Dumb Things From Baltimore

Went up to Bawlmer today, mostly for the Fell's Point Festival (a group of us went two years ago, but didn't see much more than the beer garden), and also to stop by Atomic Books (which I haven't been to in a few years, since it moved).

I got off to a late start, which wasn't helped when I left the house without my keys and locked myself out.

Darn.

Fortunately, I had my wallet, so I was able to use my Wegmans card to jimmy the lock.

Unfortunately, I broke my Wegmans card doing it.

Getting to Bawlmer was fairly uneventful. Really nice day, too.

Picked up a Shifty doll (one of the Happy Tree Friends) for ten bucks, among other things.

Then headed over to the festival. Parked over by Patterson Park, which is one of the few areas of Baltimore I know fairly well, due to having been to the Kinetic Sculpture Race for a couple of years.

The festival was nice. I hope the pictures will be interesting.

Oh, and I also stopped by the Sound Garden and dropped 50 bucks on used CDs and DVDs.

Coming back, I was driving back on Fleet Street. Saw a woman helping guiding her fella out of tight parallel parking space, which was nice.

Of course, while she was doing this, she was standing between the back bumper of his car and the front bumper of the car behind her, which was exceptionally stupid, unless she was trying to flatten her thighs.

Later on, on 95 South, traffic was kind of slow leading up to the 495 interchange, probably due in some part to extra beltway traffic from the [Washington football team with the racially-insensitive name] game.

I was in the 2nd from left lane, and I needed to get over one more to get on the Outer Loop (it took me a couple of years from when I first moved down hear to figure out what they meant and which way the loops went. Outer = Counterclockwise). Traffic was slow, but it had started to move more freely in the far left lane.

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but from what I heard and saw later in the rearview mirror, I think someone behind me tried to pull out from the line headed to the Outer Loop, and got clipped by a black pickup truck; I heard a plasticky-crunch and car pieces went flying by. I looked in the rear-view and saw a sedan askew across two lanes.

I'm not sure if the pickup truck stopped; I heard a traffic report on the radio later on of a single-car accident.

I would have stopped, but I wasn't involved, was already well past and the Beltway isn't exactly the best place to pull over.