It's been an exciting week around here.  Most importantly, Maggie and I have sold our apartment and bought a house!  Yup, after more than 8 years at our current place, we will finally be moving into a house. We'll only be moving about 3 miles away, so it's not a big move.  But it is definitely something that we've been wanting to do.  With Jillian getting older -- and being oh so close to walking -- we wanted to get our own place with our own yard where she can run around.

Our closing date isn't quite set yet, but it looks like it will be the first week of September.  We really like this house, and it's in a great location, close to our church and a park and the local schools.  This is New Jersey, so of course it wasn't cheap.  But we think we got a decent deal.  We're both very excited about it.

Speaking of our apartment, we had a bit of excitement here over the weekend.  Early Sunday morning, we were woken up by a bright flash of lightning and loud boom of thunder at the exact same time.  Of course, this indicated that the lightning was extremely close.  But we didn't realize just how close until we got up for good.  The lightning actually hit the chimney of our apartment building!  This caused a bit of an explosion of bricks, which rained down on the cars that were parked underneath.  Three cars were heavily damaged, and our driveway had to be closed so that the rest of the now-teetering chimney could be dismantled.  This is not something you see every day.

The last bit of excitement from the weekend occured during my run on Saturday morning.  I was acutally struck by a car that rolled thru a stop sign.  I was on a main road, running along the side of the street facing traffic -- which is the proper side for a pedestrian.  The car was approaching on a side street, ahead and to my left.  The guy was intending to make a right turn onto the street that I was coming from. As he approached the intersection, all he bothered to do was look to his to make sure that no cars were coming from that direction.  When he saw none, he rolled right on thru the stop sign without ever looking to his right.  And thus he rolled right into me and knocked me over.  Yes, I was actually hit by the car!  Luckily he was going very slowly, so there was no harm done.  But it could easily have been a lot worse.

And this is not the first time this type of thing has happened to me.  In fact, this is my fourth such encounter (or near-encounter) in the last 12 months.  Is it just New Jersey drivers who make so many careless right turns?  Or does it happen everywhere?  No matter what, I implore anybody reading this to please be careful out there.  As a pedestrian, you must expect that drivers don't see you.  And as a driver, please look BOTH ways before going thru a stop sign or making a right turn on red.  Thank you.