A boring summer gets exciting - fast.

Hey guys,

I'm spending my summer at home (Seattle!) and working at the restaurant where I've worked for the past two summers. Everything has been pretty chill, aside from the fact that I got a little angsty about not having anything to do/ a bunch of my friends aren't here/ wtf why did I decide to go to Russia in the fall? However, I had the great luck to have a mid-summer jolt of excitment. Here it is:

So, I'm house-sitting for these family friends and they have a pretty nice house and are letting me drive their swanky Mercedes. Cool, right? Uh huh, until I went and ran that Mercedes into a fence on Saturday evening. I was driving to work from the Johnson's (the peeps whose house I'm taking care of) and right when I'm almost to St. Clouds (the restaurant where I work), I have to pull over to let a fire truck go in front of me. So, I'm following the fire truck up the hill when I start thinking that it might be going to the restaurant, I get closer and I realize it looks like its going to the elementary school a block away. Anyway, these types of thoughts are meandering through my head as I'm parking the car in a lot across the street from the restaurant. I suddenly realize that I'm going a little fast and should brake. I start pushing my foot down, but - gasp! - it's not on the brake, it's on the gas. I get the car about halfway through the fence and about a foot away from a house before I get it stopped. At this point I am crying and yelling profanities, so a guy who was walking by runs over to help me because it sounds like I'm dying. I kind of blubber to him and then he tells me that his wife is across the street and she called the police. At the time, I kind of wanted to be like, "She did WHAT?!?!?!" Because I did not want the po-pos there getting me in all kinds of trouble. But they were all nice and I called my dad and then went to St. Clouds (still crying) to tell them that I was going to be late because I crashed the car. Fast forward, and everyone - my dad and sis, people from St. Clouds, rando neighbors - is helping me get the car out of the fence. Oh, and it also got jammed on the top of a small parking barrier, so I couldn't just back out. At one point we had people sitting on the back of the hood, pushing backwards and holding the fence up (it was chain link and pretty bendy). In the end, we had to call a tow truck to get it out, but it turns out that all of the damage is just cosmetic. A relief, but cosmetic damage to a Mercedes is still pretty pricey.

So, you would think that with that kind of major fuck up, I would be in a really bad mood - but I'm totally not! I'm actually feeling a lot better about, well, everything. It's almost a relief to have a real problem to take care of, a purpose or something. Also, I realized that if I can mess something up so cosmically in about two seconds, I can likely make things better too. I've also realized that all the stuff that I've been fixating on is minor in comparison and I should just chill the fuck out. Maybe it was my mid-summer wake up call. Not to mention the fact that everyone is being super nice to me and my faith in humanity has been completely restored.

The family doesn't get back until Saturday, and I've been getting estimates on the repair work. It will be expensive, but I'm just glad to be making some concrete steps toward remedying the situation. I'm sure that sitting down with Doug (the owner) and telling him what I did will be anything but pleasant, but I'll just have to suck it up.

Other than that, it's just life as usual.