No idea what the cause is, whether it’s some unusually unfavorable juxtaposition of planets or the weather or something in the water, but there has been a rash of accidents on my commute lately. Yesterday a bus load of pensioners on the freeway managed to swerve around a road work vehicle at the last second. A second bus following the first then crashed into the vehicle, killing at least one and injuring 15, and closing down the road for hours. I listened to reports on the radio on the way home (I was driving Alpha’s Fiat Punto, which has a nice radio, as she needed my Fiat Doblo to transport a bicycle, and the radio in the Doblo hasn’t been working ever since Space and Pat didn’t come to Austria and didn’t drive it around). And I had a good opportunity to listen to the radio, because my usual street was really backed up due to another accident there involving three ambulances and another three police cars. Although it’s entirely possible that they only showed up after the accident. Car-sized outlines were spray-painted on the pavement in neon green.

This morning, there was an accident in the opposite lanes of the freeway, and a humongous jam on my side caused by people slowing down to gawk. A BMW was all crunched up in front, leading me to assume it had struck the Opel parked behind it. I nearly got rearended in the jam, which came upon us suddenly. Alpha called me on my cell phone. She was driving a few minutes behind me and so I warned her about the slowdown. She was smart enough to move over into the slow lane and as she drew up even with the accident – which now involved a hysterical woman, she said, and a police officer getting very pissed off with all the gawkers – a car slammed into the rear of the car next to her in the passing lane, which had slowed down to look.

Anyways, I made it to work without further incident, besides close encounters with two idiotic, unnecessarily aggressive drivers. Alpha was stuck in a couple more accident-caused jams. And so the day begins.