Hello! First a quick update: I can’t remember the last weight I announced here, so if I’m repeating myself, I apologize. I have lost 32 pounds now. Also, yesterday I did yard work again, and I was not tired at all. It actually involved bending over quite a bit, which would have absolutely killed my back before. My back did not hurt then, and does not hurt today. Yay!
Today I’m going to talk about coincidences. The idea was prompted by a story I saw today about baseball player Richie Ashburn, who in 1957 hit a woman in a face with a foul ball, then as she was being carried off the field in a stretcher, hit her again with a foul ball, this time on the knee. Read the bizarre story here.
Reading this story this morning was right on the heels of this coincidence: I was looking through old photos yesterday, and I came across some of when my family was at the filming of a Slice commercial in 1987. Just a couple hours later on Facebook, someone posted in a closed group “Do you remember when they filmed a Slice commercial in 1987?” And they included the link to the commercial. Here you go. That was weird! I, of course, shared one of the photos. Here are two:
And, this is a small one, but the other day my mom made stuffed peppers for dinner. Then, just as she finished eating, she gets a text with a photo from my brother, who also had stuffed peppers. I mean, I know that’s not much, but it was weird to us. That kind of thing actually happens ALL THE TIME in my family. Every Christmas, one of us would end up getting the same gift from two of the other four of us. It was quite the running gag, and it was a testament to just how close our family was and is.
So, all this brought to mind some bizarre — or maybe not so bizarre — coincidences that happened in the past. The first one that comes to mind is a story that weirds me out to this day. When my family was vacationing at the beach, we ran into some old neighbors who we hadn’t seen in years and years. Now, that in and of itself is bizarre enough, since my family and our old neighbors were on separate vacations several hundred miles away from our homes. The part that always gets me is that just two weeks later, the husband was killed in an accident. What are the odds that we would get to talk to these old friends, hundreds of miles from home, then one of them dies? It was a weird kick in the gut, to think about how these folks were on a vacation just two weeks before the tragedy. I was still a kid, so it really put some things in my head I hadn’t thought about before.
There was another time that some friends and I went out of town to support a friend who was running a half marathon. Well, due to a lot of problems, we ended up getting there too late to see her finish. Well, we decided to try to head back, but we had to take a ferry to get to the parking lot, and there was a massive line. So, we ate some lunch, thinking that the line would get shorter by the time we were done. We were wrong; it actually got longer. So, we walked down the road to a different spot to catch a ferry. No line! But after a few times watching ferries pass us by, we found out that it wasn’t stopping there. Two of us had to get to work, and there was no time to get back to the first line and wait. So, we decided that we would call a cab. We saw that there was a hotel right there, with cabs in the lot. So, two of us, including me, stayed where we were to wait for the cab we called, while the other two went to see if any of those cabs were available. While we were waiting, we heard shouting coming from the other two. The car of the friend we had gone to see was in the parking lot! We couldn’t even believe it. What a crazy coincidence. If it weren’t for all the crazy things that we did and that happened, we never would have been in that lot. So, we called her up and got to congratulate her in the lobby. (Bonus: The guy who we asked to take our photo didn’t understand how to use my camera, and we ended up with no photo. But the memory is so bizarre that thankfully I won’t forget it.)
Coincidences like that last one are so fun. They really scramble my brain and can make for some great memories.
Until next time!
Frazzled Daisy 