Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Alone, But Not Really

The baby is on the floor, looking up at me and kicking his feet on the floor. Bonk. bonk, bonk. The fish tank is making it's "I'm peeing" sound and the computer is humming. Otherwise, the house is totally quiet now because I am home alone. I would go to the park, or the library or just for a drive. But the car is with H-Man and H-Man is up in the mountains working.
I'm thinking about mountains and how people used to consider them little more than large, dangerous warts on the surface of the earth. This was before modern vehicles and Sir Edmund Hillary, apparently.
When we were in New Zealand we were walking around Castle Hill, a place where giant bare rocks jut out of the earth. A little boy cam running up the hill and shouted "I'm Sir Edmund Hillary" and started to climb the rocks. What do kids say in America? "I'm Neil Armstrong"? I kind of doubt it.
I watched "The Right Stuff" not too long ago. Interesting how the space race was the most interesting and exciting thing in the world at that time, and today very few people care about or think about space travel. It was a good movie. I really enjoyed it, even though it had Dennis Quaid in it.
I was driving this morning and pulled up the stop sign at the bottom of our street. There was a sign there it said "Wait here for Pilot Car" So I waited, but there was no one around. No construction workers, not car, nothing. So I turned right, without this alleged pilot car , and pulled up to the stop light 100 yards are so away. There was a construction worker there, holding a slow sign in the middle of the street. He shouted at me "You need to wait for the Pilot Car at that stop sign" I responded "Where was the pilot car, I didn't see anything!" and he said "you just have to wait for it. But you can go now" I looked at the cross traffic speeding past and looked at him and said "the light is red and there are cars going, how can I go now?" and he said "you need to wait for the light to turn green" I considered suggesting that they could have hired a traffic cone to do his job of holding a slow sign and spouting ridiculousness, but since I'm not too clear on the union guidelines of traffic cones, I kept my mouth shut.