Thankful the Rooster Crows

We live near some farms, vineyards mostly. Some of them have roosters. Unlike how they are portrayed in cartoons, roosters do NOT wake up just before dawn, quietly clear their throats, take a deep breath, and then let out one loud glorious er--er-er--er-ERRRRR just as the sun first drips over the horizon. No,roosters actually start before dawn and crow and crow for quite a while after the sun is up. This is especially true if there is more than one rooster, because then they do a little back and forth deal between them.

I was on the front porch early this foggy morning listening to the roosters and smelling the air since it rained last night. Just as I began to think about what I might do to the roosters if I had a BB gun and a clear line of sight between me and them, my mind wandered again. I thought about that fact that there have been farms with roosters for a long time. Even a hundred years ago. Then I realized that a hundred years ago was 1908, and that didn't seem so long ago. But there were roosters on farms 200 years ago, too. And all this time, those roosters have been crowing. And during bad times, maybe people were glad to hear the rooster crowing because it meant that nobody had to eat the rooster, and the rooster hadn't starved.

Then all of a sudden the crowing sounded just as nice as the air smelled. So I sat a little while longer on the porch in front of the house I get to call mine, even though Wells Fargo really owns it. And I listened and breathed in and out.

Then automatic sprinklers came on simultaneously at three nearby houses because people didn't reset their timers after a recent power outage, so I got up and went inside.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Temptation is All Around Us

I've started looking into why roadside cleanup crews don't have proper protection from injury, and I found this in a document about Adopt-A-Highway cleanup crew safety.

"Sometimes people use unclosed, recyclable
containers for urine disposal. If your group
takes home recyclable items for redemption,
please use extra caution. Resist the temptation
to empty containers of unknown liquids."

Oh. I'll try.

Weed Whackers and Fence Fixers

I was driving on Highway 4 and came along a crew of people on the left side whacking weeds. I've seen similar crews, although they are usually picking up trash on the side of the road. They are not CalTrans employees. And, as I have before, I wondered why these people are a few feet away from my speeding car (65 MPH max., of course) with just a van and a port-o-potty between us. I have heard that many of these crews are made up of people who got busted for things like DUI. Does that mean officials figure it would serve them right if they got hit by a drunk driver? This has been bugging me lately.

Compare this to official CalTrans workers. They usually have a mile of cones, flares and flashing signs preceding their work area, which is surrounded by M1A1 Army tanks, painted orange of course.

I am NOT saying that CalTrans workers should have less protection. Some of them still get killed out there, so whatever they need for safety they should get. But why don't the cleanup crews have protection?

Then - I kid you not - about 4 miles down the road I saw an honest-to-goodness CalTrans crew. Actually, I could barely see the crew because of the vehicles in the way.
That's four big trucks on the side of the road. You can't tell from the picture, but the road drops off on that side, and down in the embankment there is another CalTrans truck which is near the chain link fence you can see in the distance. The fence is 20-30 yards from the side of the road. There are two guys finishing a job where they were patching about a 40 foot section of the chain link fence. The truck near the fence probably carried the two guys, the fence material, and all of the tools they needed to fix the fence. Did I mention that the fence is down an embankment and pretty far from the road?

So two guys were needed to fix a fence that is yards from the highway. Naturally, five huge trucks are dispatched to take care of the job.

At the same time, some weeds that are about a car's length from the highway supposedly need to be cut. So some people who maybe took a 20-minute safety class - which probably consisted of watching a video and trying to pick the least gnarly hardhat and orange vest from a box - are sent out to RISK THEIR LIVES doing what a CalTrans crew could do with one of those giant lawnmower attachments I've seen them use on their trucks.

I'm going to look into this.

Halloween is Over

Well Halloween came and went pretty quickly around here. We have a few empty houses in the neighborhood, and some neighbors just weren't home. As usual, I stayed home to give out candy while Blythe and the kids went trick-or-treating. I would estimate we had fewer than 50 kids come all night, which is not many for our neighborhood. We have lots of young families, and plenty of houses in easy walking distance, so we used to get closer to 100 kids.

Halloween seems to be changing. There are more parties and less trick-or-treating. When I realized that, I at first expected to be bummed about the change. But I realized that the door to door begging is really odd anyway. The costumes, and of course the candy, still show up so it's not like the whole tradition is disappearing.

We did have a woman who I've never seen before show up at the door with a stroller containing a sound asleep baby. After she knocked and I opened the door, she held out a plastic pumpkin bucket without a word. I hope I didn't make too much noise when I dropped the candy in the bucket. No, I wasn't worried about waking the baby. She was on her cell phone. I think everything was OK, though. After I dropped the candy in the bucket she laughed into the phone and turned away without even looking at me. Whew, that was close.