of black ice and NEAR-DEATH and driving and hair dye and phone calls and GAH do I need sleep.

So yesterday I drove all the way to Auburn Hills (north of Detroit) and back with some friends, to see the state finals for that drama thing I did... it's a 3-hour drive on a good day, but yesterday was NOT a good day. It had rained then snowed the night before, not much snow, but the roads were, um, shit. I went anyway, though, because other people needed me for transportation, I wanted to go, and I didn't think they'd be *that* bad...


I was planning on taking my mom's car, but it crapped out, so instead I was in my 1993 Toyota Corolla wagon -- bad car for highways, since it has a large surface area to pick up wind gusts but barely weighs anything...


Around 40 miles into the trip, cruising along at 75 mph because the roads were fine, I hit a patch of black ice and fishtailed over 3 lanes into a fairly steep, 6-foot deep ditch with a foot of soggy snow in the bottom of it.


Now, this could have been very very bad. But about 15 seconds after we go into the ditch, two tow trucks pull up alongside me. They'd been behind me on the road and saw me go off. They weren't legally allowed to pull my car out because they were from Illinois and their permits weren't valid here, but they did anyway out of, um, a lot of niceness. And they only charged me $20 for it. Glad I didn't have my mom's car, because they had a hard enough time getting mine out and hers weighs three times as much....


We kept going, and when we hit Ann Arbor the roads turned to absolute SHIT. Black ice covering them completely. It was enough to even slow Detroit drivers down to 35 - 40 mph tops (except for one semi that decided to fucking tailgate me). We counted 29 cars off the road, and a total of 15 ambulances and 32 police cars stopped at the assorted accidents. And I don't know where they found that many tow trucks. It was really bad -- and some friends of mine who took a busier route around Detroit counted over 50 accidents.


It took us a good 5 hours to get there.


Was pretty fun, anyway... hung out with Gull Lake people a lot, and some with Ann Arbor Huron people we knew from last year. Some other Lakeshore people -- Richard, Sean, and Amber -- had come up too, so I watched the last few shows with them...


The shows were pretty good -- Ann Arbor Huron did "Wit," a play about a teacher dying of cancer, which was probably the most powerful, best-acted thing I've ever seen done in Forensics competition. Holy shit. The lead actress shaved her head for the role. When she got an acting award every single person in auditorium stood up, biggest standing ovation I've ever seen... and she deserved it. Completely.


We left again at 8:00 that night, and the roads were better. However, the drivers were a zillion times worse. I was in the middle lane and got cut off by at least 2 cars every time there was merging traffic, even though there was room in the right lane for them. FUCKING STUPID DETROIT PEOPLE AND THEIR INABILITY TO DRIVE. Gaaaah. And Alaina fell asleep around Kalamazoo and then it was SO hard to stay awake. Bleh.


And yeah. Now, today. Slept a lot. Got up. Procrastinated... a lot. Dyed the part of my hair that ISN'T still black to blood red -- is nice, and it got rid of my goddamn roots. Procastinated more. Cleaned bathroom, blaaaagh. Got a phone call which lasted approximately an hour and a half... longest I've been on the phone in aaaages. Was fun, though, except I bet the guy I was talking to thought I was drunk because I kept randomly going "AAAGH! Falling over!" as I fell off my bed, and also laughing insanely as I blew up rubber gloves and shot them across my room. But then, he was making old man and pterodactyl noises, so things even out.


I'm so hyper right now. Gah. Damn sleep deprivation. Hee hee.


And now, getting bitched at by parents. That was entirely too long of an entry, anyway. Shutting up now. ^^;;