Losing your marbles and flipping your lid

Crap.  It has been way over a week since I have posted.  I was so busy (here's the losing your marbles part of the title) planning and taking care of the big 80th birthday party for my father-in-law that took place last weekend.  The party and all the family stuff was so much fun.  And unbelievably, all of us, and I mean every last one, were all in attendance.  Isn't that wonderful?

I don't know about you, but in our family, whether it be my side or Mr. Big Ed's side, there is always a conflict with someone's schedule and it just leaves a hole in the dynamics.  So anyhoo, it was wonderful that we were all here and that we got loads of pictures.

Rachel Pie and I worked hard on a project for this that we called "When Dad was my age".  I wrote down every child and grandchild in age order, then calculated what the year would have been when Dad was their current age.  For example, the youngest grandchild is five, so his part (read by his older brother) was this:  "When Grandpa was my age, the year was 1937.  FDR was president. The price of gas was, the price of a loaf of bread, and some fact pertinent to Grandpa's life".

You get the picture, right?  It was really fun taking those little strolls down through what was life like at each of those stages.  So, I sent all the info to Rachel Pie who took it all and put it on little pages for a scrapbook.  We skipped every other page and left the facing page blank to then put in a picture we took of Grandpa with each of the participants.  Then we ran off to CVS and printed up those photos and stuck them in and gifted him with the book.

I gotta tell y'all, it was a HIT!  Everyone loved hearing what each other had to read and Grandpa loved it. But for some reason, neither Rachel Pie nor I expected it to become a touching, emotional event and it turned that way really quickly.  Lots of tearing up and dabbing of the eyes.  Then we had cake and ice cream and everyone was happy again.  : )

Last night Sparky and I were up really late and sitting in the family room in our respective "spots" and we heard this loud, and I mean really LOUD, BANG!!!!  We looked all over and Sparky looked outside but we didn't see anything.  So he wanders off to go to bed and I started hearing sirens.

Not hearing sirens off in the distance, like I normally hear when they are headed to the hospital nearby, but like right in front of the house.  So first I peeked out the peephole and there were flashing red, amber and blue lights aplenty!  Holy Shitballs!  Something major was happening on our street!

So I yelled at Sparky to come back down and look.  We looked again and for some reason I don't understand, he went back to bed!!!!


Not me!  I grabbed my cel phone and went trotting out there to see what was what.  It took my eyes a bit to process what was actually going on.  There were 2 huge fire trucks, and 5 cop cars all with lights blazing.  There were neighbors out there in all sorts of pajamas and hurried-on garb.  And in the midst of all this there were 2 cars in the street.

One was a parked car that had been not only side-swiped but shoved down the street.  And the other one?

Upside down and had been spinning on its top and come to rest facing perpendicular to the street.

Holy Shitballs, indeed!

Seems that the very young looking girl who crawled out of the red upside down car was loaded on something.  Whether it was booze or drugs remains to be seen.  She was barrelling down our street and managed to hit the parked car (of the neighbor's girlfriend) and careened into a free-flying upside down spinning disaster.  I have no idea how she got out of that car and was still all in one piece.  If anyone had been in her backseat they would be toast.  That car was fucked up bad.

Another cop car joined the light brigade and then 2 tow trucks came, one from each direction.  We were all wondering how on earth they would get an upside down car onto the bed of the tow truck.  You know how they do that?

THEY FLIP IT!

Here are some crappy cel phone pics of that whole process:

Amazing, right?

So after they flipped the car and all sorts of crap went flying out of the car, loose cds, cel phones, her purse, etc. They put all the valuable things in a plastic bag, gave the arresting officer the purse and took a huge push broom and swept up the remaining parts o'car and put them inside the car!!!


For some reason, that struck me as funny.  "Yeah, here's the REST of your car for safe keeping".

While all this was going on, we went back and forth between commiserating with the poor girl who will probably get her car totalled just by parking it on a quiet neighborhood street at 2 a.m. and watching the officer try to get a field sobriety test completed by the driver of the red spinning top car.  It was not pretty.  She was not present enough to know that her life had just taken a screeching wrong turn and there's no coming back from that.  Thankfully, no one was killed and she herself didn't appear to be hurt.  She is going to be sore as hell today when she wakes up in jail, that is a given.

It got me to thinking about how they always say that you get a lesson over and over again, stronger each time till you get that lesson and learn it and are able to move forward.  Wonder what her lesson might have been?  Sure hope she got it, because she might not live through another more forceful lesson.