Happy New Year. . . .[not]: My First Accident

My Christmas break was pretty fantastic this year. It consisted of a lot of play time with my family (especially my nephew Jared), plenty of chilling around the house, and enough fun times with my friends from home-- exactly everything I really wanted for my break.

The real problem came when it was time to go back to Provo. I put it off until literally the last minute (8:30pm Tuesday night) before I had to be back to work at the prison on Wednesday, Jan. 4th. Obviously I wasn't eagerly looking forward to my return (for multiple reasons really).

That Wednesday, I made it to work on time and actually had a decent day at work, considering it was my first full day in over 2 weeks. It was still light outside when I started my journey back to Provo, and I had luckily remembered to grab a book and a receipt I needed to make a return (Christmas gift style) at Barnes and Noble on my way home. So instead of taking the Provo Center Street exit on my way home, I took University Parkway in order to make a stop at Barnes and Noble.

Bad, bad idea.

This meant I would have to navigate my way through Orem and Provo in order to get home. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but that night, it happened to be a HUGE deal.

As I was driving down Freedom Blvd. in Provo (almost a mile away from my apartment), I got distracted by my stereo for seriously point five, but that point five was long enough for me to fail to notice the vehicle in front of me was stopped. I had just gone through a green light on 960 N., so I thought I was good, but the reality was that the light at 800 N. was red and the cars had backed up to about 100 ft. past the intersection I had just gone through. My moment of distraction resulted in me smashing into (and under) the truck in front of me, totaling my car (essentially about where the car is in the picture above). When I say under, I mean it. I was going the speed limit- 35mph- and when I crashed, I had literally gone under the truck and lifted it's back wheels off the ground so they couldn't move. A tow truck had to come pull us apart.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Luckily nobody was hurt (other than whiplash after effects), and although my car is done for, as far as I know the other truck didn't have too serious of damage- it drove away from the scene. Also, thankfully, my sister was kind enough to meet me at the scene of the accident, help keep me calm, make sure I had all the info I needed, and most of all, give me a ride to my apartment after all was said and done.

Thankfully, my parents have been extremely kind to me through this all (especially because it was their car). I was pretty terrified of what they were going to do/say, but they were very gracious after having to come up to give the title to the junk yard and having to clean out all of my junk from the car. (I'm thinking it helped that this was my first accident ever. As for some other members of my family. . . it might have been a different situation. Only kind of kidding.)

So here I am:

• nearly 3 weeks later;
  
• a $310 ticket later;
  
• no car;
  
• a bus pass;
  
• plenty of gracious, kind friends (with cars);

and I'm only beginning to be able to laugh at the situation.
In fact, I can hardly believe I'm posting an entire blog post about it- I didn't even tweet about it!

If this is how the year is going to be, I'm not that excited to see what else is in store.
Also, I'm fairly sure I say that every year.