What catastrophe have you averted recently? Any near-misses?

Well, my mom and I almost got crushed by a falling tree in a storm, if that’s what you mean.

I have the habbit of asking clients at my hotel how their family is doing. Not all clients, just the ones who visit the hotel often enough for me to have memorized their names in the 4 months I have been working there.

Today the receptionist stopped me from asking “hows your husband doing?” ... turns out he is not doing too well, he is 6ft under.

The professor of my online class lectured on the answers to the midterm the night before I took the test. I didn’t know this, but fortunately I didn’t watch the lecture until after I took the test. If I had watched it, I don’t know what might have happened. I had these doom-thoughts about getting kicked out of my college for trying to cheat.

Since this god forsaken heat wave has been in full blast effect, my guts have become a cauldron of uncertainty. I sometimes have no idea if what comes out will be a fart or something extra. It’s maddening. A couple nights ago after work wifey wanted to go shopping and I was against it. First off, it was GI payday and its going to be crowded as hell. Going to Walmart is always an exercise in anger management for me anyway. The other reason, I was really tired and felt poopy and wanted to not be out in public at all.
But she had gotten sort of dressed up and put on make up before I got home. We were going shopping. So I got cleaned up and we go. I say we should do a “speed shop” this time get the essentials and get out. Not even a scowl from her which was a good sign she was OK with it.
We get there and we somehow get separated. She’s disabled and needs to use the scooters there and I always push the cart.
Then it starts to happen, and I’m sort of panicking and start to sweat. I’m too far from the front of the store where the restrooms are. The store is packed with shoppers and I am so fucked…and mad at my wife now even though its not her fault. With a full cart I roll into an aisle with nobody in it, except a woman with a toddler in the cart seat.
Well it happens, a dry one, thank god. It’s a small one but it seems huge and it’s raunchy. I keep my head down without stopping and I hear the mother say to the child “Ooh baby you did a stinky”. keep walking…keep walking. That little baby saved my ass and will probably never see him again but I was sooo lucky he was there.

@woodcutter Uh, so I know this would probably be really uncomfortable for you as a dude, but….wearing a feminine pad could give you a lot of peace of mind in those situations.

It comes without much warning so I hope for an early winter.

Haha…well, I had my ‘kitty toy’ I tripped over last week that turned out to be a real dead Gopher. Ack!

Yes, just yesterday, it was perfect too!

Was driving back from the local hub in my tourist zone when some ^&$#*& kids decided to pass me on the winding little road down to the river zone. The speed limit is about 40 and they came up behind me at at 60 easy, I’d say, then, swerved to pass and just missed another oncoming car by a few feet!

I laid on my horn, and damn near chased them down, NOTHING makes me MADDER than people getting crazy on these little roads! Grrrr!

But…it was perfect, came upon them about 5 miles up the highway, broken down on the side of the road. Haha

INSTANT KARMA! So beautiful!

Normally I would stop to see if someone needed help, but nope, enjoy being stranded in the middle of nowhere on a 100 degree afternoon. Heh!

A couple of weeks ago when we were coming back to Toronto from Ottawa, I nearly hit a deer that was running across the highway. Three lanes of traffic in each direction – I was in the fast lane, going about 130km/hr when a deer leapt over the median right in front of my car! I don’t know how I managed to avoid it, or how it managed to avoid all the cars.

When recently decorating my son’s bedroom, I came mighty close to spilling a pot of paint over the wife’s head. Now that would have been a catastrophe on a truly biblical scale.
She’s got a mean right hook & isn’t afraid to use it.

Last night we had a real nice storm brewing. It wasnt raining yet but you could see a lot of amazing lighting out in the field behind my house so I decided to sit outside and enjoy it until the rain started.

So im sitting out there enjoying the storm when I happen to look at the ground next to my chair. I wasnt ready for what I saw…. Two baby skunk foraging for food. So the first thing to cross my mind was HOLY SHIT this is about to get really horrible… So I slowly got up and began to back away. The one skunk raised it tail like it was going to spray so I got out of there much quicker lol. Luckily I didnt get sprayed. The skunks were actually pretty cool looking though, one was all black with a white patch on its head and the other was all white with a thin black stripe.

@uberbatman

Awww….well, next time take some hard boiled eggs, they love them!

I had a resident skunk that was born in a drain pipe in a culvert at the end of my driveway. He was one of 7 babies that claimed my house as his territory. He got so tame, I would feed him cheese and HB eggs at night from my hot tub. lol

Once he took the egg from my fingers…but, it was a one time thing, I didn’t want to push my luck. “Little Dude” has moved on now, but he was around for several summers.

They are actually very smart little guys!

@Coloma Yea I know, id love a pet skunk but honestly im scared as hell of being sprayed by one. Id like to be able to keep them around even and just feed em like you do but their burrow is right next to my fire pit. I have parties out there a lot, I know eventually someone will get sprayed. Soooo I think I may just have to call animal control or something.

I almost served Merlot with my Tuna Steaks…<Shudders>

@Cruiser

Oh my, and I fancy you as such a sophisticated but earthy guy!

What WERE ya thinkin’ boy? ;-D

@Coloma No excuse but I need stronger readers! Merlot Pinot…they all look the same when you are almost blind! Happy 4th kiddo!

@Cruiser

Yes, I know the blind zone well myself these days. Back at’cha, have a great day!

I dread to think! I spend most of my time trying to stop thinking about near misses… but yesterday someone nearly reversed into my bonnet which made me rather shaky for a while… having having been in a car accident a few months ago one can do without these experiences…but I’m trying to think of them as useful in some way :-/ x

Only small ones like the routine act of catching and preventing avalanches on my desk.

Otherwise I seem to have met my catastrophes recently, or enough of them to feel that I must have filled my quota.

I’m with @nebule, though, in that I often think about the unknown possibilities—the what-ifs, the almost-happened, the almost-didn’t-happen. If there is a use for the shocking mishaps, it may be that they heighten our awareness, make us remember how fragile our sense of security really is and how our lives can change in an instant, and how essential it is to be fully present in the present.

This is my favorite* koan: At the top of a one-hundred-foot pole an iron cow gives birth to a calf.

——-
*If I were a more enlightened being, I would not have a favorite koan.

JUST now, averted stepping on the cutest baby toad in my gravel driveway. Whew!
I put him in the shady, mossy edge of my garage where it is cool. :-D

I dropped a very heavy countertop on my finger. I thought for sure it cut the tip of my finger off, but it is not even broken, just sliced and mashed.

It happened two weeks ago. I can type now, and may be sewing by next month.

@YARNLADY

Owwwwwie!

I hope sopmeone kissed it and made it all better. ;-D

He came running in when I yelled for help and was with me the whole time.

In our shower stall, there’s a 6-inch ledge at the bottom of the opening. I have a habit of leaving a towel in easy reach (usually over the shower curtain, then drying everything but the one foor I’m standing on before getting out. Keeps dripping on the bathroom floor to a minium. I didn’t want to step on the marble cap of the 6-inch ledge, so I took a giant step out, aiing for the bath mat with the one remaining wet foot. The foot still on the shower floor slipped, and I just did catch myself before sustaining a really nasty fall. I would have smashed my shin into the ledge and come down hard on a marble floor.

I made a mental not to just step on the ledge cap from now on, and give it a wipedown if the moist foot leaves a track.

NSFW: @ETpro Dude, wet showers are scary! A while back I read (on the internet, so it may just be an urban legend) about a girl who slipped in the shower in a way that caused her to do a massive split, and it somehow caused her vagina to rip open, and I’ve been super paranoid about slipping in the shower ever since.

@Mariah
Nooooo! Aaaagh, the horrible and bizarre home injury scene. lol

@ETpro

Yikes! I fell down my garage stairs in a power outage last winter, went head first into the side of my dryer. haha Actually it wasn’t funny, I sprained my arm and was all banged up, glad you’re okay.

@Mariah I’m in good shape. I had my vagina removed way back in the early stages of development in the womb.

@Coloma Likewise, I am glad that a sprained arm is the worst of your injuries. Seems there are so many possible ways to do something klutzy that it hardly bares making a list.

I backed into a fence post today in my driveway, no damage to my car or the post.
I have had a lot of accidents right in my own driveway. LOL

@Coloma : Welome to the I-only-park-where-I-don’t-have-to-back-in Club. You will find lots of friends, both here and elsewhere.

So many members of the local food coop are of “a certain age” that the telephone poles in the parking lot are surrounded by hay bales.

@gailcalled
Haha, hay bales, maybe I should line my driveway with them, bumper cars.