The Good Word

I just finished my seventh week of school and the 8th graders just took their unit test over George Orwell's Animal Farm. Despite how much I enjoy my kids, how much I enjoyed having Mallory here, and how well everything has worked out with my move thus far, I feel discontent. Maybe it's just because I haven't blogged in awhile. We'll see.

Lifetime Incompetence Award

If you've been keeping up on the blog here, you'll remember that I was in a car accident in late August. Click here to read the post. That was the last day of classroom preparation I had before school started the next Monday.

Those of you who know me know that I have lots of luck. Good and bad. Things never go "alright" for me. They are always terrible or great. I will now recount for you the tale of how fate gave me the most incompetent insurance agent who has ever lived.

While still at the scene of my accident, as my arm was bleeding and the firetruck (because when you tell 911 dispatch the cancel the ambulance they send a firetruck) was just rolling up, I was already on the phone with Progressive reporting my claim.

At the time I was really excited about the fact that Colorado doesn't do No-Fault Insurance. That meant that the woman who blindly pulled out into moving traffic and hit me would have to pay for the damages and my insurance rates wouldn't go up, unlike in Michigan where when an old man hits my parked car, sets of the alarm, pulls forward, and then backs into it again, I end up paying a couple hundred bucks more per year for insurance.

Unfortantly, because Colorado doesn't do No-Fault Insuranace I've had to spend the last 9 weeks dealing with some jacktard that has no interest in keeping me happy at all. And here's what happened:

Week 1: I call Mr. W and try to arrange a time for him to look at my car and do an estimate.

Week 2: He misses the appointment we made, shows up the next day when I'm not at home, drops his business card on my driver's seat (through the non-existent window) and leaves.

Week 3: I receive, not a phone call or an e-mail telling me what's going on, but a check for $4,500. I wonder if I should contest the amount and call my Progressive agent who tells me a of a reliable body shop to take the car to.

Week 4: I finally get ahold of Mr. W again and let him know that if I'm going to take my car in to get repaired that I need a rental. The guy at the body shop ends up negotiating the rental with Enterprise because Mr. W can't seem to figure out how. After looking at my car for about 10 minutes Sam, the guy at the body shop, says "there is a lot more damage here than he put on this estimate... ...he also put about 12 items on here that don't even exist on a Chevy Aveo..."

Week 5: Mr. W, after telling me he would be back down to give my car another look, goes on vacation for a week. Both Sam and I call his office a couple times a day until we find out, on Wednesday, that he won't be back in the office until the next Tuesday.

Week 6: I drive a rental around.

Week 7: I play phone tag with Mr. W's secretary. The XM free trial ends on my rental. Mr. W takes another 3 days worth of vacation.

Week 8: Voicemail message from Mr. W "uh... Mr. Good it looks like we're going to have to declare a total loss on your vehicle, get in touch with me as soon as you can." I loot Gretchen's corpse and wait to hearfrom Mr. W about a settlement. Mr. W tells me that they'll give me 10 G's for Gretchen and I agree. He claims he'll take care of it from there.

Week 9: Voicemail message from Mr. W: "uh.... Mr. Good I'm going to need you to return your rental in the next 48 hours..." I panic and start looking for cars.
Voicemail from my loan company: "Mr. Good, this is your final notice, we need to reposess your vehicle." I call Mr. W and find that he has yet to contact my loan company, which means I'm two payments late and they still don't know my car has been totalled.
Letter from 5/3 bank, received on October 10th: "Mr. Good your account has been overdrawn. Please pay $170 in fees before Oct. 8 or your account will accrue further charges." I call Progressive and tell them that my car was totalled and that the insurance payment shouldn't have hit my account, much less my Hillsdale account. They are nice and give me back two months worth of insurance payments that I wouldn't have incurred had Mr. W called them to tell them the car was totalled. I buy a new car, return the rental (one month later), and leave a voicemail for Mr. W telling him to just void the check he originally wrote me and pay off my damn loan like he said he would.

Yesterday: Voicemail message from Mr. W: "uh... Mr. Good now that our business is settled I need you to go ahead and return your rental car." I called him back, told him I returned the car 48 hours ago and that he needed to pay off my loan. He said he had made a payment to the company, but that I would have to take care of the rest out of the original check he wrote me.

Last night: I answer the phone, "Hello, is this Mr. Good?"
"Yes it is..."
"This is Detective M I wanted to confirm that you are the owner of a '06 Chevy Aveo and I need to know where that vehicle is."
"I was the owner, the car is totalled and if the insurance company hasn't claimed it yet, it's at Expert's Only Collision in Colorado Springs, Colorado."
"Could you giv me the number of the body shop? It seems that Farm Bureau Insurance out of Denver thinks it's a little suspicious that your car is in the name of a deceased person. I've already talked to your step-mother."

Ich habe du nicht gesheisst.

I kid you not. That's actually what's been happening. I've had to buy a car on the assumption that I would some day get reimbursed for my accident, I've had to talk to people who wanted to reposess a totalled car, people who were insuring a totalled car, people who thought that I had stolen said car and totalled it, and Mr. W who probably still doesn't remember my name.

But here's the new ride:

And here's your Halloween clip of the day:

I'm going to head to a coffee house later today to watch the episode of Heroes I missed this past Monday. Hopefully that will put me in a better mood.

It is the eve of the day that begins the month which culminates with my favorite holiday: Halloween.

As I watch the sun throw up it's last pitifully unanswered cries for help, while the mountains obscure it's grizzly fate - drowned in the cruel pacific - I focus every fiber of my being on the self-restraint it will take to refrain from the sugary sweet goodness of candy corn for another four hours. How can a simple mixture of sugar, corn syrup, egg whites, honey, soy protein, salt, artificial flavors, confectioner's glaze, carnauba wax, and artificial dyes including red 7, yellow 5, and yellow 3 taste so good?

Did You Ever Think When a Hearse Goes By...

Today after work I stopped by Experts Only Collision to pay my final respects to Gretchen and to search her mangled corpse for valuables.

All told she held: a bottle of laundry detergent, my other hobo-glove (whose mate is my favorite pot-holder), three dirty socks, Chaucer's Canturbury Tales, four quarters, and about 643 pens.

It's funny how little I mourn the passing of the lesbian in my life when I consider how attached I was to my Oldsmobile in high school. Maybe it's because the times spent in Gretchen weren't nearly as good as those spent in the Olds, but I should feel some gratitude towards her for getting me through three years of Hillsdale and the move to Colorado.

She's carted more than her share of odiferous highschoolers to and from Young Life, she's been borrowed and battered by nearly everyone I know. She's driven to Chicago without me. She's crossed the Missippi and climbed mountains while bearing my only wordly possessions. And now, like my bike, my savings, my dignity and my will to live, Colorado has taken her from me.

Rest in peace Gretch. May the spirit of Henry Ford, from whom all cars come and to whom they must all return, take kindlier to homosexuals than the God of Abraham and Isaac.

Also, the Fantasy Book Store on Platte does not have The Hobbit. Really they don't have any of the sort of books you're looking for. Really, it isn't that kind of fantasy book store.

St. Dracula (the patron saint of Halloween that I made up today) has sent me numerous blessings in preparation for the fast-approaching season.

Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead

1. Mallory is coming. I'll have a great friend from home in the Springs for a week beginning this Thursday (just in time to start Halloween right).

2. I've received a standing invitation to watch Heroes and, much like St. Dracula hisself, I can't go anywhere without being explicitly invited (I also don't like mirrors, though I love garlic... hmm...).

3. Gretchen is dead. That's right my woman-loving car is totalled. It took a month for the verdict to come down, but it has been made and she's gone. Hot stuff. The settlement will pay off Gretchen and give me money left over for a down payment and trip to Boston. Turns out this whole thing was serendipitous after all.

Prepare yourselves for my favorite month. It's going to rock the flesh off from your bones.

Only 48 more hours remain in my candy corn fast, then the blood hits the fan (like in the movie Carrie) and I force you, once again, to love everything I do, or to be bored out of your mind for an extended period of time - speaking of which, tonight is Heroes which means tomorrow will be an all-Heroes post. Eat my ectoplasm.

Love Halloween like I do? Let me know what your reason for the season is and how you'll be spending it - disembowelling your loved ones, I hope.

Some people get up and run every morning, some people read their Bible, some people even go so far as to floss, but I think the best thing I could possibly do for my day would be to spend half an hour every morning just dancing around to Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Queen of the Road

Gretchen is in the shop. My accident happened over three weeks ago, so it's about time. While the ol' ball and chain is getting a final once-over to determine if she's headed to the big junkyard in the sky, I'm driving what I like to call "The New Hotness." While it isn't much, and definitely not a car that I would consider masculine, it's about a flight* or two up from Gretchen. Right now I'm thinking of calling her Betsy, but maybe I should go for something a little more exotic.

She's a Saturn Vue, whatever the crap that is, and she's BRAND new. I'm talking plastic still on the floor mats, presets still set to deadair, only 15 miles on the odometer, the whole shebang. Plus, she's got XM radio and a CD player, which will be especially useful since I got a package from Mike and Maggie today containing a CD marked "Zach's Culture CD." I can only imagine that it's a copy of ABBA Gold.

After driving a busted-up Gretchen for several weeks, "The New hHtness" felt a little weird at first. Not only was I looking down at people at stop lights, but I had power windows, locks, and an XM radio (which will probably get its own post in the near future). I seriously felt like I had ditched my sandspeeder for an Imperial AT-AT Walker.

The biggest change, however, was actually being able to open up my driver's side door (which I haven't been able to do in a couple weeks). I left school midday to pick up the rental and as I pulled back into the parking lot I actually said out loud "well, now how in the hell do they expect me to climb over that console to get out." There was absolutely no thought in my mind that I could just open my door and exit the vehicle.

In other news I ate lunch with my 8th graders today. It seems strange, but our Executive Director asked us to try to eat with the students once a week. The soccer guys readily accepted me into their ranks and we spent most of the meal daring each other to eat some conncoction that one boy's mother had told him were "wasabi peas." That's right, you guessed it: dried peas covered in wasabi.

Also, I was informed by the lunch crowd that my facial hair was not in line with any known classification. They decided to call it the "mutton chop/soul patch killer combo," though I'm pretty sure it resembles neither.

Also, if you haven't already been over it, review my How George Lucas Stole Star Wars post and then check this: Brett Jordan's Blog

*Get it? A flight is like, a bunch of steps.

At the library again. I haven't been able to get on the internet (outside of school hours) for the past couple days, so I'm cashing in my credit from the day I got in my car accident and double-posted. I won't count it if you won't.

It seems as though I devoted a bit too much time this weekend to leisure, because I have felt disgustingly unprepared for class every day this week. Every day I manage to pull through, but I feel like I'm just barely getting by.

On the plus side, it looks like my car will soon be fixed. I got a check in the mail from the insurance company of the woman who hit me, and tomorrow I'm going in to talk with the mechanic who will be doing the repairs and he's going to see if he can cut down on their estimate so that I can keep a little bit of the insurance check for myself. Hopefully that conversation goes well.

Also, last night was my first RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) class. After having some trouble finding the building, I sat down in a semi-circle with about a dozen other individuals including three instructors, two sponsors, and a handful of candidates/catechumens. The average age in the group was probably upwards of thirty-five and I was the only unmarried adult (there were two sixteen year-olds). So, once again, probably not the place I'm going to be making friends... The class itself was alright, though a bit too touchy-feely for my tastes. I don't want to circumvent the system or anything, but I wish there was a more rigorous route I could take. I expected homework out of the Catechism, saints' lives to read, rituals and historical data to memorize, etc. Instead the meeting was really just the sort of "feelings" session that I have previously found so refreshingly absent from the Catholic church.

Oh well. I'm sure I'll find a way to get what I need to out of it.

In the near future I'd like to:
1. Respond to Pat's comment on yesterday's post.
2. Comment on Mike and Maggie's blogs.
3. Put down some thoughts on Sarah Palin.
4. Explain what I meant when I said that Julia Child and I disagreed about the nature of art.
5. Attempt to start a blog centered around reading and reacting to essays by notable authors a couple times a week.

One last thing: yesterday a student told me about a website called FreeRice.com where you can identify vocabulary (in English, French, Spanish and German) and for every word you get correct, the sitemakers donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.

While I have implicit trust in neither this website, nor in the UN, it is fun, and it couldn't hurt. My best vocabulary level is 51. Let me know if you beat that. These words are HARD.

Fun Fact: I've tagged more than one post with the label "empty promises".