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To 2024 Happy New Year card (page 1)
In February, Alan was struck by a car...hit and run driver. Bike totaled :^( but Alan was able to walk away :^). His back was a little sore for a while, and the event gave new meaning to the idea that "I'm not just paranoid; they really are trying to kill me."
Here is a video, but a warning, it has content that may be disturbing.
When I approached the intersection I slowed to ~4mph. As I entered the 4-way stop intersection, I did not notice the car pretty far to my right.
I was accelerating through the intersection and when I was about halfway through, the car, going 2 or 3 times faster than me, went right through her stop sign without slowing down. I tried to swerve to avoid collision, but it was too late. I'm now doubly, triply, or quadruply cautious when encountering an intersection.
In March, after an especially drenching series of rains, one of our 3 giant live oak trees in our back yard fell on our neighbor's house.
The giant root cluster destroyed part of our fence as you can see here, the tree as it was before the bulk of the tree removal job that was not insignificant.
In April Dan visited, coming by train from Denver. We picked him up at the train station in Emeryville, but as we were 15 minutes early, waiting in our car parked on a nearby street, a woman executing a distracted driving move rear ended us. Both cars had to be towed, so Dan, Diane, and Alan got home later than planned.
All these mishaps had relatively happy endings. Another ordeal that had a satisfactory resolution, albeit after several months, was the 3-unit ductless minisplit heat pump system that we got in May but wasn't really adequately tested and didn't really work until October. Thankfully it works great now.
And everything bad that happened to us was overwhelmingly counteracted by good things that happened and were extremely minor compared with what's happening to folks in Ukraine where the ending seems an gruellingly long distance away and Palestine/Israel where the ending may not even be in our lifetimes.
Then there's globewide climate "anomalies", but hey...that can wait. We can work toward solutions in our lifetimes, whenever we want.
To 2024 Happy New Year card (page 1)
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