There’s actually a reason that I like to get all my driving for the day finished by noon. It obviously isn’t that I’m a go-getter hotshot morning person. It’s not that I’m more alert or awake in the wee small hours of ten or eleven o’clock in the A of the M. Nuh uh.

The real reason is that the freaks come out at noon. I used to think it was midnight when the gremlins and goblins were on the prowl, but I now firmly believe that there’s something straaaaaange about the way people drive in the early afternoon hours.

So it takes a lot to get me to leave the house at 1:00 pm. You have to order me to do it. Or you have to ask me to do it. Other than that, I’m staying home.

Today I was out after noon, and while I didn’t turn into a pumpkin, I came very close to turning into an SUV sandwich. I was driving along, on my way home from picking up D.J. plus an emergency trip to the bank, and suddenly there seemed to be a black van parked on the two-lane road directly in front of me. I couldn’t pass, because there was traffic coming at me from the other direction.

As any good defensive driver would do, I slammed on the brakes. Then I saw the white van in the driveway to my right, with its backup lights beaming at me. This one had already started to move, so I had to speed up a little to avoid being backed into. Meanwhile, the other van was now backing in my direction as well, in the middle of the street.

Needless to say, I got stopped in time and in a position where neither van could hit me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. The black van in the roadway had missed its turnoff, and it backed up just enough to swing around onto the side road. That’s when I lit out for home, before anyone else could aim two tons of steel at me. I may never leave the house before noon again. These things just don’t happen in the morning.

In case you were wondering, we have moved on from cheetahs. D.J. informed me that he now has a pet ocelot. A kitten, he said, and he’d taken it to the doctor to get a shot so it would stay a kitten. (Where do you find that doctor? That would be awesome.) He insisted that ocelots come from Australia, because all animals whose names start with “o” come from Australia. (I’m sure he thinks that Australia starts with “o”, but we didn’t get that far. That would have required me to get a word in.)

I did ask if he made that up, the Australia thing. “It’s just what I like to think,” he told me solemnly.