Current mood:	strange days indeed
Entry tags:	life

my morning commute
I've mentioned in the past that I've got a 52 mile round-trip commute every day (thanks to having to drop my kids off all over the place) which goes home-school-daycare-work, work-daycare-school-home. Unlike when I lived near Boston and most of my time was spent being stuck in a bumper-to-bumper borderline-road-rage traffic hell, my current commute is very scenic and mellow. Near as I can figure I drive by at least six different kinds of cows every day, seven when I go to the chiropractor and drive by the bison farm.

So, really, my commute is more like:
home
hills
farm fields
woodsy river with small mountains
farm fields w/ belted galloways
woodsy hills
big pretty pond
school
big pretty pond again
woodsy twisty road
random brownish fuzzy cows
more woodsy road
field
little town center
big fields
malls
big fields
jerseys on the right
large black cows that aren't angus on the left
angry big white tom turkey, sometimes in the road
chickens
rolling hills with distant mountains
rolling hills and fields
some kind of all-black-but-white-face-cows
more fields
holsteins
fields
more holsteins
sheep and goats
large plow horses (Belgians, someone told me.)
daycare
...turn around, pass the above in reverse past the malls, then:
big fields
reg'lar horses
many sheep and one vicuña
more jerseys
work

Despite doing lots of driving, it's a really nice, mellow, sort of zen trip. There's a total of three traffic lights and one four-way stop, though I go through them more than once.

It takes me about 12 min to get from home to the big kid's school, 25 from there to daycare, and 15 from there back to work. Today, though, it took me two hours.

Because, despite having no plans to do so, I stopped for nearly an hour by the side of the road.

Here's why:

I'm never gonna use the phrase "have a cow" quite the same way again.

By the time the calf was born about a dozen cars had also stopped and we all watched together. One woman who I ended up chatting with a bit was a labor & delivery nurse, so we were both cheering on the cow: "C'mon, breathe! You can do it! Now push!"

Within about 10 minutes of being born the calf was making a concerted, if ungainly, attempt to stand. Although I didn't get a good glance, it appeared to be a boy cow. I figure a boy cow ain't much use on a dairy farm, and tried very hard not to think about that all day, but really, I can't escape the thought that he's probably destined to be veal on someone's plate. I haven't touched veal since the day I found out what it was, but man, now I'm not even sure I can eat cows again. I saw one being born, man. So cool, so inescapable how they're intelligent creatures. Remains to be seen, I guess.

(Chickens I still have no problem eating. I've met pebbles that're closer to sentience.)

I did ponder the practicality of finding the farmers and offering to buy the baby cow so he wouldn't get eaten, but then in very little time I'd have a *bull* in my not-so-large backyard which probably wouldn't be smart for many, many reasons. I need a farm, I guess. Or I need a friend with a farm who needs a boy-cow.


Anyhow, that was today's commute. And when I picked up the big kid from school this afternoon, she had a bucket of rescued tadpoles with her from a nearly dried-up pond, so there may be some emergency home pond construction happening this summer. Anyone want to help?

---
ETA: and I'm once again grateful to llcoolvad for the suggestion that one should always carry one's camera, no matter how uninteresting one expects the day to be, because you just never know.