{"id":2144,"date":"2011-09-27T07:06:34","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T12:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=2144"},"modified":"2011-09-27T07:06:34","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T12:06:34","slug":"accidents-and-coincidences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/09\/accidents-and-coincidences\/","title":{"rendered":"Accidents and Coincidences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday, 22 September 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today, in an effort to chill out after the stress of flying, I took the day off of work. I drove Owen to school this morning and narrowly avoided getting into an accident.<\/p>\n

We were headed west-bound towards a busy intersection. The street we were driving on almost always has the red light at this particular intersection but at this particular moment there happened to be a green light. So, without slowing, I proceeded to drive through the intersection. A vehicle coming from the opposite direction was attempting to make a left. It was a pick-up truck and he evidently had no plans to yield to oncoming traffic.<\/p>\n

Once I saw that he was not going to wait for me, I slammed on my brakes and swerved to avoid being hit. He finally saw me and likewise swerved. The look on his face was pretty funny, actually.<\/p>\n

At any rate, we didn’t get into an accident, and I was able to proceed west towards Owen’s school. Owen didn’t even notice that we came this close<\/em> to being involved in a motor vehicle accident; he just kept yammering on about something astronomy related.<\/p>\n

Friday, 23 September 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a grueling week of work, in which I attended a class at a swanky hotel in Atlanta and then took a vacation day, I partook in a department outing today.<\/p>\n

First, we met for lunch at Lord Fletcher’s<\/a>, a restaurant on Lake Minnetonka known for their good food and slow service. While there, I bumped into my cousin-in-law. It happened like this:<\/p>\n

I was walking into the dining area of the restaurant, following a couple of my co-workers. Ahead of us was a table of a dozen people and one of them called out to one of my co-workers. My co-worker immediately looked over and, noticing the guy that called his name, diverted over to say hello. I didn’t think much of it; after all, every once in a while someone is bound to coincidentally bump into someone they know, right? Well, from the very same table, I then hear a woman calling out my name. I look over and stare at her for a second. I am terrible at recognizing people out of context. A few months ago, for instance, Jennifer and I saw our chiropractor at Target and it took a good 10 seconds before I recognized her out of her ‘normal’ domain.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I finally realized this was my wife’s cousin, so I went over and gave her a hug. Turns out, she was also at an outing with her department. More coincidentally, she does the same thing at her job as I do at mine and thus many of her co-workers knew many of mine. How funny is that?<\/p>\n

After lunch, we went out on a boat on the lake. It was cold, but I had a fun time. When we returned to the dock, my cousin-in-law’s group invited us over to their boat (which had also docked). I got in the boat and sat with them for a spell. They offered me a beer, which I declined, and then one of them said, “Ah, I see you aren’t related by blood.” I assured them that normally I would love another beer, but that I had to drive home, and they all seemed to think this further proved my cousin-in-law and I did not share any blood-relations.<\/p>\n

Saturday, 24 September 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, I have this really unimportant goal of visiting all 50 states. I’ve been to 19 of them, which isn’t a bad start, really. But here’s the sad thing: I haven’t been to a new state since 1998.<\/p>\n

A few days ago, as I’ve noted above, Jennifer, Isla and I were in Atlanta. This afforded both Jennifer and Isla with a new state on their respective checklists, but I had already been to Georgia once before: I drove through the state on my way to and from Florida back in 1991, even spending the night in Macon<\/a>. Isla has now been to three states (Wisconsin and, obviously, Minnesota are the other two). Owen has been to five states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Florida. And during the past decade, Jennifer has added three new states to her list: Florida in 2003, Washington in 2009, and Georgia as of earlier this week. But I haven’t logged any new states in 13 years.<\/p>\n

In my defense, it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve certainly gone on my share of vacations here in the 21st century, but I seem to keep revisiting states I’ve already been to before. I’ve been to two new Canadian provinces (Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in 2001) and even a new country (The Bahamas in 2004), but I just can’t seem to get myself to a new state.<\/p>\n

I’m going to try to do something about that during this decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday, 22 September 2011 Today, in an effort to chill out after the stress of flying, I took the day off of work. I drove Owen to school this morning and narrowly avoided getting into an accident. We were headed west-bound towards a busy intersection. The street we were driving on almost always has the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2145,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144\/revisions\/2145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}