You Get a Really Epic/Horrible Story To Make Up For My Absence

You know how life keeps kind of chugging along, and things happen and you think, "It'd be really nice if I blogged about this," but then a week passes and then three and you still want to talk about that thing, but then more things happened between then and now and you want to talk about those things too, and then it just gets so overwhelming that you just abandon ship so you don't have to think about it?

I'm really easily overwhelmed. I've been so overwhelmed for weeks and weeks. But I need to get some of these stories written down so I don't forget them.

Stories like how I threw my sister a bridal shower and how we visited a bunch of new places (Virginia Beach! the Biltmore! Williamsburg!) and how I turned 28 and how our families came to visit on several different occasions over the past few months.

(Oh, and only the most terrifically traumatic story.)

But despite my brief note-taking and photo-snapping, enough time has passed since some of those events occurred that I don't really feel like recapping entire trips. So instead, I think I'll just share a story or two from each over the next few posts.

Starting with this one.

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My friend Chelsea and I were driving to book club. It was being hosted up near Roanoke, way up in the mountains (and not really that close to the city at all). We were so, so late because traffic on the main highway had been completely stopped for almost an hour.

So we finally get out of traffic and exit the main highway, and start weaving through the mountains on one of those little two-lane highways. We're coming around a curve and this THING comes running into the street. A black, German-Shepherd-sized thing.

It was a bear.

Now, I had heard that there were bears in this area, but I had never seen a bear in real life before. When I learned that there were bears, I really wanted to see one for myself.

Well, I saw the bear all right.

Right before I ran it over.

I slammed on my brakes, but I wasn't fast enough. It went under one of my truck tires.

Thankfully I saw it get up and run right off the road, limping a bit, in my rearview mirror. Because it's not like you can get out and make sure the bear is okay. It's a freakin' BEAR.

We were horrified. I asked Chelsea if there was any way that I could have possibly seen the bear and avoided hitting it, and she said she didn't think so, that it came out of nowhere. But I still cried when we got to book club after the shock wore off. I hit a baby bear!

Matt says the bear is probably okay. (He once ran over a dog in our neighborhood in Texas, and it lived to continue chasing cars for many years.) I'm hoping he's right.

A month has passed since this happened. My book club has since met again, and it turns out the ladies in that club really love telling people the story of how the vegetarian ran over a bear.

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I don't have a good question. Anything I could ask after that story would just be too gruesome. So I guess, if you have a story to make me feel like a less horrible person? That would be great. Or just any story about something that's happened to you lately. I've missed you.