melancholy

This week has been so weird and stressful that I'm actually looking forward to Monday. Normally on the road I rarely feel threatened but I had a strange experience Wed. evening that still has me kind of shook up. Nothing happened to me but it was just a reminder of why it's very important to be observant of the actions of people around you in traffic. I'm not going to hash it out here but wanted to send a reminder out to the women truck drivers to be extra careful.

The second incident was yesterday. I thought James was possibly going to get killed or seriously injured. We were on our mountain bikes riding to the disc golf course and part of our route we had to ride on the sidewalk--no lectures here, even the local cops tell us we have to ride on the sidewalk in that area and a few others because of no shoulders and the speed of traffic. There's one very dangerous intersection near our house that I'm always super diligent about crossing as a pedestrian because I've come way too close to being sideswiped because people are in a hurry and ignore the red lights while making right turns. We get to that intersection, the people going north-south have a red light, we have the pedestrian crossing light that it's ok to go. James makes sure the pickup approaching the light to our left is going to fully stop, tells me it's ok to go, starts out in the intersection and the pickup starts to turn right without signalling and hits James. He literally went up on their hood, rolled off, and was thrown into the closest lane of traffic going west. I honest to God thought I was going to lose my husband right then. The couple stopped and jumped out to help James out of the street, apologizing and saying they didn't see him.

What pisses me off so much though is that the woman in the passenger seat made eye contact with me and still told her husband it was clear to go because they didn't want to wait the extra 10 seconds for me to cross the street. I'm sure they didn't see James but she was totally ok with cutting me off. Oh yeah, she got out saying it was her fault because she told her husband it was ok there was nothing coming. 2nd thing that makes me angry, nobody else stopped, they just kept whizzing on by.

Thankfully no broken bones or worse but James will have to replace at least the front wheel on his mountain bike. He thought everything was ok and told the couple it was all right just to look for people on the sidewalk from here on. Me, I wasn't that easy-going. I refused to say it was ok because, I know damn well that woman saw me even if she supposedly didn't see him. Anyway because no cops were called and James said it was ok, we're now out the cost of repairing his bike. I'm also still not ok with the fact that I saw my hubby get rolled over the hood of a pickup.