Naked Escapees and Random Axles

Tuesday was a strange day.

To leave our new place, you pull out of the driveway, straighten the car, go about 10 yards to a stop sign, turn left, another 20 yards to another stop sign and then right onto a major street.

I pulled out of the driveway, straightened the car and saw a strange flash of pink across the street from the first stop sign. "What the hell was that??", I thought. Pulled up to that stop sign and saw it for what it was. A little naked boy popped out from behind the tree! About 2 years old and buckass naked! It was a beautiful, mild day and he was enjoying it to the fullest!

No adults in sight so I put the van in park (put on the hazard lights) and walked across to the boy. As I'm getting out of my van, I see a car that is driving down the street I'm about to cross and I see the man driving the car spot the boy and start to slowwww down. He sees me and speeds away. (Probably assumed I was the kids parent but, even so, it was a bit creepy) I walk up to the boy and say, "Hi! I'm Ruth! What's your name?" He smiles and waves but doesn't speak. I say, "Hey, can you show me which house is yours? Let's go find mommy!" His smile disappears and he looks worried (probably knows he'll be in trouble for getting out alone). He stands there for a bit and I repeat myself and then he walks up to the first door and picks up a set of those huge plastic baby keys, pretends to use it on the lock (the door was already ajar) and goes in. I ring the doorbell, knock and with no answer, come inside (stepping over the puddle of pee just outside the doorway). "Hello! Hello? Anyone home? Hello?"

It's one of those foyers that opens immediately to a set of stairs and the kid is already at the top of them and playing with his toys. I start up them and then his mom appears...
Her: Oh! Um. Hello?
Me: Hi! Yea, um, he was just outside. I'm Ruth, I just live down the way there and I was driving out of the complex when I saw him.

She understandably starts to freak out a little bit..."Oh my god! Ohmygod! He was??? Ohmygod! I had no idea! I was putting my 2 month old daughter down for her nap and I thought he was watching TV!"

She starts thanking me profusely and her hands start shaking and I see that the door has one of those hotel locks way at the top (the kind where you flip the long U-shaped bar over the little metal knob on the door) and I get the feeling this kid's slipped out of the house before! I try to calm her down, "No worries! They do that sometimes. There's a bit of pee outside the door so I think he just needed to go the bathroom. It's OK. He's safe! Flip the lock, give him some TV time, if the little one's down for a nap, you can take a nap, too!"

I really had to go and it took a few minutes for her to calm down and let me leave. So scary for her! I would've freaked out, too! So close to the main road, creepy guys in cars and you don't even know the kid's outside! Yea, I would've lost my mind. Kids do stuff like that, though - the little brats,...um dears. Trev used to do that to me when we first moved to Parker and I finally had to sit him down and give him a good scare as to the possibilities of what can happen to little kids that leave the house without telling anyone.

I was going to Parker that day to meet up with Donna and we had picked a coupla yarn stores to go to so we could pimp our wares. (One ordered from both of us, the other didn't order anything from either of us.) On the way home, there was a small backup on our side of the road and a much bigger backup on the other side where a nasty accident had taken place. In the middle of the road, I saw an axle with two tires attached and nothing else! A big axle. Then I saw a medium sized sedan with an obliterated front end and a guy strapped to a gurney.

I looked at Donna and said, "Did you see that axle? Where the hell did that come from??"
She said, "You didn't see the cherry picker in the ditch?" I hadn't. What a strange day!

More random things:
On Monday, I had a bit of a baking spree. I had about 8 pears that were ripe and needed to be eaten right now and I decided to make stuff with them. I had a package of Tastefully Simple apple cake mix (if you've never had it - it's amazing!) and I substituted pears for the apples. An 8X8 pan and it was gone in 24 hours. Mostly into me.... sigh. I also had a recipe for pumpkin gingerbread and I substituted the rest of the pears for the pumpkin in the recipe and added a bag of chocolate chips because everything's better with chocolate. Also, because the bag of chips said it was to expire on 11/09 which means I had that bag for, what... 5 years??

That bread came out excellent! Even the boys like it! (Probably because of the chocolate, though.) And the recipe made 2 big loaves and one small one. I gave a big one to Donna and a small one to my inlaws. We are working through the other big one here.

It's been snowing like mad these past two days here. My garbage can out back looks like a guard at Buckingham Palace. Dave's new landscaping biz has snow removal service in the winter and yesterday he left at 5am and came home at 8:30p. Poor guy!

The boys and I have been enjoying it, though! They had snow day from school yesterday and today. I had some video games on hold at the library so I picked those up Tues. night before it started. They've been playing those, playing with a giant box I unpacked and playing in the snow when I kick them outside for an hour. Cracks me up that they don't want to go outside but when they are out there, they don't want to come back in!

On Nov. 6, we will have been in Colorado for three years. I'm still stunned and twitterpated with the magic of snow. Every time! I love it so much! But, then, I'm not out in it unless I want to be.

Yesterday, I went to scrape the driveway so Dave could get into it when he came home. It was about 4:30p and there was almost 2 feet out there. Our driveway is in between the other two attached to us so I scraped the one closest to the grass (or where the grass was) so I could clear ours. I didn't mind. I actually like scraping snow! Not like I want to do it for a living or anything, mind you, but there's something about it that I find strangely appealing. I finished hers and was about 1/3 of the way finished with mine (contemplating doing the driveway on the other side as well, they are an older couple) when a troupe of 4 guys (1 in a small scraping tractor thingy) came around the corner and started clearing the snow! Yea. There job is to scrape all the sidewalks and driveways. hah! I'm a dork. I forgot that that's part of the HOA fees our landlord pays. I gave them all cookies!

Yesterday, my computer decided to take a snow day along with the children. It worked but it was crazy slow. Taking 5 minutes to load a page, if it loaded at all! So I got quite a bit of unpacking done along with some laundry. Not much knitting! Seems like on such an awesome, snowy day, it should've been spent just knitting and watching movies.

Maybe today....

Living a Winter Wonderland in Autumn, Ruth!