Terribly Happy

This year, for some reason, I got really into our Christmas lights.

We had bins in the attic of lights including some we bought last year in the post-Christmas sales, but except for the ones we put on the tree or around the house, I never messed with trying to set up lights outside.

It always seemed like too much of a hassle and I never had enough time as Christmas chugged, Polar Express-style, toward us at high speeds. (See also: why we haven’t sent out a family Christmas card in a few years.) It seemed exhausting and a little dangerous (what happens when it rains? Does your house just explode in a shower of sparks?) and I just had no solution.

But maybe it was a sudden burst of energy I was having at the end of the year, or a restlessness of not doing enough stuff outside with my hands that got me going, but I made the decision to put up lights. Or lay them on the ground. Or something. There were going to be lights, dammit!

So I started setting up the lights. In my mind, we had all the stuff necessary to do this stashed away, including extension cords, electrical posts, plenty of lights that all matched and (imaginary) items that would hold everything in place perfectly. It was all in the bin just waiting for me to set things up.

In reality, it was a mismatched heap of tangled indoor lights, one shady-looking green electrical post that looked like it might shock me if I looked in its direction and maybe one set of six 3M sticky tabs that probably wouldn’t work with our stucco and stone outdoors.

So I bought lights. And then I bought more lights. And then I bought some extension cords. Then I bought a bunch of hooks and adhesives and a holiday staple gun that shoots staples as well as plastic staple protectors, as if the stapler were afraid of getting a loathsome disease and is blowing through dozens of tiny little condoms.

They also keep you from stapling through the electrical cord and killing yourself, I think, so sure, why not. Staple condoms.

I set up a line of big bulb lights (not LED, it turns out, but the old school ones that burn you if you try to touch) along the yard. I didn’t have stakes or clips or anything to hold them down. In fact, three different gigantic stores told me they had sold out of crates and crates of these. So, I tried to make some makeshift stakes by tying the lights to some skewers and you can image how shitty and lame and ineffective that turned out. So the lights were basically just lying on the ground in a loose row, ready to be tripped on or blown away by a strong wind. Success!

I had better luck with a set of tiny globe LED lights that I stapled up around the garage. Near the stucco is a spongy border and that turned out to be perfect for the staples. I set everything up, brought my wife and the kids out to see the glory of my gorgeous lights.

Half of the set that I had just put up didn’t come on. I had forgotten to check before I put them up.

Another trip to the store. More lights, Lots of cursing.

I finally found some stakes at the grocery store and I was able to lock down the lights around the sidewalk, or at least keep them from wandering off.

When it was all finished and I taped up the ends with Duct Tape to keep water out, it all looked really nice even if it was a pretty simple setup with nothing for the bushes or in our yard. We have the lights down the sidewalk, some lights around our garage, some lights going around the side of the house, a little LED tree and bear in the doorway and that’s about it. Next year, maybe we’ll add some stuff to the yard, but I felt pretty manly-man enough with just this first effort.

I couldn’t tell you why I needed to to this this year. I think it’s that the kids (now 3 and 5) like it and the things I used to really not care about seem to matter a little more when there are kids involved.

All this happened before recent events in the news made that even more clear to me. It’s so easy to just let the holidays fly by and to try to get through it and look forward to days off and a new year. But this year, I’m trying to enjoy it moment-by-moment and not let is rush past too quickly before I’ve gotten to really let the glow of the lights illuminate the darkness a little.

Recent writing stuff:

I’m finally on vacation through January, but here’s what’s run recently (and one thing that’s running tomorrow that’s pretty significant).

In the Digital Savant column, I did a piece going over my 2012 tech predictions from last year and then looked ahead and made more predictions for 2013. Will those pan out? Wait a year and find out! One neat thing was getting to see the word “Omarstradamus” in display headline type in the paper.

The column for Monday, Christmas Eve, is a roundup of all the apps you should download if you happen to get a new smart phone or tablet. It’s impossible to list anything even close to comprehensive, especially if you’re trying to include more than just iOS and Android, but I tried to focus on stuff people who are new to these kinds of devices might need. Even trying to narrow it down, it was a pretty impossible task to cover all bases, but I think the list is a good start for most people.

I included Fairway Solitaire, the mobile game I’m currently addicted to. Please don’t download it. It will eat your life.

Other stories I wrote since the last blog entry: a piece about the Statesman’s new digital offerings, a story about top Austin searches on Google for 2012, a review of the full first season of the brilliant “Walking Dead” video game and a write-up of two Austin-made games, God of Blades and Arcane Legends, that are worth a look on iOS.

For Digital Savant Micro, I wrote about why you might need a dual-band router, what the Hell Snapchat is and what a “Chromebook” laptop is all about.

I was also on the radio last week, talking about holiday tech gifts (it’s a bit late for that, I know, but maybe you’ll get some ideas for post-Christmas gift exchanges) with The Daily Circuit on Minnesota Public Radio. You can hear the full audio by following the link. The other guest was Dana Wollman from Engadget.

The last thing is that Carolina turned 3 on Friday. As much as Lilly keeps us on our toes constantly, it’s Carolina who makes us laugh, who always does or says something completely unexpected, and who seems to always have mischief and smiles in her eye for everyone she meets.

I’m not sure if it’s a phase or if it’s just part of her personality that she constantly tells us she loves us. I hope it lasts a good long while.

Things improved dramatically, almost all at once, to the point where I wondered if it was all a coincidence or if it was a chain reaction, a one-thing-leads-to-another fixx, if you will, where the outlook becomes brighter on everything because of self-fulfilling optimistic action.

Maybe it was all coincidence.

I’m not going to complain or question. I just know that things that felt stuck just over a week ago seem to have greased their way past the logjam. Not only am I working on one of the things I thought was hopelessly stalled, but I have a totally new thing that popped into my head that I can’t wait to work on as well, something that sounds so fun that it’s all I can do to stop myself from putting everything (including my day job, eating and sleeping — I mean my day job AND ALSO eating and sleeping, not my day job, which involves eating and sleeping for money, though holy shit, wouldn’t that be awesome?) aside to start working on it immediately.

Our girls have been behaving better lately and getting more sleep, which seems like some kind of pre-Christmas miracle because it means that I, too, get more sleep and am less cranky.

And on top of all that, work has been pretty good lately, I have vacation coming up and a friend of mine invited me to come help pitch a completely and totally separate thing that could turn into something that might be a cool thing that I would like to do and share with you should it become an actual thing!

Things! They are happening.

Also, and perhaps because of the flow of good things lately, I came out of my upside down turtle shell a bit and invited a few close friends out for lunch, a sign that I really don’t want to be at home all time bitterly wondering why I’m at home all the time. And I’m having fun writing again. That sounds like a given, but I’ve had real dread and anxiety about writing this year that simply wasn’t there before. Being able to look forward to writing instead of dreading it is kind of a radical thing for me right now. It has me bouncing off the walls with new energy, feeling renewed.

There’s renewal and newness in the air all around.

One friend of mine just had a baby, another friend is about to have one and a third friend has a slightly older, but pretty recently newborn baby. Babies are coming out, people are getting engaged, other people are breaking up or moving away or moving back to Austin or selling things or making things and for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m part of the community of things happening and people doing. It’s a good feeling, one I really missed.

Here’s some of what I’ve been writing lately at work.

Photo by Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman

I did a column about the usability testing as it’s taught at the University of Texas School of Information. I got to meet a really great professor and some scary-smart students who are trying to make the future of product design a little brighter and smarter.

Image courtesy Acura

Last week’s Digital Savant column was about the increasing amount of technology in our cars. Since I’m not into cars and don’t know much about them, it was a bit of a shock for me to realize that this is stuff I should be paying a lot more attention to as a tech writer. A woman wrote me a terse email a few days after the column asking, basically, “What happens if you’re on the highway and you’re about to hit a semi in a collision and all this technology fails?” I responded, “You crash?” I mean, honestly, I’m not sure what else could happen.

And the column that runs on Monday (but appears early online in the blog) is about how we deal with grieving online, particularly on social networks. Every year is suck-filled with death, of course, but this year it hit me personally a few times and many people I care a lot about and I’ve been paying a little more attention to it than in the past. In the column, I reference my grandmother’s death, which I wrote about earlier this year on this blog.

Other new stuff: a Micro about making digital photo albums and a Micro offering advice on Xbox games for 6-year-olds.

I was also on the radio, speaking on the “At Issue with Ben Merens” show about holiday tech gifts. You can listen to it on this page or download the audio directly.

What else… we bought a fridge! I kinda got the bug seeing all the huge price cuts during Black Friday time and it reminded me how much I hated our fridge, which was so small and cramped and always made me curse when I’d load it up with groceries. It was so cramped I would not buy things because I knew what a pain in the ass it would be to try to cram them into the freezer or find space in the fridge. So we’d run out of stuff really fast, creating a cycle of fridgefrustration (or fridgestration for short).

The new fridge is not even as big as they come. We have a narrow space to fit one in, so a full-sized 30-square-foot one would be banging on the sides whenever the doors opened. We ended up with something smaller/narrower, but still gigantic and spacious and luxurious compared to our old one. It has French doors, but they’re not that snooty, and two drawers the kids can easily pull on to get their own damn yogurt and frozen waffles for once.

They moved our old fridge, which had not budged an inch in about eight years, and there was a Leviathan dust monster back there I had to defeat in just moments before they wheeled in the new one. Rugs were moved, doors were attached to metal frames and a burly man taught me how to push a button to magically generate water. “But don’t drink it,” he warned, like a grizzled shaman, “it’s full of charcoal.” It turns out that is temporary, you just have to drink two gallons of water before the water gets good. Mmmm charcoal. I just realized he said DON’T drink it. I was distracted by the stainless steel.

It doesn’t have a TV or Internet, but the new fridge keeps stuff cold and spits out ice and doesn’t make me not be able to buy more than one damn frozen pizza at a time, so I think it goes solidly in the win column.

Talk to ya soon. I’ll keep updating every week or two, but I’m really hoping to have some actual news/announcements to share with you before the end of the year about some old friends who will soon be returning. December is getting really exciting all of a sudden.

If you have been the parent of a kid older than 2 or 3, you probably have experienced the thing where the kid lies down on the floor and doesn’t want to do anything.

It usually happens as you’re trying to get them ready for school/day care or when they’ve had a bad sleep night. They’re tired and frustrated and revert to a state where they not only don’t want to remember how to put on socks, they won’t even stand upright. It’s incredibly frustrating for the parent, but sometimes, if I’m not going crazy at that moment, I try to imagine how frustrating that moment is for the kid. Their emotional range hasn’t caught up with their inability to process certain kinds of stress and they just turn baby.

They flop on their back and, like the turtle, can’t seem to right themselves without help. So they wail and cry or kick or get mad at you when you do try to help and basically nobody’s happy. It sucks, to the BIG TIME.

I’ve experienced that a lot on the parental side lately in the months since our sleep schedule changed, but I also have finally had time off enough this week to realize that I’ve been doing some of that myself.

The last few months I’ve been the upended turtle, flapping around, but not really doing anything, expecting someone to help right me and just sort of letting out these little weak turtle bleats.

They go, “Behhhhh. Behhhh.”

It sounds fucking disgusting and the worst part of hearing it is knowing it’s coming out of my own turtle mouth.

So that’s what I’m working on right now. Trying not to feel so stuck and overturned and waiting for something to happen and going “Behhhh” and having one sock on and the other sock across the room because I flung it over there in frustration. Things feel like they’re not moving at all, at least relative to all the movement in the world, but then I have to remind myself that I’m the turtle, the one on its back, the one that’s not moving.

And that’s what needs fixing.

Behhhh.

I’m on a little four-day weekend for Thanksgiving, but work continues and there’s been a lot of writing still going on there.

The new stuff is:

I did a pretty sizable holiday tech gift guide for last Sunday’s newspaper. This year it was focused on gaming, led by Nintendo’s Wii U. I don’t have a lot to say about the Wii U itself. For the first time since maybe the GameCube (including portables), Nintendo didn’t sent a review unit to try out ahead of the launch, which is a little weird, so my only hands-on with the device was in a little trailer the company brought into town. I’m not buying one myself because, frankly, there are lots of other games to review that I don’t have time to get to and I think, based on my limited time with the demo and what I’ve been reading from reviewers who did get hardware, Nintendo has released a product that wasn’t ready for retail. We’ll see how it’s faring after the holidays.

I also did a tech gift guide, as I do every year, for Television Without Pity. It’s more of a photo gallery, with text by me, but not focused just on video games.

One thing I’ll add to both of those guides: at the time I wrote them, only four of the five episodes of The Walking Dead: The Video Game were out. Since then, I played the last episode of the first season and I can only recommend it even more. It made me cry, it broke my heart, it’s an absolutely high-water mark in video game narrative and character work. Such a great accomplishment.

This week I also wrote about three other games I’ve been playing a lot (including the fantastic Penny Arcade/Rain-Slick Episode 3, which I actually completed) and I got to witness Chris Roberts achieve $6.2 million+ in his crowdfunding venture for the future game Star Citizen and posted a really lengthy interview with “Epic Mickey 2” game developer Warren Spector.

The day I did that interview, Warren Spector was kind enough to invite me to his house(s) to see some of his amazing collection of artwork, movie geek wares and Disney stuff. What I learned is that if Warren Spector ever invites you to his house to see any of his collections, you go, no matter what. It was inspiring and very cool.

On the Micro feature, I briefly defined Quora, the Q&A website.

Weird couple of weeks here, all over the place.

Lots of strangeness and change and tension in some areas and then all of a sudden these amazing moments of grace and clarity and reenergizing.

I don’t know what to make of it all, so I won’t even try, but for a lot of this year I’ve felt like things have just been in this weird, boring, waiting lull, me waiting for things to happen or for things to present themselves instead of chasing or working toward them. These last few weeks have been the opposite of that with permanent change going on all around and me asking myself, “Well, are you going to do something or just watch?”

Mostly, I just watch.

But I also did a lot recently, a lot more than usual. I reached out to a few people I haven’t talked to in a while. I finished an archive/migration project for a new website that took me so much longer than I was expecting, but damned if it isn’t done now. I spoke to a group of mom bloggers and was able to Skype in my writing partner for a session that was supposed to only be about 20 minutes, but lasted much longer and really inspired and reinvigorated my energy levels for something that has been a long-term struggle.

(Here’s a photo of that a blog post about the event. The photo is from Nicole at Livemom.com, I believe)

And, weirdly, I volunteered myself to go to a (totally hypothetical) plastic surgery consultation, which I think honestly may be the bravest thing I’ve done in a while (more on that in a minute).

My daughters, who in recent weeks have been behaving like little, possessed zoo animals have turned a corner and are starting to behave like the sweet girls that I remember from before the new school year hours made them into cranky kids.

So, strange times lately, but I’m actually kind of excited about the rest of the year and hoping to take a few more risks after what’s felt like almost a full year of stasis with only the occasional curveball (like going to New York City or restarting an old project I hope to help debut before 2013).

A few days later… I wrote the above almost a week ago and since then, the 2012 presidential election happened, I went to Wurstfest and had another week just like what I describe above.

The holidays are on us like a loose freight train and, weirdly, I’m not stressed about it in the “gotta get stuff done” sense, but more in the looking back and wondering how so much time passed so quickly from summer till now. Outside of work, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten much done at all even though I feel busy all the time.

We’ve been having a hard time with a few things like figuring out how to deal with two kids 5 and under who are angels half the time and tantrum machines at other times.

Work is still in major transition with a lot of things up in the air right now.

And due mostly to lack of sleep (caused by the above-mentioned girls who have also added waking up at 5 a.m. for no reason to the mix), I’ve had a really hard time staying up late enough to write anything, or being clear-headed enough to even have the energy to get myself to the keyboard. And of course, that leads to a self-loathing cycle of feeling like I should be doing more even though I know I don’t have the energy or the right mindset.

Really frustrating.

So instead of more whining, I’ll try to focus on some positives.

I’m working with my brother on something I’m excited about. I’m working with some old friends I used to work with in the Latino Comedy Project on a comedy thing for next year that we’re very excited about. And I’m working with a writing partner on the ongoing thing, which is still slow in progressing, but is still happening.

I don’t trust myself to work on stuff along right now outside of the usual freelance stuff because mentally I’m just not motivated right now. If something isn’t assigned to me or given a deadline or pushed along in some small way by someone I’m working with, I probably won’t do it And that’s frustrating too. Wait, positive! This was supposed to be the bright side.

OK, here’s this. I feel like the only place I’ve been really productive the last few weeks is at work (SEE ALSO: deadlines, teamwork, stuff assigned to me). I’ve written a lot of stuff, it feels like, but only there.

There was a Digital Savant column I was pretty happy with about how to spot online fakers and scammers, which I hope came in handy as the election craziness was ramping up (and which is an issue now that holiday shopping is in season).

Speaking of that, I did a column that runs in Monday’s paper about what’s new this year in online shopping. I tried to do a story like that a year or two ago and it didn’t seem like a lot had changed, at least not enough to warrant a big article. This year, I do feel like there are some new trends that are just starting to take off, so the piece is a roundup of those new shifts.

I had some hands-on time with Windows 8 and the Surface tablet (neither of which Microsoft was able to provide review units for, not that I’m bitter). I don’t think I held anything back in that write-up, but I’ll that for myself, I don’t really like using Windows 8 on a computer with a keyboard and mouse. It doesn’t seem built for that, and I don’t plan to go through the trouble to upgrade my PC (or my Boot Camp on Mac) to Windows 8 anytime soon.

I wrote about an Austin restaurant called Lucky Robot (where Zen on S. Congress used to be) that uses iPads for its menus and ordering. It was a mixed-bag experience.

For the Micro feature, I defined 4K TV (or Ultra HD), and what the deal is with Windows RT (the OS running on the Surface tablet).

And then there was the nose job story. We got pitched an item about this 3D plastic surgery image and both my (former) editor and I thought it would be fun, interesting story. Then, at one point, as we were trying to figure out if the story could lead the section and if we would have enough artwork to go with it, I suggested, “Maybe I should do the imagine and we could use those photos.”

That was when the story went from a pretty standard thing to me standing in an office with my face being swabbed and put in front of a machine to have my nose critiqued.

Dr. Jennifer Walden, a plastic surgeon, checks out the old Gallaga beak. Photo by Deborah Cannon / Austin American-Statesman

The trick to doing a story like that if you have even an ounce of shame and vanity is to have a deadline the same day as the office visit. When I got there, our photographer said she didn’t think she could do that and I told her that at that point, I had no choice; there was no way to back out with my deadline looming.

And that’s how I’m able to trick myself into doing things I would never, ever want to do otherwise — having my nose the focus of the front of the Life & Arts section on a Monday. I’m too numb about it to even be horrified at this point.

I’m sure there’s lot more I’m not thinking of at the moment, but those are the high/low lights. I’m really trying to get my energy back up and not end the year in the doldrums. I’m going to try to get to bed earlier and to stop stressing about the writing so much. It’ll happen when it needs to happen, I really hope.

I have some photos I want to post, but I’ll save those for a separate blog entry. If you can’t wait, you can probably see most of them over here on the Flickr or on my new Instagram profile page. For now, here’s one I really like that I took last week at Wurstfest:

I had a whole post planned out, but I had a sudden thought that I have to share before I go into all that.

I live in a neighborhood/housing area where a lot of people have turned their garages into second living areas. They’ve mounted a TV on the wall, put a couch up in there and instead of parking their car or giant truck in there, like you would in a garage, they sit out there in the evenings and watch baseball games or boxing or presidential debates or whatever the Hell.

It was one or two houses when we first moved here, and over the years it’s become A Thing, with probably about a dozen nearby, including our neighbors right across the street.

I’ve been trying to articulate for a while — years, honestly — why this would even bother me. And for a long time, I thought it was because I was a little jealous. Why can’t I watch TV in my cat-litter-smelling, funky, dirty, humid garage like these Manly Men who live near me? Why do we have to have half our garage full of bins and junk and the other half occupied by a car? Why can’t I have a damn man cave (or a cave that opens up into direct sunlight and is well-ventilated as caves are, I guess).

Then I realized, it’s not that I’m jealous, it’s that I’m embarrassed. When I go outside, I feel like I’m walking past a stranger’s living room as they watch whatever they watch. Which, to me, is kind of mortifying. I barely like people in my own house to know what I’m watching on TV, much less total strangers walking by on the street.

I hate feeling like I’m interrupting something, even when I’m not, and I really just don’t care to know what my neighbors are watching. It’s baseball 90 percent of the time, which is as boring as things get. I know I’m in the minority here. I know nobody else cares about my obsession with garage living rooms. Just let me vent a little here.

OK. Done venting.

This was a good, overfull writing week.

I had an idea for a CNN column, a peace treaty for Apple and Samsung Fanboys, who seem to be taking their smart phones a little too seriously lately.

As I’ve said before, CNN seems to really like it when I pitch them weird, out-there ideas and this one hit the sweet spot between silly and relevant, I think.

What I didn’t really think about when I pitched the idea what how much work it was going to take to get the language of an actual peace treaty correct. For several days, I hit the pediawikis, researching the wording of different kinds of peace accords dating back several hundred years. The result is a hybrid of different treaty types, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. It turns out I can broker peace if I really work at it!

The article got a write-up on the popular tech blog Gizmodo and one blogger compared me to Kofi Annan. That’s a winning week right there.

Last week, the Digital Savant column was shorter than usual due to tight space from our Austin City Limits Fest coverage, so I did a grab-bag column talking about the game “Borderlands 2” and a few other topics, briefly.

The Micro was about Kickstarter. This week, I did a micro defining the term “Placeshifting.”

This week’s column started out being about wearable computers (fitness sensors, sleep monitors, that sort of thing), and then ended up being about how sensors are turning our tech from bulky to wearable to completely invisible. A professor from UT’s iSchool gave me some insight that gave the column a little more weight, I thought. In it, I mention a sleep monitor that I tried out. I got it at the BlogHer conference and, seriously, if you want to look like a total dork while unconscious, try the Zeo. But it did give me some insight into how badly I was sleeping at the time and made me adjust my habits a little bit.

Then on Wednesday, three stories broke at around the same time. I wrote a story I’ve been sitting on for a little while, about how South by Southwest Interactive is starting a new startup-focused conference in Las Vegas next August, a piece about layoffs and a studio shutdown at Zynga and an interview with Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman about his Austin appearance this week.

The SXSW story ran on the front page of the paper and the Zynga thing made some national headlines. Lots of busy time at work.

Other crazy things that happened recently:

I went to Austin City Limits Fest, which was wonderful, and I took a bunch of photos, but I want to post those separately and I’m not done editing the images, so I’ll post that sometime over the weekend.

Had my first parent-teacher conference for Lilly at her kindergarten. She’s very shy at school, not shy at home, is what it came down to. At least she’s well-mannered and behaved in the classroom, which is more than we could ask for.

I also did a creativity conference for work on design thinking that was really great and forced me to tackle problems and ideas in a different way. Honestly, I can’t even tell you what changed because I’m still figuring it out, but I had a few “A-ha” moments that I need to work through and integrate into my life a bit more.

My editor, who I mention a lot in talking about my stories and columns, has taken a job at UT-Austin and next week will be her last in our office. I’m sort of numbing my brain to not have to think about it because as awesome as it is for her, I can’t even imagine doing my job without her guidance and great ideas, so it’s going to be an adjustment, to put it mildly.

And that’s it. I’ve had lots to think about and process and reflect on, but to be quite honest, the changing weather has just made me very sleepy and most nights I just want to crawl into bed instead of staying up late and writing. Hoping I catch up on sleep soon and get a second wind before winter freezes me all up.

I’ve been promising this story of woe and ridiculousness in regards to my car and here it finally is.

First, though, quickly, let me just update you on the stuff from work this week.

The Monday Digital Savant column was about apps that can help you get to and get around Austin City Limits Festival, which I will be attending this weekend. Some Austinites act like they’re totally so over the fest, and yet it sells out every year and people seem to manage to have a good time despite all the sighs and grumbling. I plan to have a good time and eat one or five of these Tiffblitzes. Please tell my family I love them when I die of sugar.

Also in the paper on Monday was a Digital Savant Micro defining “DLC,” or “downloadable content.”

Online, I was sad to report the end of one of my favorite online games, the quiz app “Qrank.”

RIP, Qrank. I will miss you.

OK, on to the car thing.

This whole nightmare started on my way to work one Thursday evening in early August. I got pulled over on the highway for a law I didn’t even know existed. I was in the right lane and a police had pulled someone over, lights flashing. I would normally change lanes in a situation like this, but there was traffic, so I stayed in the right lane and was extra careful passing.

A few minutes later, the same police officer pulled me over and told me that it was a fairly new law, about three years old, that you have to either change lanes or slow down 20 miles per hour in that situation.

OK. Fine. Consider me duly warned.

Except I also had an expired inspection sticker, which I had completely lost track of in another universe I wasn’t even connected to anymore (I didn’t say that out loud. Best not to.). So, all right, I probably deserve a ticket for that. But the part about the passing lane thing was a lot less clear and even the officer couldn’t remember what to cite on the ticket. (He was, it sounded like, winging it.)

Double ticket. He was nice enough and told me that if I got the inspection taken care of soon, it would be dismissed, but he had no idea what I was in store for on the other part. I drove home and planned to take care of everything on the weekend when I’d have time to get the car inspected; I wasn’t planning to do much driving before then.

And then I had my car accident.

It was on Saturday, the same day I was planning to wait until the kids took a nap to go get my car inspected while my wife watched them.

That morning, I took the kids to the library while she ran errands. We were having a great time.

On the way back home, right in front of the New Braunfels Police station, there was a horrible accident. There were two motorcycles laid out and a truck. It did not look good and I was pretty sure, just from the number of ambulances and police cars, and the tarps on the ground, that somebody must have died.

The girls in the backseat were staring at the sirens and I suddenly got scared that they were going to see something horrible as we passed slowly next to the scene. The road had been reduced to one lane and the line was backed up. We were going very slow, stop and go, stop and go, not even two or three miles per hour.

I turned to the backseat to see what the girls were doing. I turned to the left to see what they could see of the accident. I turned back to the girls again. And then I turned forward and saw that I was heading, very slowly, right into the truck in front of us.

There was a bump and a lurch as I hit the brake, but we barely felt a thing. We did hit the truck, though. Just really slowly.

We pulled off to the side, as did the truck in front of us and I got out to see the damage. It looked like the photo at the top of this blog entry.

Here’s what the back of the truck I hit looked like:

Why no damage, Tacoma? WHY NO!?!?

The guy in front of me was an older gent. It turned out he’s retired military, just like my dad, and the guy could not have been nicer. He kept asking me about my girls and if they were OK and did not even act a tiny bit put out that some random person hit him from behind and now all of a sudden his time was being wasted on insurance bullshit when his truck was barely even touched.

He said he was on his way home from a grocery run and I imagined him sitting at home on the couch with a cold beer instead out of in the hot sun with me while my daughters sat patiently in the air conditioning waiting to go home. He did not even act like it was a thing, and I was incredibly lucky the guy was so cool about it.

A police officer saw our (my) wreckage told us that they had some other stuff to deal with (“Yes! We’re sorry, please go see to that, sorry!”), so for us to both go pull into the police station parking lot and wait.

This is what the area looked like:

The guy kept saying he’d never been in an accident and wasn’t sure what to do, so we took photos of each others’ insurance information and he called his insurance person while I called my wife and asked her to come pick up the kids because I didn’t know how long things would take.

It turns out these things take a long time, especially when they’re in proximity of a much more serious incident. So we waited, awkwardly. Ages later, a police officer came and told us that we could fill out an accident report since no crime had occurred and that was fine by us. We exchanged the paperwork and since my vehicle was hideous, but drivable, I went home.

I called my insurance agent’s service; the person on the line did not express any surprise that I did something so stupid and, to their credit, did not judge. While I was on hold, I Tweeted:

If I worked for the insurance company it would be hard for me not to tell some people, “It sounds like you just suck at driving.”

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) August 11, 2012

The insurance agent told me everything was cool and asked if I wanted to take my car to the body shop that did some work on my car the previous year. That was fine. I was set to take the car in on Monday and get a rental. Problem solved, right?

Well, no. I still needed an inspection sticker (I figured they frown upon you bringing in a wreck for that) and still had a court date. But that was weeks away, no biggie, right?

There’s a local body shop that did work on my car last year that was superb. I mean, the damn car looked brand new and the bumper issue I was having was totally resolved. I know that’s what body shops are paid to do, but I was still stunned by what great work they did. So it was a no-brainer to use them again for this job.

Funny about that…

Everything seemed great at first. They told me the job would only take a week or two and that my insurance (with deductible) would cover my car rental.

The rental, you guys. It was PIMP! I know it was only a Ford Taurus, but my car is five years old and paid off, this car was brand new and had stuff like satellite radio built in (instead of my jerry-rigged batch of wires and ugly antennas) and Bluetooth streaming.

BLUETOOTH STREAMING! Of music and stuff!

And it was a big, smooth-riding beast, much bigger than my car, but way more comfortable for my long commute.

I took the rental car to the City of Kyle, where my ticket was issued, and went to the quaint City Hall building. I was told I would need to come to the court in about a month to get the inspection thing resolved for a fee and for the driving lane issue, I’d have to pay $107 and take a defensive driving course, which involved more fees.

Two weeks later, when I called for the third time to check on my car and was told by the collision center that they needed more time, I asked, “Is the car rental still covered?”

They said it was.

“Shit, take your time!” I bellowed, singing along with a happy song in my head, “take as long as you need!”

That was probably a mistake.

Because the week before my court date, I was starting to worry. No car. No inspection sticker. The collision center told me the car rental time was up but that they would cover the difference. That didn’t seem like good news.

I began to call every day as the status of my car kept slipping. The woman I was talking to, I think, was starting to dodge my calls.

Finally, she agreed to let me have my car back and even agreed to take the car to get the inspection done the day I was to pick it up, one day before my court date.

I checked in that morning. It still wasn’t done. I was told my car would not be ready until 5:45 that evening, right when I was supposed to be with my daughter at her dance class.

“What time do you close?” I asked.

“5:45.”

“So I have to be there at exactly…”

“Yes.”

Shit.

I took my daughter to dance class and asked the teacher if she’d be OK if I ran across the street (the collision center was not far away) to get my car. She said it was fine, though Lilly was not thrilled that I wasn’t going to be in the waiting area the whole time.

So I rushed over with my pimp rental car and waited and waited and waited until they finally brought my car out.

They forgot to do the inspection. The woman said she sent a different, probably already-inspected car, because she got confused.

I transferred the car seats, cleaned up as best I could, and moved all the rest of my stuff over to my own car. Fine, it wasn’t inspected, but I had my car back. I drove quickly back to the dance studio and waited for Lilly to finish.

Things were almost back to normal.

The next morning, I went to get my car inspected on the way to work. That went fine; it only took a few minutes.

Then, about 10 minutes on the highway toward work, a bunch of warning lights in my car came on, including a signal saying something might be wrong with my brakes.

The car dealership where I get my oiled changed is on my route, so I was able to make an emergency stop there.

Half an hour later, they figured out that it was a hybrid water pump that needed replacing.

My car has about 150,000 miles on it. It’s paid off, which I love, but I’ve learned that when something needs fixing, it needs to just get fixed, no matter what the cost. This one was going to be $600, on top of the deductible I’d just paid for my wreck. So not having a car payment was not working out so well for these two or three months.

They had no idea how long the fix would take, but the estimate was looking like around three or four hours. My court date was that evening in Kyle, about 30 miles up the road toward Austin.

I called my wife and told her I was at the car dealership with a car problem.

“But what about your inspection?!” she asked.

“What? Oh… no, that’s taken care of, this is a whole other set of bullshit I’m dealing with now.”

I wondered if my car sitting for so long at the collision center may have caused the problem. It didn’t help my mood.

With some weird luck, they were able to fix my car a lot more quickly than expected. I got out of there by lunchtime and headed to work.

Night court was one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been and I’ve lived in Mississippi.

It was a mix of teens, families, people who just got off work based on the uniforms they wore and random others in homogeneously bad moods. Nobody talked, everybody waited in fear, there was no, “So what are you in for?” chit-chat. Some people messed around with their phones because, you know, this is America, but there was no mirth or camaraderie. With some tweaking, it could have been The Hunger Games without weapons.

I signed in and waited for two straight hours, Tweeting about #NightCourt to keep myself awake.

Going to a court of law at night not as hilarious as my childhood TV viewing led me to believe.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 13, 2012

Judge is bilingual. Potential for me to get yelled at in two languages. #NightCourt

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 13, 2012

“I advise you keep your mouth shut and invoke the 5th Amendment.” – Imaginary lawyer sitting next to me giving terrible advice. #NightCourt

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 13, 2012

Guy approaches the bench with underwear hanging over his waistband. DUDE, THIS IS TEXAS, THEY WILL LETHALLY INJECT YOU! #NightCourt

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 13, 2012

Driving with expired inspection sticker was the case that they gave me. #NightCourt #thuglife twitter.com/omarg/status/2…

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 13, 2012

“Your honor, I would like to request a recess. Which way to the playground?” – Me, when my turn comes up. #NightCourt

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 14, 2012

“Are you pleading Guilty or No Contest?” “100 percent Not Guilty, your honor.” “BAILIFF!” #NightCourt

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 14, 2012

Case dismissed! U-S-A! U-S-A! Wait, I still have to pay $20? #NightCourt #BULLSHIT!

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 14, 2012

Tonight, I learned what’s wrong with our legal system. It’s slow and hellaboring and nobody pronounces anybody’s name right. #NightCourt

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 14, 2012

So, that happened.

My case was dismissed, but I still have to do defense driving. I plan to do it online, very soon, but it’s a loose thread I’m still dealing with.

And then this other stuff happened:

I got charged for the rental car after all, almost $100. It turns out it was because Hertz thought I left a huge mess (I did not) and didn’t put enough gas in the car (I actually put more than what they gave it to me with and never agreed to pay for gas). But the Hertz Twitter account had my back and helped get that charge reversed.

I noticed later that the hood of my car was sitting unevenly. That required another trip back to the collision center where they fixed it, I shit you not, in 20 minutes.

I watched some Night Court clips on YouTube and found they were much funnier than my experiences.

I like my car and not having a car payment, but at some point in the next few months, I’ll probably end up buying a new one.

And that’s it. I hoped you enjoyed THIS TALE OF TOIL AND WOE.