D'oh, a deer!

I hit a deer yesterday. Frankly, I wasn't all that surprised by it, being as how it was a Town B deer that I hit.

At some point in the past, I've mentioned the symbiotic relationship of the Town A, Town B and Town C Tri-Metro area of small WV towns in which we reside.

I live in Town C and work in Town A. Traveling to Town A from Town C requires that I pass through Town B. Town B, as I've also mentioned at some point, is composed almost entirely of confusing one-way streets. In fact, to describe Town B as a double lane loop running along a series of trailer parks would, while not entirely accurate or charitable, not be that far off from reality.

In addition to trailer parks, Town B is also composed of a number of other neighborhoods, businesses and restaurants along the same loop. And since this particular double lane loop of road is on a fairly well-trafficked route of travel, people who stop at these restaurants, businesses, neighborhoods and trailer parks often find getting back onto the loop rather challenging due to the amount of traffic headed at them at upwards of 40 mph. Factor into that the fact that Town B's population seems to be comprised primarily of tard cakes and you begin to see the true horror of the situation.

I have to travel through Town B on my way to work around five days per week. On at least one of those five days, my journey becomes punctuated by at least one screaming, bitter fit of cursing on my part due to said tard cakes, who have no better sense than to pull out into my lane of traffic, directly in front of me, and then proceed to drive at 10 mph when I'm practically on top of them and driving the posted speed limit of 40 mph. This action on their part forces me to have to slam on my brakes and lay on my horn in a most vicious manner or, passing lane traffic permitting, whip into the other lane to avoid collision. And in the majority of these cases, the particular seemingly suicidal cake who has whipped out in front of me and gone slow has looked directly into my eyes mere seconds before doing so, meaning that they could clearly see me approaching, made eye contact with me, saw what speed I was doing and then decided to whip out and go slow anyway.

And believe me, I can feel their pain. I have, on occasion, had to stop in Town B myself and have also found getting back on the road frustrating. There you sit, staring at two lanes of cars moving toward you slow enough that you'd really like to go, but so evenly spaced as to be liken unto a communist plot because despite their slowness there's no way you can safely insert yourself into the traffic stream. And with no traffic lights on the loop to speak of, there is no guarantee of any sort of a break. After a few minutes of waiting, you find yourself tempted to just gun it and hope for the best. And that would be fine, except the `cakes who whip out in front of me NEVER EVER gun it.

Town B infuriates me, but it no longer surprises me. I have learned to always be on guard when driving through it, so much so that I've even been known to slow down to give myself that much more buffer when folks whip out. It doesn't help whatsoever. The `cakes just wait until you're closer to them before whipping out.

"Hey, guess what," I say upon arriving at work, at least once a week. "I was driving through TOWN B today and someone whipped out in front of me and went slow."

"Ooooooh ahhhhhhhh," my co-workers say in mock surprise.

And one day the `cake in question who whipped out in front of me and went slow was our very own Mrs. J. Yep, pulled right out from a local grocery store parking lot and didn't even look once to see if anyone was coming in her lane. (We all refuse to ride with her because of driving habits such as this and bless her out royally when we catch her driving like that. We're convinced the only reason she's still alive today is that she must have a battalion of guardian angels on her side.)

So there I was yesterday, just entering the boundaries of Town B, driving in the passing lane, when from the left shoulder I spy a deer leaping out of the bushes and directly into my path, probably 30 feet from my car. To its credit, the deer did seem to be in a pretty big hurry, for it was low to the ground, gunning it for all it was worth. However, this `cake of a creature was gunning it right in front of me and gave me little chance to avoid hitting it. I slammed on the brakes and did my usual fit of cursing, but still clipped it in the rump with my passenger side headlight. It continued its mad dash across the road and disappeared. Fortunately, no one was behind me to slam into the back of my car, so I just pulled off, parked and got out to inspect the damage.

Other than a few deer hairs, I saw no damage. Upon closer inspection, later, I saw that my passenger headlight was chipped and the metal of the side of the car just beyond it was ever-so-slightly bent from the impact.

So the car is a wee bit damaged but not likely beyond our $500 deductible, so we'll have to eventually take care of it ourselves. I would have gladly taken reimbursement in venison steaks, but the deer I struck did not have the decency to hang around and die. In fact, I rather doubt it's dead at all, but will probably walk with a limp for some time to come.

It's just as well. Tard cake deer tastes funny.

Adventures in Tri-Metro Land

This morning, Ash took all the little scraps of paper, on which I'd been scribbling vital information about our debit card theft, down to the bank to confer with them on our next step. So far none of the charges the thieving CAsshole made have hit our account, likely due to the fact that they've been canceled at the source. Still, we don't want this weasel to get away with it, so after consulting the bank, Ash popped down to see the police. Unfortunately, you can't just pop into ANY police station for this sort of thing.

"We can't do anything," the policeman at Town-A's police department said. "You're not in our jurisdiction. You're in Town-C's jurisdiction so you need to go see their department."

See, we live in the Town-A/Town-B/Town-C Tri-Metro area of small West Virginia towns. The towns are very small, but they're so close together that you'd hardly notice you'd moved into another town unless you paid attention to the signs. So Ash piled in the car again, traveled from Town-A through Town-B and to the Town-C police department, a journey of no more than 4 miles, and was hardly shocked to find Town-C's police station was empty of all life.

Town-C, which we live closest to, is not large enough to have a full fledged police force, you see. They have a handful of officers who have to both patrol in the cars and come back to run the desk. They can't do both at the same time, so they don't even pretend to. It's not at all uncommon, therefore, to see the police station sitting empty and locked up with all its lights out. In the department's defense, Town-C is a very poor community. It used to be the hub for all lumber activity and the money that came with it and for most of its life was actually something of a Flourishing High Society mecca. But logging dried up and most of the high-society crowd moved over to the more clean and historic-looking Town-A, leaving Town-C to dry up.

So poor is Town-C's police department that some of its officers have been known to moonlight as police officers for Town-D, 11 miles down the road. And, a year or so back, a couple of these Town-C/D officers did a wildly intelligent thing. They pulled over a woman over for speeding, she offered them sex in exchange for a free-pass on the speeding ticket and they took her up on it. They then proceeded to head back to one of the officer's apartments where they VIDEO TAPED the "encounter". Then, in some kind of endorphin-fueled haze of fraternal camaraderie, one of them decided it would be a great idea to show the tape TO THEIR BOSS back at the station the next day. Fortunately, their boss WAS a good cop and he had the pair charged, prosecuted and ultimately fired. Mayberry, this is not.

In order for Ashley to file a police report today she had to first come home and CALL the police. This evidently routes through 911's dispatcher who forwarded the call to an officer who then agreed to come back to his station for a few minutes so someone would be there to let her in and help with the report.

So now the report is filed and will soon be winging its way to San Diego where we'll see what happens. As I said before, it seems phenomenally stupid that our CAsshole debit-card number thief would actually ordered stuff off the internet and sent it to his own home. If he's smart enough to have gotten the number, it stands to reason he has some sort of plan for not getting caught. I'm thinking we're not likely to find him. But maybe, just maybe he really was that stupid and the cops in San Diego can nail him to the wall for this.