Whacked

Louise's year of firsts continues.

Earlier in the year (the actual year 2010, not the school year, though that's how I tend to think of years anyway, since I'm still in school) my turn signal had bit the dust. Not so much the entire thing, just the clicker, the thing that made it automatically blink. So you had to toggle it when you drove to have any semblance of normal. Which is all well and good, mostly during the day, but there was that fairly memorable occasion when Em and I were coming back from a concert in Rochester (the director the Campus Community Chorus was directing a chorus and orchestra in Rochester as part of her graduate degree, and Em sings in that chorus, so therefore we went - it was really good, too) and were by the Lady of the Lake statue, going to go the back way to Dunkin' Donuts to get some coffee and a doughnut before heading to Relay for Life. There was a fairly liberal amount of swearing as I pulled over, a few Oh, shit's from the passenger seat, and the distinct chance that I was going to throw up over the local cop that had pulled me over. In the end, he told me to get it fixed (Being at school is no reason not to get something like this fixed) and sent me on my merry way. Well, my merry way that also including freaking out a bit more, and then a medium dark roast from Dunkin' and a doughnut.

In the end, everything turned out just fine. And I got the turn signal fixed during the six days that I was in NYC and wouldn't need my car.

Yesterday I wrote a post between the first teen cruise (my own school district's eighth graders on for their semi-formal) and then went back to work for the second of the night. After that fiasco (ninety-seven high school kids that have graduated earlier in the day from the middle of nowhere at 12:30 in the morning....) I figured that I would drive down and see my dad for a couple minutes at work, before heading home. Hadn't seen him in like a day and a half because of the way his schedule is (he goes in to work at 2, I work dinner shifts, so there are times when we don't see each other for roughly a day and a half, or two days, which is really interesting in itself since we live in the same house), so I was going to go see him.

I didn't see the deer until it was off of my left front fender.

Hit the brakes and then hit the deer. Which promptly slid off the hood, rolled on the pavement, and then got up and ran back into the swamp. And left me sitting there in a sort of shock, staring out the windshield and realizing that I've just gotten in my first MVA.

This was the first thing that I've hit that's bigger than a squirrel.

Naturally I was a little freaked.

Dad was calm about it, telling me that it was okay, wanting to know what had happened to the deer, and then called the village PD to send someone to do an accident report.

I didn't actually break anything on my car. My headlight is still intact, though slanted inward, toward the right one more, and the grill in the middle has a corner that's got a crack in it and came away from the housing. The headlight still works - high beams, too - and the hood is still functional (you can open it). So it's not like I smashed the entire front end of my car in one go. If anything, this proves that my car (my sister calls it a death trap) is more tank-like that I had thought.

Does that mean that I think it's invincible and that I'm invincible? Hell. No. I'm human. I'm mortal. It was a deer, but it was still an accident and something that undeniably stresses you out to a certain degree. Probably why I'm still pretty tired, middle of the night work shift aside.

It's the first, probably not the last, but it still unsettles you a little bit. Nothing life-threatening in this case, just something very different and more than a little scary.

And while it didn't scare the shit out of me on a literal level, I can't say the same for the deer - I've got two little piles sitting on my hood.

On a better note: I sent paperwork across the pond to Wales today, including a photo for them to make my student ID card with. It should take about five to ten days for it to get there, and while I need to double check that it actually makes it, they're forms that could probably be filled out there as well; Fitness to Practise and Needs Assessment. Basically they want to know if I require anything extra due to learning disabilities or disabilities in general. Next on my agenda is, when the time is right, to start my Visa application process. Which is fairly long and more than slightly complicated.

Once that's done, it's a matter of counting down the days until the flight leaves. There's a bit more to it than that, obviously, but it's something to look forward to and be very excited about.