I was in the upstairs bathroom at my parents’ place which had a skylight you could open. I did, and half of a hornet’s nest fell from it. I slammed the window shut as quick as I could and then looked down. The other half was floating in the toilet with the hornets momentarily dazed. I closed the lid and flushed. When I peeked under the lid, it was gone.

6 years ago, I had a hard time sleeping and felt “weird”, so I thought my blood sugar was low. I picked up my glucometer and on the way to the living room, I dropped it 3 or 4 times. I’m fairly clumsy and I was tired, so I didn’t think much of it.

When I got to the living room and tested, my sugar was normal and I said “Well, it’s not low blood sugar” out loud to myself and heard the awful slurring. I knew it was a stroke. In the 2 minutes it took me to stumble out of the bedroom, I had progressed to having to hold myself up as I went back to the bedroom to have my wife call 911. Before the paramedics got there, I was almost completely paralyzed on my right side. In the ambulance, I was paralyzed on that side.

Luckily, the hospital nearest me is known for its great stroke response and had a portable CT scanner so they could rule out a hemorrhagic stroke, which meant they could give me the clot-buster drug, TPA. I walked out of the hospital 2 1/2 days later at about 95% of where I was before the stroke. My deficits are very minor and if you didn’t know, you’d never think I was a stroke survivor.

I went to work for a company in an entry-level, unskilled position. That company had a mentality of hiring from within and training for positions rather than hiring qualified external candidates. Because of that company, I managed to develop a career and am currently making over 6 times what I was earning when I started there 12 years ago. I’m no longer at the same company, but I am incredibly grateful for how lucky I was for things to fall into place the way they did.

My wife cheated on me. That was lucky because, when her family found out, she was humiliated, and didn’t demand that I sell the house to give her half, she just walked away. Had she not cheated, and just divorced me, I likely would have been forced to sell the house at the bottom of the market. We would have each gotten less than $10,000.

Now, the mortgage is nearly paid off, and the house is worth three times what it was when we divorced.

I met one of my now closest friends at the end of a Halloween party just as things were shutting down and everyone was leaving.

As she was walking by, she randomly announced that she was going to see a band next week. One that I had already bought tickets for. We talked briefly and exchanged numbers. We saw the band together and hung out a few more times but I think after the third time we hung out, we knew we were best friends.

We both weren’t even supposed to go to that Halloween party. Both of us had very different plans and somehow ended up at the party as something to do. The timing for us to meet was just so tiny and it doesn’t even feel real sometimes.

I was working on my car and had one of the springs out tightened down with a spring compressor. I stupidly had it stood upright with my face over it. I moved out of the way momentarily and the spring compressor broke, launching the spring like four stories into the sky landing in a field next to us. Don’t know what that would’ve done to me if it hit me in the face.

My ex was having a girls night with some friends and accidentally butt dialled me while she was having sex with her ex, I could hear them clearly but she had no idea. She came home acting like everything was normal, I would never have known if it weren’t for the butt dial, dodged a bullet

Reno: I put a dollar into a penny slot, pressed two buttons, won $1700, and immediately cashed out.

With my now Partner. I almost scrolled past them online. And almost didnt massage them.

Now i saved them from homelessness and starvation. After i took tjem in and for the first time in their life got good nutritional food, they got into puberty and growthspurt at age 19 and 20.

In 2017 my mom and I took a week long trip to Iceland. It was amazing, 10/10, will go again.

However, we went on this hike up into the mountains to find this hot spring river. About halfway there I see this outcropping from the trail that overlooks the gully below. I hand my mom my phone and tell her I’m going to walk out there and to snap a picture of me. So I head out there and its cool. Not narrow or seemingly dangerous in anyway.

As I’m standing out there, a wind kicks up out of nowhere. Picks me up off the trail, feet and all. Like, I was literally weightless. It was just for a few seconds, only a few cm off the ground, but I knew it would carry me over the edge and into the gully below, and I couldn’t do anything.

Instead, it set me back on my feet and was gone as soon as it came. I walked back to my mom and thanked her and said nothing about what just happened, I didn’t want to scare her. But I stuck to the main trail after that.

I can’t really explain how unnerving it is to be weightless like that on earth, where gravity is king. I became immediately helpless. If that wind had lasted longer, I could have easily been flung over the edge without being able to do anything about it.

Exploring a city drain, and I leapt over a puddle, and mid-air I kinda saw something and ducked my head sideways. Turned out I’d leapt directly into a 30cm piece of sharp, rusty reinforcing rod that was hanging out of the ceiling and bent directly toward my eyes. I don’t really know how I avoided it, but if I hadn’t, it may well have been an instant involuntary lobotomy…

I found $360 in the street in Boston one time when I was 12 years old or so.

Found out the lower control arm on my car was barely held on with one bolt that was so loose it rattled while I drove. Had my transmission replaced and they didn’t totally button up the sub-frame after they were done. I was one hard turn away from finding out what happens when only one tire goes horizontal at highway speeds for about 3 months

Growing up, my mother was a opioid/heroin addict. My dad had divorced her, but she had joint custody and my brother and I would go visit on the weekend. There was one night where she was going to drive us to get fast food. I was 8 years old at the time. She had taken pills right before the drive and nodded off on a busy, fast moving main road. We crossed over the yellow lines and I unbuckled my seatbelt to try to get her to wake up as a tractor trailer was coming at us. We veered off the road and hit a telephone pole, missing that truck by like two seconds

I won some Tupperware at bingo in the church basement when I was nine years old.