Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

About the definitely swearword-worthy event shortly before midnight:

I'll be posting photos later. I haven't picked which ones I want to post yet, or scaled them for the web. I did spend a while this morning adjusting brightness/contrast (the itty bitty built-in flash on the digital camera really wasn't up to the task, but there's enough information in the shadows to get some detail back in GIMP or Photoshop), and a while this afternoon uploading them in batches that would fit within my disk quota, to email to the police. Sorry to take so long to get around to posting an update here.

My car runs, but not very reassuringly. I took it for a test drive after the neighbours and I finished talking to the police. At 25MPH on city streets it felt okay, but there was a vibration and I couldn't tell whether it was a problem with the car or just the Baltimore streets. After I spent a little while photographing the car that did all that damage (it wound up only a few blocks away), and talking to the owner and her kin, who were similarly upset at the person who'd taken it, I went a couple exits down on I-95 and back to get a feel for how the car does at highway speeds.

It's disconcerting.

The vibration wasn't the streets -- the car shakes badly. Other than the shaking it feels more or less okay on a straghtaway, but I have to make small corrections to the steering a lot more often than I did before, and the steering wheel doesn't point straight up when I'm going straight ahead. Curves are the scary part: it feels floaty on curves (and off-ramps), imprecise and uncertain and feels as though it's about to let go of the pavement. Keeping on the line I've chosen through the turn, which is normally so easy I don't notice I'm doing it unless I've entered the curve way the hell too fast, has become something I have to work on continuously as long as the car is on a curve. Even when I'd slowed down.

I really, really, really hope all I need to fix that problem is a front-end alignment. If the body is bent (is a '90 Accord a Unibody design? That was my guess...) or if suspension or steering parts are munged, I might be screwed.

In addition to the significant handling problems, the left marker light is smashed, about half my left front wheel cover is missing, there's unattractive crumpliness of the fender and the leading edge of the driver's door ... and unsurprisingly for damage in that area, I cannot open the door very far, making getting in and out of the car quite awkward. *grrrrrr*

But hey, the folks a few doors down have much less ugly-looking damage to their door, but the mechanism inside is so munged that they can't open their driver's side door at all ... and the cute widdle Miata owned by the music teacher next door is, well being able to open the doors is the least of his problems. Yeah, when a car becomes that much shorter than it had been, it's generally not good. When I heard the rollback arrive this afternoon I had to go watch to see whether I had guessed correctly as to whether the wheels would turn. (The left front wheel did turn as it was being winched up. The left rear did not.) I liked seeing the Miata around -- the "cute" earlier in the paragraph was not sarcasm -- but I'll be shocked if it's not declared totalled. (Heck, at 17 years old, if my car needs much more than a front-end alignment and some sheet metal straightened, it might be totalled too. It doesn't take much at that point.) The fourth victim-car got the least of it, at least visibly: that was the wagon that the Miata got pushed into, and which was in turn pushed about six feet up the street from where it had been parked. The visible damage is that the rear bumper is hanging a little crooked.

I'm still trying to figure out how the driver managed to slam the side of his car into the back of the (parallel-parked) Miata with that much force. And wondering how he escaped serious injury, with his door all staved in as far as it was.

I'm also still trying to figure out how far I trust my car. I'd been counting on getting to HCB rehearsal tonight. If I'd managed to make it to 3LF last night like I'd planned (I ran out of spoons while I was getting ready to go, and wound up crawling into bed instead), then I would've headed down to see anniemal afterward and my car would not have been scathed. Obviously, I didn't wind up getting much rest last night anyhow. :-(

I'll give more details about the incident in a little while. I wanted to get this state-of-the-car report written up first, since folks had already been asking.