Did you know...

Want to know how to make 100 teachers scared out of their ever-loving minds? Spend 8 hours lecturing them about gang and school violence (complete with demonstrations on just how easy it is to conceal dozens of semi-automatic weapons in a pair of baggy jeans) but don't say a WORD about exactly which gangs are active at their school or what kinds of weapons the school's cop is pulling off students.

It's been a fun first day back at work.

We're starting to calm down a bit after the accident, in a segue that has absolutely nothing to do with the above observations, and I was even able to get a decent night's sleep for the first time since it happened. Hopefully that continues since the (suddenly scary) students come back to school on Monday and it's going to be a tough first few days back as they adjust to actually having to do work for the first time in two weeks.

I just hope none of them are packing heat.

PSA

We're safely home and, well, that fact is more significant than it may appear on first blush. Yesterday afternoon we had a pretty bad car accident on our way back to Salt Lake from Idaho. The roads got icy very quickly and our car rolled. We got very, very lucky and nobody was injured. The accident happened when there weren't any other cars around us and the car rolled off the shoulder (and not into oncoming traffic) in an area where there was a lot of brush and snow, so damage to the car and to us was about as minimal as it gets with a rollover. We were also all wearing seatbelts, and I've never been so thankful for a piece of fabric in my entire life.

People, wear your seatbelts. Make your kids wear their seatbelts. Make your mothers and your sisters and your friends wear their seatbelts. It doesn't matter how good a driver you are or how many times you've driven that stretch of road; an accident can happen in an instant, and frequently there's nothing you specifically do to cause it. I can't even count the number of times we've made that same drive, usually in worse weather conditions than the ones we encountered on Friday. It didn't matter--we hit ice and that was it. If we hadn't been wearing seatbelts (and Luke hadn't been strapped into his carseat) we certainly wouldn't have walked away from the crash without a scratch, and we might not have walked away at all. Wear your seatbelts.