Well.

Well. That wasn't how the weekend was supposed to go.

I left on Wednesday evening to drive to Jim's cottage up near Bancroft for an extra-long weekend with him and his kids. The last bit of road to the cottage is through the woods and I'm not very familiar with it. Also, it's 10 pm now and dark. I call Jim from the highway and he says he'll meet me and I can follow him in. And so we proceed. A few minutes later, I see his car swerve to avoid a porcupine that is crossing the gravel road. "Porcupine!" I think. I look at it for a couple of seconds longer than I should have because, well, porcupine! And then I hear this huge crash and I can't see anything and I'm wondering why my car is making such a strange grinding noise.

Turns out that Jim suddenly slowed almost to a stop so that his youngest could see the porcupine. Me, being distracted by said beastie, did not notice this in time and slammed into the back of Jim's car. Net damage: MiddleJim has a small cut on his forehead caused, most likely, by a piece of flying glass when Jim's rear windshield shattered. No one else is hurt, thank God. Jim's rear bumper is mangled. His trunk is bent. Both rear panels have small dents from minor crumpling. My front bumper is mangled. Jim's trailer hitch went through my bumper and sliced into my radiator, immobilizing one of the fans (which produced the strange grinding noise) and making the car undriveable. My passenger-side airbag went off and filled my car with whitish, stinky gas (which is why I couldn't see anything). My seat belt is jammed.

The rest of the evening was spent calming LittlestJim down (he's seven years old and got a little hysterical), limping to Jim's cottage in his car, and cleaning up MiddleJim's forehead. Much of the next morning was spent picking glass out of the backseat of Jim's car so that we could drive into town without slicing anything. The afternoon was spent on the phone with insurance companies (Insurance Lady: Where exactly are you? Me: Well, I'm not quite in the middle of nowhere, but I can see it from here...), arranging for a tow truck, driving an hour into Peterborough to deliver Jim's car to the body shop, picking up rental cars, driving back to the cottage, etc. etc.

So now I'm back in Ottawa with a rental car from Peterborough and a slightly stiff neck.

::sighs::

::chants mantra:: No one was hurt. No one was hurt. No one was hurt. No one was hurt.

Prison Break

Who the heck starts the second season of a series on August 21?!? Also, the nifty streaming thing that Fox has going only works if you live in the U.S. ::huffs:: I forgot to watch or set my VCR for the premiere last week and had to find, er, a creative way of obtaining it.

Also, if Michael Scofield and Lincoln Burrows are brothers, why don't they have the same last name?

I watched S4 of Nikita this month and was amused to see the actor who plays Teabag on Prison Break in a suitably psycho role in one episode. He's really, really good at being creepy.