Disaster at the Drive-Thru

I rear-ended the girl in front of me at the Jack in the Box drive-thru tonight. I don’t really know how it happened, but I committed the most cliched driving faux pas ever -– I stepped on the gas instead of the brake. It all happened so fast. One minute I was rocking out to John Mellencamp and the next I was listening to the sounds of breaking glass and crunching metal. It was the battle of the Hondas. The damage was all to her Civic. My CR-V came through unscathed. We exchanged names, phone numbers and insurance information in the parking lot while our food cooled. This was a big mistake, even bigger than the accident that caused it in the first place.

A couple of months back, I constructed a fruit fly trap from a fast-food cup and a drinking straw. You pour about 1-1/2 inches of apple cider vinegar into the cup and add a few drops of dish-washing liquid, apparently to break the surface tension. The fruit flies are attracted to the vinegar, fly down the straw and drown outright or just get trapped in the cup. Either way, they are no longer milling around your bananas, peaches or grapes. I love summer fruit and this summer there was an excellent crop. I had some of the best peaches and nectarines I’ve had in ages. I also discovered mangoes and was eating them faster than I could stock up on them. There was also a horrendous fruit fly invasion. The day I made the trap there were at least a dozen flies buzzing into my face every time I entered the kitchen.

The first trap went on top of the refrigerator, next to the banana hammock. That trap worked so well, I made a second and placed it on the counter, right next to the fruit colander. That spot proved, dare I say, unfruitful, so I moved the second trap right next to the first one. Although my son kept complaining about the vinegar smell, I was so happy with the lowered fruit fly population that to me it smelled as good as my best cologne. I was also quite proud of myself. Dumping the traps was really fun too, in a gross kind of way. I was actually doing body counts and comparing the effectiveness of the McDonalds trap to that of the Burger King cup. When the wax coating on the cups started to dissolve away, and my son complained nonstop about the odor, I put them on saucers and continued my fruit fly war. Then I realized there were plastic soda cups, which worked even better.

The weather cooled down for a while in early September and I figured summer was over and the fruits and their flies were gone. Even though I’ve lived in California my entire life, I’d forgotten all about Indian Summer, which showed up a couple of weeks later. There was more fruit in the markets and likewise more flies. At that point I had thrown away all the old, yucky fruit fly traps, so it was time to make a new one. I searched the trash (come on -– only in my own apartment) for a new soda cup and the one I discovered was blue and white, with a great big breakfast sandwich on it and the words “Breakfast Served All Day.” From that point on (having verified the menu information with my son), I wanted breakfast for dinner and that’s what finally took me to Jack in the Box tonight.

I was pretty shaken up on the drive home this evening. It's hard enough just keeping two large sodas in the cup holder when I'm turning left or going over speed bumps. I know for a fact my insurance rates will go up. The darn accident probably happened because I was stressing about my finances in the first place. I haven’t had an accident in 20 years! But that stupid breakfast Ciabatta on the fruit fly trap looked so good, I just had to have it. I now know it had 713.6 calories, 35.8 grams of fat and 1731.2 milligrams of sodium. And take my word for it, they taste lousy cold.