This pic reminds me of something that happened on my drive home last week. At about 4 a.m. I stopped at a Denny's somewhere in CA for breakfast and lots of coffee. Hoping to make it more than another 30 minutes down the road I paid my bill and then stopped at the men's room on my way out. While standing at the urinal I heard a guy in the stall: "What'd you say??"
In an instant my mind processed it all. I hadn't said anything. I didn't even know he was in there, but he'd undoubtedly heard me come in. So, a) he was baiting me into a conversation, something I should definitely avoid, or b) he was talking on the phone.
Turns out it was b), something I realized a moment later when he said something about a drug deal his friend on the other end of the conversation had messed up.
When I opened the door (after washing my hands like my mother taught me) I stood face to face with two very tall, beefy cops and standing behind them a short, wimpy looking restaurant manager. I silently motioned toward the stall in an effort to assure them I was not the person they were looking for. The cop in front nodded and said,
"Mr. ______, it's time to come out now."
I wasn't going to hang around, just in case this (insert inappropriate figure of speech here), but as I made my way between the two cops and past the manager I heard the next few pieces of their exchange. The cops were there because he was trying to skip on his bill, he professed to have a bad bellyache, and coming out of the stall was just not possible.
Feeling particularly flush (yep, I did that on purpose) with a sense of citizenship I said to cop #2 as I walked by, "He's also talking about a drug deal."
"Thank you, sir."
When you're driving hundreds and hundreds of miles up the very boring central CA valley you'll take any small bit of excitement you can get and milk it for as long as you can.
We live 5 miles from Elmira, an unincorporated town with about 2,500 people, three businesses, and no stoplight. Another 5 miles away is Veneta, incorporated with a population of 4,500, one stoplight, and a decent group of businesses in a strip mall. But mostly things here are very rural with roads not streets, great stretches of field fencing, and gravel driveways.
And a Facebook page called Veneta Community Network that functions mostly as a combination bulletin board for posting For Sale items and a place to complain about bad drivers.
Last Saturday a woman on Sheffler Rd., one of the roads we take to get home, wrote that she surprised a mountain lion approaching her goat pen.
Note: not the first sighting in this area where we also get reports, incl. pics, of bears and coyotes.
Her post brought a flurry of responses that fall generally into two categories. The first is from people certain that a great crisis is about to happen, with perhaps a small child snatched as she waits for her school bus in the morning darkness.
The others posts are from males eagerly offering to lay in wait with a gun to shoot the beast if it shows its hulking body ever again.
Yep, this is rural life.
Pam flies into Eugene at 6 p.m. tonight. That's very good. It's too quiet and too lonely on Baker Rd. without her.
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