nixtress's Diaryland Diary

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Work headlines and a summer memory.

My aunt Mag called me at 10:30 last night, freaking me out because relatively late calls from family members who are housing my Grams make me assume the worst! However, she was just calling to let me know that she was expecting the roads to be crap in the morning, hadn't any plans for today and figured that I could have this morning off. The boys are on yet another two hour delay and therefore are home till at least 10a.m. It's truly not that horrid out there. The roads look wet but not especially slick.

Headlines of our local newspaper this morning: Shooter found hanging in cell.

Explanation? In January there was a man found in the middle of a road out in our county, all shot full of holes. They caught the guy who did it (a drug deal gone wonky--the victim was beat first in a basement in Woo-town and then taken into our outskirts and shot four times) and had him incarcerated in the county jail here. Apparently they were checking on him every forty minutes or so and he hung himself via sheet minutes after his last check. Nice.

That combined with yesterday's headlines (Deputy arrested in insurance fraud! He reported $4000 worth of belongings stolen, then sold some of those "stolen" belongings to another deputy. He collected insurance money on it and effectively worked his way out of a job and into a misdemeanor) should make for an interesting night at work. All the unusual things happen when I'm off!

***

I saw a truck last night with a bedful of those fat donut-looking inner tubes people sometimes use for sledding. Instead of sledding, the first thing that came to mind was summer. I could feel the heat of the sun on my head, remember how the smell of the rubber was so strong you could taste it on your tongue, and the way we'd splash water on the tubes to keep them from getting too hot. When I was a kid, in the swimming holes we played in, those truck-tire inner tubes were our versions of floats and rafts. On super hot days, days when playing baseball was torture and doing anything other than floating in water was unthinkable, we'd trudge down to the service station and fill them up as close to bursting as we could. And then we'd roll them down to the creek. We'd wet them down and spend hours playing like sleek little otters, flipping each other and dunking ourselves.

Strange how in the middle of the cold one can be brought back to such a warm and simple time just by an object.

Happy Friday all.

N.

8:41 a.m. - 2004-02-06

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