Sometimes I find it mildly irksome that whenever I go out and get myself a nice sympathy garnering injury, someone else always goes out and one ups me. In this case, it was raining this morning and I slipped on a wet sidewalk, wrenching my knee something awful. Okaasan however out did me, getting into a minor car accident.

In full detail, how things occurred was thus: it had been drizzling since I had gotten up this morning, and so everything was damp and icky. Now, between Hikone Eki and the bike storage lot there is this stretch of sidewalk made of already rather slick tiles to begin with; with the rain added it was almost akin to ice. Right in the middle of this sidewalk there is a dip, and as I went blissfully strolling along I stepped on the downward slope, and whoops, down I went. As I started to fall I felt my knee twist in a truly unnatural way, and visions of years worth of corrective surgeries danced through my head. Then however, I was actually saved by my ten ton backpack of doom, because as I feel it yanked my center of gravity back, causing me to slip off my knee and land on my much harder to injure butt. I still twisted it something fierce and although forward and back movement is fine, trying anything lateral makes it ache all to heck and back. It seems more or less fine, and I'm going to give it a few days to heal before I start getting worried about it.

As for Okaasan, she was running errands this afternoon when another car ran a stoplight and almost sideswiped her. The whole thing was at a low enough speed so that neither car suffered much damage, and no one was seriously hurt, but Okaasan come home wearing a neck brace, which certainly looks lot more dramatic than a twisted knee, and really surprised me (especially since I'd gotten home late and was worried to find a completely empty house).

The story behind my tardiness was that simply put, I was dead on my feet today. For some reason I haven't been sleeping as well as usual this week, and on the train ride home, despite my best efforts, I fell asleep, dozing not only through Yasu, but the next two stops after it as well. When I awoke to a train station I had never seen before, after getting over my surprise and dismay, I hopped on the first train traveling in the other direction (actually a twenty minute delay).

So I was a bit more than an hour behind schedule, and quite concerned to find the lights on, but nobody home. Had there been a dinner trip that I had missed? A weekend getaway that simply couldn't be delayed to accomoate tarrying foreigners? Oh no, just a car accident.

What a relief.

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