confessions of an adrenaline junkie

I've been having trouble posting & leaving comments ever since upgrading to blogger beta. So hopefully this works.

So my driving confessions, as requested...

I'll start with a little bit of background. I grew up in NJ in a family and community of fast drivers (in high school I remember being passed by a cop when I "slowed down" to 75mph on the turnpike). As I learned in my driving class the other night, I'm an adrenaline junkie. I LOVE to drive fast. I do limit my fast driving to daytime/clear weather/highway situations and I do pay close attention to everything around me and try to anticipate & avoid bad situations. Overall I do feel like I'm a good driver, just a bit faster than those around me at times.

When I was in college I was more than a bit faster...and I ended up with a few tickets to show for it. Granted two of those were on a speed-trap highway (watch out for those sneaky state police in Camaros around Binghamton, NY!).

By the time I moved down here I was driving slower, but still got a couple tickets. One of those was on a beautiful clear weekend morning. I was driving back home at 75-80mph on a straight highway - no traffic & clear weather. I had the radio turned up and was generally just enjoying the ride. Unfortunately that part of the highway it dropped down to 55 putting me at 20-25 miles over the speed limit...which just happens to be reckless driving in this state (is that true everywhere? maybe I need to move). Clueless me did not get a lawyer and had a jacka$$ judge so I walked away with a reckless on my record.

Few years later and I'm looking less & less like Speedy Gonzalez. One day on my slow commute home I did have an exchange of fingers with another driver over his rudeness (cutting aggressively across a wide merge area) & my intentions to not to let him merge back over later on. A cop happened to catch that exchange and pulled us both over and charged us with reckless. This time I got a lawyer & got it knocked down to improper driving. The other guy did not get a lawyer and ended up with a pissed off judge.

So after all of that AND the fact that I'm getting older and have a deeper sense of mortality, I am much much much MUCH more careful & conscious when I drive now. But I have that beautiful driving record to accompany me.

Anyway, several weeks ago I was heading over to meet my husband to pick out granite for our basement. It was the week after we thought our FET was cancelled & I had stopped all meds. The road I needed to take was closed, but there were no detour signs or people directing the f-ed up traffic. There were some cars cutting through a couple of cones to go over to the access road, which wasn't closed. So I follow a few cars over there and find a group of cops further down the road. They ended up pulling us all over for cutting through to the access road. I'm sure that everyone else simply got detour directions, but I was a huge smart a$$ and got a general reckless charge.

The cop started off with a bit of attitude, which I did not appreciate. I matched some of his sarcasm and got pretty fired up as it escalated. And I got REALLY pissed when he wrote it up as reckless. My lawyer said that the cop probably saw that I had prior tickets and wanted to screw me over.

I've learned in this driving class, which BTW is run by a very-cool former cop, that you really do need to "play the game". Also there really is no true justice - difficult concept for this fair-loving Libra. It ultimately is up to me vs. the cop. And I better no piss him off. I’m sure that everyone else in the world knows this – it seems so obvious. I just get so fired up sometimes that I don’t think. And I was already on edge from our cancelled cycle before the whole incident.

So this is just a BIG lesson how to control my emotions as well as to learn how to "play the game".

"You must have had a good reason to pull me over, officer"

"I'm sorry, officer"

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On a side note, I had my TSH tested again this week and it came back at 0.8. So that's good for now -- my endocrinologist prefers to keep it on the lower end because theoretically when you cycle the additional estrogen can cause it to increase.

And we should be getting our new insurance cards next week!!!! DH doesn't actually start work until Monday -- we're very impressed with the new company's benefits dept!