Katie and I are going to school this morning. We haven’t been to school in two weeks.
Can we go NOW Mama?
She is excited.
Next Saturday we have a Rally trial. Katie says she doesn’t remember how to spell Rally much less sit with precision.
Mama says we got a lot of learnin to do!
Trucking issues are once again flooding my mind. The work to make our highways safer ebbs and flows in my life. Sometimes I can push it away and fool myself into believing that my life is what it was before 2004. Sometimes truck issues seem to be everywhere I look. This week I am overwhelmed with trucks.
Of course some of these feelings may be because Thanksgiving weekend eight years ago was the last time I saw my Dad. Spending time with family in his home was poignant and brought my awareness of trucks into sharp focus again. But there’s been more this week to make me focus on the truck issue once again.
A beloved father, whose wife was killed by a tired trucker in much the same way Dad was, and whose two sons were severely injured, is facing his second set of major holidays without her. The realization of his new normal has begun to hit. He’s finally got the boys settled and though the constant care of one of them consumes his days, he has just begun his own painful grief process over the loss of his wife and their life together. I’ve seen his pain emerge this week, and it hurts to watch. I wish I could make it all better for him. But I can’t fix it.
Yesterday my commute to work was extra long due to a tankard truck flipped over on one side of the freeway, and a couple of miles further, a double bottomed gravel hauler that had gone off the road on the other side of the freeway. The slow snarled traffic gave me lots of time to think about what may have caused these incidents. Turns out the tankard truck carried something very bad. Hazard material crews were on the scene when I went by at 7 a.m. and they were still there when I went home again at 6:300 p.m. Turns out the driver fell asleep while driving this dangerous load at 5:00 a.m. No one died, but the cleanup is enormous.
This morning I turned on the news and saw the screen glowing with a fire on another local freeway. A semi hit a Ford Focus, then bounced over the median, breaking apart and bursting into flames. They say the driver may have fallen asleep. Luckily no one died, and the semi driver only broke an ankle.
Falling asleep while driving is a problem of huge proportions. Not just for the drivers of commercial vehicles, but for all of us. These recent local incidents are just a few of the crashes that are occurring all across the country every single day. These two didn’t kill anyone but across the country today an average 11 people will die and another 200 will be injured. This morning my local news is full of the consequences on rush hour traffic, the spectacular fire video as if that were the only effect on the general public. I am silently screaming at the reporter to wake up and see that the consequences of these crashes are much greater than a closed freeway. Screaming that this time we were lucky.
This morning a family that owns a Ford Focus is counting themselves lucky. But more of us should recognize that we’re all lucky every time we make it to our destination safely. The odds are that sometime somewhere one of us will find ourselves tangled up with a commercial vehicle. And that we probably won’t be lucky. Please stay vigilant. Stay away from these large vehicles that share our road. Be careful.
Be safe.
Early morning at the lake.
I am back from four days ‘away’ and it feels like I was gone a week. That’s a good thing.
It’s hard to describe what it’s like to go from stressful work filled ‘here’ to sunny shiny watered ‘there.’ (Click the photos to see the details.)
Calm
There is always the underlying sadness that very special people are no longer there. But still it was very good to be South.
Magical
We visited wonderful places, ate wonderful food, played wonderful music and slept until we woke up.
Yum
I couldn’t ask for more. Except to have Mom and Dad there too.
Missing
Katie says: “Happy Thanksgiving to all our blogging friends and family! In the spirit of the holiday I will share with you my latest gift, for which I am thankful!”
It’s my Frosty Dog from Katybeth!
“Well…not share exactly. A princess does not share.
But you can enjoy me enjoying it if you like.”
It’s MY pink pig too. Just saying.
Sunday I cleaned – cleaned lots of stuff, including the front of the dishwasher, removing drips and fingerprints, dried on stuff of undetermined origin.
Monday night I got home from work and found this.
Katie says she is not responsible. But if she didn’t do it that only leaves husband. Who was, admittedly very hungry when I got home.
Still…
We spent the weekend working on projects around the house, taking care of a neighbor’s cat while they were out of town and taking advantage of unseasonably warm weather to put up outdoor Christmas lights.
It was nice.
Early morning peace.
This weekend was the calm before the holiday storm. Crazy people are camping outside retails stores to be the first shoppers on Black Friday…and some stores are even opening on Thanksgiving night. As usual I will not be in those lines, nor shopping for things no one needs. I’ll be spending next weekend with siblings; goofing off, cooking, taking walks up mountains, pictures and naps.
If you’re spending next Friday shopping for stuff….well…enjoy. To each his own.
And I do appreciate your efforts to turn our economy around. Yes I do.
I went out on a cold rainy grey November day to find something for Scott’s color composition challenge. The day before had been warm and sunny but I didn’t venture out with the camera. Too obvious and too sensible.
One of the articles Scott provided for reference talked about the meaning of color, how you can sometimes use color to set a mood for a photo. I guess I’ve been feeling kind of sad that the summer has ended and winter is right around the corner, because every bit of color I found that day was blue. I’m not saying that the blue in each photo set the mood for the photo…just that it was what I noticed on this day. (Click on the picture to see the details.)
My first stop was at a historic church. I pass this church every Tuesday on my to and from band rehearsal and I’ve never noticed it. At our last rehearsal I saw with shock that someone had painted the front door and knew I had to come back with a camera.
The color composition challenge was a perfect excuse to stop and get that shot. I started out focusing on the door itself, then tried to get the steeple and the door in the frame. But as I walked back to the car I looked back and knew the whole church needed to be included – because the transformation of the door only worked when it was shown against the disrepair of the entire building. I placed the door near the intersection of the rule of thirds lines.
Historic Presbyterian Church gets a small facelift.
Continuing on with my errands I passed an old schoolhouse that has been painted many many times. Long after the last schoolchild left it was run as a restaurant and catering business, but that closed years ago and now it sits empty. Through the rain I noticed the bell tower with it’s multiple layers of paint showing a bit of it’s history. Again the blue caught my eye, and I tried to have it take up 2/3rds of the image.
Years of schoolhouse colors.
And as I made my way home I noticed the local ski hill. No snow yet, but there was more blue. I had to climb down a muddy hill and ruined a pair of shoes to get this. But I really enjoyed the way the blue ski lift moves from the lower left and climbs up to the upper right of the shot, reflecting the angle of the hill.
Ready for the ski season.
Yep, it was a blue kind of day. But I can’t say that was all due to fall moving into winter. After all I found this blue last spring at my local nursery.
Blue pots
Change Is Hard 