Why No New AggroChat

This past goes down as one of the more bizarre weekends in a long while.  Those of you who listen to AggroChat are waking up realizing there was no new podcast episode and this is due to some extenuating circumstances.  Saturday for the most part was a pretty chill day, and I had settled into my office to prepare to record.  I was just literally about to start trying to cobble together some semblance of show notes… when I had a knock on the door.  My wife was on the phone with my mother in law and she had been in a wreck out on the turnpike.  Granted this is 9 pm and there was a massive storm bearing down on us, so while my wife offered to go pick her up alone…  I didn’t really want her going out there completely alone especially considering that we knew it would mean a two hour plus long round trip to take her mom home eventually.  I gave my apologies to the AggroChat crew and threw some actual outside style clothing on…  and rushed out the door.  It turned out she was on the Turnpike slowing down to get off at the next exit, when someone hit her from behind.  It came out while sitting on the side of the highway that the guy had been reading a text with cruise control locked in about 80 mph, and when he realized he was coming up fast on her…  he swerved attempting to dodge and only caused his car to spin out and flip…  and then catch on fire.  Thankfully both car loads of people were okay, but this also set in motion a whole string of events.

We dropped mom-in-law off at home and I stopped to get some form of caffeine for the trip back.  It was about when I got back on the turnpike that the skies opened up and began what would ultimately be this massive storm.  Thankfully it remained a pretty chill drizzle until we made it back to town.  Around about midnight thirty we ended up in bed and were both conked out pretty fast.  Our niece lives on property adjacent to where mom-in-law lives… and she agreed to spend the night just to make sure nothing was wrong.  The ambulance had checked her out at the scene of the accident but we were still concerned because when you take an 80 year old person and put them through a pretty severe car wreck…  there is going to be at least some soreness.  Because of this… when we did make it to bed my wife turned her phone up fairly loudly as it sat on the nightstand charging.  Thirty minutes after falling to sleep we were woken up by a weather app on her phone going off and informing us that we were under a thunderstorm warning.  It was around about then that the skies opened with this hurricane style deluge of rain.  We fought through it and attempted to go back to sleep…  when about another thirty minutes afterwards we were awoken again by the same app informing us that we were under a Tornado watch.  Thankfully the area of rotation was not near us and unlikely to come our way…  but it still shifted us into a night of trying to sleep while listening to the television just in case that changed.

Yesterday was a bit of a blur as we sort of slept walked through the day.  After church our niece dropped mom-in-law off at our house, and my wife and her made a trip to go see the car.  Functionally the entire back half of the car is gone…  the trunk is now functionally pushed into the back seat and thankfully no one was back there.  Now Saturday night while on the side of the road my wife attempted to cram everything she could find in one of those giant blue IKEA bags that I keep in the back of my SUV as a just in case…  but then we always forget it is there and wind up buying a new one when we do make it to an IKEA.  However in this case it was super handy, but there were a handful of things that they missed under dark of night that were visible during the light of day.  There is little doubt that the car is going to be totaled, and and at the scene of the wreck the guy confessed to texting while driving so there is going to be zero doubt on whether or not his insurance should cover this.  I feel like this is a not so subtle time to state that this should serve as a reminder why you shouldn’t be futzing with your phone while driving.  Especially not while going 80 on a pretty congested turnpike with limited visibility because a massive storm front was bearing down and blotting out the stars.  The most frustrating part about all of it… is that mom-in-law had no intention of being on the turnpike and was simply there because she missed her turn due to some construction and was trying to find a way to route back to where she needed to be.  All of this is why there is no new AggroChat episode, and why I am still groggy as shit from lack of sleep.  My hope is that tonight I will be far enough removed from the events to be able to get a normal nights sleep, because last night it felt like I didn’t get great sleep either because I was almost too tired to sleep.  The Tornado that blazed through town was rated as an EF2, and I was so groggy yesterday that it did not dawn on me until this morning that I have a few friends in neighborhoods that were in the storm’s path.  So here is hoping they made it through okay.