Christmas Eve

The thing that really makes the Christmas season special is all the shitty driving. There isn't even snow on the ground (the signal for everyone around here to drive like it doesn't snow every year) and people are forgetting how to operate a motor vehicle.

Last night, on T's way home from work, an oncoming car made a U-turn in front of him. Like, it cut across two northbound lanes, the center turn lane and two southbound lanes to end up directly in front of him. This was not a timing issue... It wasn't like there was a lot of traffic and this was their only opportunity. There were no cars behind T going southbound. So this person could have waited 5 seconds and avoided nearly causing an accident.

Later, as we ran to Wal-Mart for one last thing... We were driving north on a regular street and a southbound car made a left turn in front of us. Like right in front of us. We locked up the brakes (There is no place to swerve on this road because the homeowner on the east side of the street dug a huge runoff trench next to the road when they paved it last summer and consequently raised the road higher than his yard. The idiot dug right up to the pavement, so the water flow has been eroding the road on that side and the pavement is crumbling away. But that is a story for another day.) and laid on the horn. But the road was wet, as it had been raining all day. So it was not likely we would avoid crashing.

At the last minute, the driver decided that hey, maybe that was not such a good idea after all, so they swerved back into their lane. Of course, the driver that had been behind them had already taken the opportunity to speed up, so they were in the lane. They locked up their brakes and laid on the horn. (They could not swerve because there is a creek on that side of the road, and a pretty steep drop off.) So finally, all three of us are stopped and nobody was hit.

And the dumbass who started this whole thing just goes ahead and makes the turn as if nothing had happened.

And then, this morning on the way to work, it was still raining. But the commute was punctuated by cars running red lights and another car pulling out in front of us, with no time to do that (unless we braked hard).

Still, I guess there were no actual accidents, so no actual harm done. I am just frustrated at the jackassery of some people.