BLOODY RENTAL CARS

I'm back in LA (since November 25).

The day after Thanksgiving, I caught a flight back to Los Angeles from Baltimore-Washington Airport, landing safely at LAX. So far, so good. I caught the Avis shuttle to the Avis lot to pick up my rental car (the cheapest available) and set out to do some errands near the airport before heading back to my Los Feliz apartment. (This is Ann's old neighborhood, where I lived from January-March, so it's very familiar territory.)

It was at the parking lot by the Bank of America ATM machine that I opened the trunk of my car looking for something in my luggagge and banged my right hand against the top of the trunk. A minor inconvenience. Then I noticed these odd, sticky drops on things - like an orange juice cup was leaking out the bottom. Strange, I thought. Examining the drops, I realized they were blood. And the drops were coming from my own hand!

I didn't feel anything, really, but it was extremely inconvenient to be stuck far from home with a very productive wound (it must have gashed some major vein in the top of my hand). I wrapped an handkerchief around my hand and tried to drive home, but got about five minutes away when the rag itself was soaked. Uh oh. I stopped at a nearby Target to pick up some bandaids and Bactine to do a little first aid on my own. I must have looked like some drunk who had stumbled or a gang member fresh from a fist fight as I walked around the aisles full of Target Christmas shoppers! When cleaned up in the men's room, the wound looked like any normal 1/2'' cut, maybe just a bit deeper than usual.

The rental car must seem a bit puzzling to you reading this. "Paul has his own car, doesn't he?" you're probably asking. Well, yes, but due to a fender-bender back in October (an SUV backed into my stopped car at about 20 mph), my Infiniti was in a body shop in Glendale over the time of my East Coast trip (a convenient time to leave it for a week or so). Instead of paying about $10 a day for parking fees at LAX while I was gone the ten days ($100 plus dollars on top of the cost of my airline ticket), I killed two birds with one stone by getting a rental car both to the airport on Nov. 14 and another when I returned Nov. 25. Because the rentals were all covered by my AAA auto insurance (while my car was in the body shop), I essentially paid nothing for the rentals - and nothing for airport parking! (Dad would have been proud! :-) Not to mention paying no hotel bills during my time out east by staying with friends every night. (Hey, I'm in a job-hunt phase at the moment!) Oh, and the conference expenses plus meals are all tax deductions for 2005!

With the 4,000-plus frequent flier miles on United for the trip, I should now have accumulated over 25,000 miles total, enough for a free United ticket somewhere else. All in all (except for the bloody hand), a fairly economical vacation/business trip!