One Cardiac Arrest to go, please. Hold the Vascular Embolism.

What's the last thing you want to see in front of your house when you get home from a barbeque at a friends place? Writer was driving me home from a friends house* and as we rounded the corner, 2 blocks down from my house, I saw flashing lights up near it. As we got closer I realized that it was right in front of my house, and when she pulled over right behind the fire truck, I also noticed a bunch of

uniformed people standing in my driveway at the sidewalk and an ambulance in front of the fire truck. There were no hoses out, no flames coming out of my house, no smoke from a recently extinguished fire. So, I was more confused than worried about the house, but as you can imagine, that initial shock was a bit of an adrenaline rush. I walked up to one of the uniformed guys, said that I lived right here and asked what was happening. Seems a bicyclist turfed it right in my driveway. I walked back to tell Writer what was up, and that she didn't need to hang out waiting to make sure everything was alright, wondering if I was going to get sued or not. Before I got to her car, I heard one of the firemen telling the kid (20 yrs old) that he had two choices, willingly get into the ambulance or they would call the police and have them handcuff him and put him in the ambulance. This is when I first started to suspect that he may have been drinking, which makes the homeowner (me) less liable.** When I came back from saying goodbye to Writer, my neighbors were out on their lawn so I went over to see what they knew. They were actually the ones that found the kid, went to check if he was OK and called the ambulance. They also told me that he was 20, drunk as a skunk and that he had fallen before hitting the hose I had left across the sidewalk. Whew!

*Good thing because I gave a 55 year old English teacher lessons on doing Tequilla shots. We did one each, then she'd had enough. Said "Now I can say I've done a shot, don't need to do any more.", and this wasn't a drinking party so I stopped too.

** The paramedics didn't seem to be in too big a hurry, and the kid was talking to them, so he seemed to be Ok. Maybe a concussion, which is probably why they wanted to take him to the hospital.

Fire trucks and sauna baths.

I don't know about all fire trucks, but the one I pulled up next to today had it's exhaust in a really inconvenient place. Lined up perfectly with the driver's door in Old Blue, just below the window line. If Old Blue had air conditioning it would have been different. But since the air doesn't work I was driving with the windows down. The fire truck was in the left turn lane and when the light turned green for it, I was left there at the light sucking his exhaust as he took off. Now, I've driven in my friend Adele's 1974 MGB with the bad exhaust where even with the top down you're tempted to breathe through a Camel Filterless just to get some clean air. It wasn't the toxic fumes that got me, it was the 1000 F air slamming into my arm and up to my face that nearly killed me. Not like it's not hot enough out there as it is, that extra blast just turned my car into a sauna bath for 10 minutes. At least the skin grafts on my arm haven't been too painful....