Monthly Archives: January 2005

Re: my previous post, I still have the summons from last time! |/|/007!!1

It is from her lawyer, who has an email address at aol.com (scoff away).

<snip>
…
Re: [Lady's surname] vs. Solow
D/A: 4/8/2003
Our File Number: 204145

Dear Mr. and Ms. Solow:

[Our client] has consulted me for personal injuries sustained in an automobile accident in which you and she were involved on the above date.

Please turn this letter over to your automobile liability insurance company so that I may discuss this matter further with it.

…
</snip>

Since it is re: [Lady's surname] vs. Solow, that makes it a suit, right? I know there was a settlement and she got monies (this was for the anxiety attack), but according to my lawyer this means she can’t sue me again.

I’m photocopying this tomorrow, here’s hoping everything works out!

I have a lawyer. I talked to her for a while today and feel a bit less worried now- especially after the information that if this lady previously sued (which I believe she did) than it is done, and she can’t sue again. After work today I’m going to see if I still have a copy of the last summons (hopefully I do) to mail to the lawyer.

The lawyer said that I may have to give a deposition, or appear in court, but that that won’t be for at least a year from now. Until then, she is going to be busy getting her own doctors to look at the lady and such.

She also said that it is unlikely I will have to pay anything out of my own pocket… here’s hoping that’s the case. Apparently it is common practice to ask for more than you could ever actually hope to get when you sue someone, because regardless of if you win more than you ask, you only get what you asked for.

Apparently it is also relatively common to sue for everyday accidents like these nowadays. *sigh*

I got my rat today. I’m not positive what I’m going to name him, but right now I’m leaning towards Salacious Crumb (‘Sal’, or ‘Crumb’) for short.

No picture yet, but I’ll probably take one at some point when it will be less traumatic to do so.

I impulsively bought The Minish Cap the other day, and I’ve come to the following conclusion: the gameboy advance is a zillion times cooler than any other system Nintendo has made in the last decade, and is surpassed only by the Super Nintendo for all-time coolness. Oh, and Zelda is best when it sticks to its top-down perspective roots.

After the whole Windwaker thing I’d been about ready to give up on the Zelda franchise, but this game shows me there is still hope. Yay!

Even though the DS is large and clunky, I find myself still playing my Advance games on it, if only because the sound quality rocks (not to mention the sane headphone jack).

In other news, I really need to see an allergist- I had dinner at Moosewood last night and something in my food made my lip swell up. Again. I think it was the bread crumbs on my Tilapia (see, I’m not really a vegetarian yet!), which was likely from some multi-grain bread concoction. Last time I ordered bread at Moosewood, my throat got tight (though that didn’t happen last night), so it stands to reason that I’m allergic to some grain(s).

Eating new things is kinda like playing russian roulette, sometimes :)

Oh, and Ubuntu on minips1 is working much better now after compiling my own kernel and going back to APM, and fixing a snafu in the locale I had set (I had utf8 instead of UTF-8, which is the way I have to specify it on my gentoo box).

Anyway, gotta go tend to Beth‘s dog- toodles.

Thanks everyone, for the support regarding my previous post. I’ve gotten a lot of advice and such, but I think I’m going to take my dad’s advice – try not to worry about it (fat chance) and let whatever happens happen. It’s not like I’m going to be able to change anything anyway.

I figure that my real worst case scenario is that I have to go back down to NJ for a day or so in court, and if the jury decides that she deserves an exorbitant amount of money, I’ll just claim bankruptcy (since I’ll probably never ba able to pay that much anyway) and she simply won’t get her money. Since I never planned on buying a house or anything, I don’t see this as being that horrible a possibility. It’s better than having a lien on my salary forever, IMHO.

In completely unrelated news, I’ve installed Ubuntu on minips1‘s replacement drive (which came in yesterday). I’m kinda cheating since I decided that the packages in Ubuntu were too old, so I added debian unstable to my sources.list and upgraded the whole thing to that. It’s still a little too non-bleeding edge for me (I’m used to Gentoo, afterall), but I think it may do. I was really surprised with the quality of the hardware detection during the install, and likewise, the lack of questions asked (I think there were only about 3). I’m not so sure this is really a good thing, ‘cuz I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to my computers, but I’m giving it a shot anyway. A few things still aren’t working properly (dhcpcd doesn’t update resolv.conf [though I told it to], xterms don’t default to utf-8 [though I set that to the default locale], acpi won’t suspend [though it does detect events] and the apm module won’t load ["No such device"?], etc.), but I’ll work on it more tomorrow.

For now though, I think I’ll just go to bed. I’m feeling a bit drained- maybe it’s the insanity that has been thrust upon me recently, or maybe it’s the new mostly-vegetarian diet I’m trying (which I also haven’t blogged, but there’s not much to say about it). Maybe it’s both. Who knows.

Mood: resigned

I thought I blogged this before, but I suppose not. A week or so ago I found out that my dad and I are getting sued (again) for that fender bender I got in nearly two years ago.

Today I found out how much we are getting sued for – $1,000,000 (one million US dollars). We are insured for nowhere near that amount. I also found out the injuries we’re getting sued for – (1) a sprained shoulder, (2) a sprained knee, (3) some shoulder joint thing which I can’t recall the name of.

My dad’s theory is that this woman thinks that he (H. Solow) is actually Herbert F. Solow, who was the executive producer for the original Star Trek series, and also most likely a millionaire. My dad believes this because shortly before the summons arrived he was recieving a few calls a day looking for ‘Herbert F. Solow’, and only after my dad insisted that nobody by that name lived there did the summons arrive. To the best of my knowledge, there is actually no relation between he and us.

Bah.

Also, the woman is insisting on trial by jury, and my dad believes that this will end up like the $2.7 million dollar hot coffee fiasco.

Double bah.

My dad isn’t going to move up to Ithaca now until all of this has blown over, for fear of building his dream house only to have it taken away after a few months. He said that the worst that will probably happen to me is that my salary will be on lien for the rest of my life.

Shit. Kinda makes life a lot less appealing if it’s all written out for me until I die a bitter, destitute old woman, ne?

I think I’m never going to drive again. You get in a simple accident, the kind that happens every hour or so to someone, somewhere, and you end up screwed forever (you probably won’t, actually, but I might). Or at least having to put up with a lot of crap. The risk just isn’t worth it (besides it also being expensive and bad for the environment). Crap.

I think I’m gonna go drown my sorrows in my own (well, a lot of people’s, actually) fantasy realm.

Mood: worried

If this keeps happening, I’m going to start thinking it may actually be me.

minips1‘s hard drive is borked. Again.

Looks like tomorrow at work I’ll be livin’ on Knoppix, not to mention calling IBM for a new drive.

I think I’ll give this Ubuntu thing a try this time around, being that everyone else at work is using Debian, and I want to try something new, yet compatible (and not to mention fast to install).

Some Amazon reviews are really quite entertaining, like this one for a mug warmer:

WOOO HOOO LOVE THIS ITEM!, January 7, 2004
I love to sit at my computer and drink JAVA while I work on my newsletter and website. I am constantly thru out the day running back & forth to the microwave to reheat my coffee cup, NOT ANY MORE this is a GREAT ITEM! I just hooked it up today and am LOVING IT! 5 STARS from me!

It would be really interesting to create a compilation of some of the best Amazon reviews.

I’m back home again, and there is lots of snow over here now (regardless of my cold feet, this is a good thing, IMHO) :)

The plane rides back today were markedly better than last time (probably because there were only two planes this time instead of three so things seemed to go by much faster) save for the little kid who kept standing next to me in the aisle on the long flight and leaning across me to trade GBA games with the people next to me. That was annoying- I’d be reading my book, and suddenly there would be a small child between me and the page. Grr.

At least my luggage (which I checked this time) arrived at the same time in Syracuse that I did- that makes things much easier :)

After getting back to Ithaca, we grabbed happicow and went over to Aladdin’s, which is a restaurant here in Ithaca, where we met Rob’s girlfriend. Previously I had been under the impression that this was an Indian place (the name, maybe?) but it turns out that it was really something quite different entirely, which likely contributed to my opinion of the food being alright.

Now I should be sleeping but instead I’m doing stuff like upgrading/posting in my blog, and posting pictures from my trip. Go fig.

Today Beth, Rob, and I met up with Sax at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, and then did some other stuff.

First, the museum- I’m probably pretty spoiled for musuems, being that the majority of my museum-going experience involves the New York Museum of Natural History, and most of the rest of it involvee the Carnegie Museum. Regardless, the San Diego Museum of Natural History is really lame. They have like, one dinosaur and an exhibit about fire which mainly consists of “Fire+civilization is bad, mmmkay?”. Sure, it was topical, but that really doesn’t make it any less lame. We definitely should have gone to the zoo instead…

After the zoo we went over to the beach&boardwalk, so that I could see the pacific ocean (I did, and I stood in it, too). We also got to play a little bit of DDR, which I seem to be amazingly bad at now (unsurprising, being that I haven’t played it in about a year in an arcade, but still depressing), and I “broke” and had to pay for a crummy shot glass in a crummy boardwalk store. I say “broke” because I don’t remember actually touching the thing, but whatever…

Then we went over to a Mexican place that Sax recommended, and I got a burrito that seemed to be mostly chicken soup in a tortilla. I also got french fries, which makes me cool (for ordering fries in a Mexican restaurant).

Now we’re chillin’ in our hotel room, getting Beth drunk. Rob (after doing some very impressive Bruce Campbell imitations) called it an early night (after we got him trashed last night). He’s definitely got the right idea, seeing as we’re gonna have to get up around 5:30 in order to get to our plane in time… but oh well.

Hopefully I’ll be back in Ithaca tomorrow, but that all depends on the weather, apparently…

I’ll get pictures from this week up whenever I do get home.