Trammell shredded his poor little carpal pads this afternoon while chasing a lacrosse ball across the neighbor’s driveway. We didn’t notice until about five hours later tonight though when we took both dogs out to Jaycee and Trammell refused to put his paws out of the window like he usually does. Kind of hobbled around the rest of the night. The blurry picture below shows the flaps of skin hanging off both pads. Poor guy.

I know I’m supposed to fired up to Save New Orleans! but I have trouble with this when I’m being bombarded by “heartbreaking images” broadcast behind sappy music. I was riding a bike at MVP last night with my pick of about four different TVs to watch while I pedalled. On one of them to my left Entertainment Tonight was literally telling me, “Now we’re going to show you some heartbreaking images over a moving song by…” a Johnny Cash remake of Bridge Over Troubled Waters. The woman speaking seemed to be brimming with pride that her show had something catastrophic to talk about. I’m all for helping people, but don’t ram it down my throat. And don’t ever give me the impression that you’re happy to have this event to talk about so you can interview celebrities about their opinions on the subject.

Sold! Or, at least getting close to it. We got a solid offer on our vacant land tonight at about $7000 more than what we paid for it less than seven months ago. Not a bad little profit even after factoring in closing costs for two transactions and all the mortgage payments we’ve made. Low ball estimate I think we come out ahead somewhere between $3000 and $4000.

I’m sad to see it go though. It really was a beautiful property and I would’ve loved to have lived on it. Just wasn’t the right time. Flexibility is the order of the moment and this decision will help immensely.

Some thoughts that zipped across my mind as we were careening off the road on Friday:

1. I smell rubber.
2. The Fight Club scene where Brad Pitt and Edward Norton crash their car on purpose.
3. And, with that, how in the future I’d probably be glad I had experienced this.
4. How the car felt like it was floating six inches over the ground.
5. Anticipating the car flipping sideways and rolling. Glancing at the ceiling, hunching up and bracing for this inevitable crunch.
6. Anticipating the car impacting something from the back end as it raced backwards. Being acutely aware of how my back felt against the driver’s seat.
7. Oh, we’re headed for the other side of the highway. We might get seriously hurt.

Number seven I think is the only time I actually started to worry that we might be in real trouble. Up until that point, even while imagining the car flipping upside down, I figured we might be banged up but certainly would be able to walk away from the wreck with everything vital intact. But as you’re rocketing into traffic with low visibility and little time to react those little “semi-truck punching through car” images begin to pop up.

And sometimes, for whatever reason, you just don’t feel like writing. Slipping… Truth be told, my free time spent in front of a computer has been dwindling this summer, no doubt correlating with the amount of sleep I’ve been getting the past two months. But that’s all done with now, so really I have no excuse now for not writing something about this past weekend. Especially given the dramatic car misadventure on Friday.

Friday morning Mary and I drove to Red Wing, MN for a friend’s wedding, deciding at the very last minute to throw the dogs in the back seat for the ten hour drive when we discovered the hotel we booked accepted pets. In my opinion this went surprisingly well. The dogs bounced about eagerly for the first hour or so before gradually coming to the realization that this trip with different than the ones just down the road. They wimpered for the next hour then gave up and tried to sleep comfortably in the limited space. I’m pretty sure (despite Trammell’s looking very car sick at times) that this was a better weekend then they would’ve spent stuck in a kennel. The dogs have now set foot in four new states and got their first peak at the mighty Mississippi (in the background of two pictures on the right).

Unfortunately, one of the states they set foot in was Wisconsin. In the pouring rain. With our car partially buried in a highway median and partially sticking its trunk into the path of oncoming traffic.

Just outside of La Crosse, WI, with the rain clouds opening up something fierce on our heads, I pulled into the left lane to try to get around a truck that was kicking up a vision-obscuring spray (in hindsight of course the obvious choice should have been to slow down behind said truck), accelerated, and promptly felt the front tires being sucked to the right. But not just your everyday mini-tug, solved by mini-correction. This time the whole car began to rotate clockwise, back tires, front tires, gliding effortlessly over a layer of rain water. I tapped the brakes and tried to ease the wheel back to the left, but I don’t think anything was going to save us at this point. Just a matter of which direction we we’re going to spin.

As it turns out, in about half a second we were pointing ninety degrees to the left. In another half second we completed our 360 degree spin (and then some) on the edge of the road while I vainly tried to counter the problem and were rocketing backwards across the grassy median. Brakes floored we slid across the two foot high grass only catching friction as we reached the berm on the opposite side and lurched to a stop perpendicular to the road with a good three feet of car sticking out into the road.

I tried to pull forward to get out of the path of oncoming traffic (with limited visibilty due to the continuing downpour) but found our front tires were buried in chunks of sod. Mary grabbed the dogs and ran across the highway. I dug our tires out then ran across after Mary, jumped a fence and started to call a tow truck when I saw a state trooper pull up behind our car. The guy turned out to be a complete jerk, never once asking us if we were okay, but maybe he was just upset about having to stand in the pouring rain rain in his shiny plastic rain coat.

In any case, with disgruntled cop standing watch, I tried pulling out again and this time was able to pull forward back across the median and back on our merry way. I guess we’ll find out the extent of the damages in a day or two here after the mechanics have a look, but for now it seems the only noticable problems are non-functioning taillights and turn signals. Weird.