Wow. Just, wow.

This WAS going to be a Random Things Thursday but it is now more of a Tsuris Thursday.

(If bad things do come in threes, I hope the lack-of-heat in my office building was Thing 1. Because then I will be done after today's issue gets fixed).

First: my youth group co-leader left a message for me yesterday afternoon to meet her and the kids at the church at 4 pm to go rake leaves. I got there a minute or two after 4. I waited a while - nobody. I thought, shoot, I was late and they left without me, so I started calling her cell phone to find out whose house they had gone to.

I didn't get anyone, but that didn't surprise me; she won't answer while she's driving and I figured she was off picking up people.

Well, I finally got through. And it sounded like there was a lot of noise and confusion in the background.

My co-leader said, "My grandson and I have been in a serious wreck! I can't reach my husband! We're out at [location]."

I managed to get out of her that neither she nor her grandson were hurt, and apparently no one in the other car was hurt. I asked her if she wanted me to come out to pick her or her grandson up. She said yes.

Luckily, there was a bank on the corner of the intersection where they had the accident so I was able to park there, safely out of the way. It was also probably lucky I didn't see their minivan until I had parked.

It was on its side.

They were going through the intersection and a pickup traveling at a high rate of speed broadsided them. The minivan went over on its side and continued to slide - from the force of the impact - through the intersection.

My co-leader and her grandson were standing, arms folded, talking to a police officer. If I didn't see them standing there I wouldn't have beleived anyone would have walked away from that wreck. (They had their seat belts on. Apparently they managed to scramble out of one of the (broken) windows after the wreck.

One complicating factor that made everything take longer was that the family driving the other truck only spoke Spanish and we had to wait for a translator. But eventually we got things cleared up, my co-leader salvaged what she could out of the totalled car, and I drove her to church with me. On the way, she managed to reach her husband and arranged with him to pick her up after youth group.

(I asked her if she just wanted to go home; I told her I could "probably" handle it for a week. But she wanted to stay and that was probably actually a better thing than sitting at home THINKING about the accident).

Her daughter pulled up as we were talking, so she picked up my co-leader's grandson (her son). She took him home and I stayed until all the paperwork was done.

And once again, I realized something: when it's a pretty serious situation, I do not seem to be given to freaking out. Well, I suppose because I knew that they were ok, that helped, but I just kind of stood there on someone's lawn, hanging back, being out of the way, but just being there for when my co-leader needed help or needed a ride or something.

So that was the big thing. The second thing, if the no-heat-Monday counts as the first. The thing this morning seems small in comparison but it's still a concern. I don't have reliable heat in my house. The "flame switch" (as best I can tell from the pattern of blinking lights) seems to stay on too long and that periodically makes the system lock itself down. It was about 62* when I got out of bed this morning. Hitting the reset switch restored the furnace's ability to heat for now, but I need to get someone out to look at it - I can't "reset" it in the middle of the night, or when I'm away at work, and especially, if it's going to be cold while I'm gone over break, I don't want my house getting cold enough that pipes might freeze and stuff.

So it's not a MAJOR thing. But still. It's still an annoyance. I left a message at the "good furnace place" (the place that finally found and fixed my problem back in 2004). They open at 8. If they don't call me by 8:10 or so I'm going to try calling them again. If they can send someone out today, my only class is at 11 so I could probably work around that. (I just hope they don't have a lot of other emergencies). That said, I do have a space heater and lots of quilts and I managed during weather nearly this cold for nearly 2 weeks in 2004.

And thinking about the sound that my co-leader's van made when they pushed it back upright so they could put it on the flatbed to haul it away makes having a tetchy furnace not seem so bad.

I have been knitting a bit; mainly working on the Barley Sugar Columns socks.