Sirens are generally not a good thing.
Around here, a siren usually means I forgot that I was heating oil on the stove while I ran to put the towels in the dryer…and check facebook…and read a few pages of Good Housekeeping. Luckily, it hasn’t ever gotten further than the smoke alarm sirens– the ones that the mostly-useless-electricians put in that just make a lot of noise, not the ones from the security company that immediately call the fire department. The fact that the immediately-call-the-fire-department ones have never gone off greatly decreases my feeling of fire-safetyishness, truth be told.
But today, the siren meant something different. Today, the siren meant that I had rolled through the stop sign on my little, backwoods, rural, middle-of-nowhere, don’t-nobody-else-stop-neither road, and that said rolling had not gone unnoticed.
Sometimes, a siren going off around here means that the kids, history buffs that they are, have re-enacted the Battle of the Alamo, using bubble wrap to mimic the sound of gunfire. I don’t know about gunfire, but our alarm system thinks bubble wrap sounds an awful lot like breaking glass. And our glass-break detector actually does immediately call the police department.
Of course, because we live in a little, backwoods, rural, middle-of-nowhere kind of place, it takes the police 30 minutes to arrive at our front door to investigate whether we have been chopped up into small, unidentifiable pieces by serial killers. There are never any police cars on patrol where we live (if you happen to be a crazed criminal, you should know that we have two vicious attack dogs and one very aggressive llama, and we are armed with awesome guns, and we are trained in the art of fujitsu. Unless fujitsu is some sort of camera, in which case we are trained in something else that will allow us to separate important parts of your body from one another using only our toes. Who needs police when you can disembowel people with your toes?).
In the entire 6 years I have lived here, I have seen no more 5 police cars. Or maybe I’ve seen one police car, but I’ve seen it 5 different times. In any event, encounters with law enforcement are sufficiently rare as to have instilled a sense of confidence in the denizens of our particular nowheresville: specifically, people don’t stop at stop signs. Some of them don’t even slow down.
Myself, I’m a stopper. Not only that, I have been known to point and wag my finger at the non-stoppers, or at least at the drive-right-through-at-35-mph-ers. And I can do that in all my well-deserved self-righteousness, because I am a stopper.
Or so I thought….
Yesterday afternoon, any delusions I held regarding my standing as a keeper-of-the-code-as-it-applies-to-stopping-for-a-full-three-second-count-at-all-stop-signs were shattered.
See, when I woke up yesterday, I had every intention of leaving the house to take Mason to go get his bloodwork done first thing in the morning. I don’t know why it takes us 4 hours to get out of the house in the morning. So we left the house on our way to the lab at the crack of 11:20.
At about 11:35, I remembered that the road was under construction. It was the orange-and-white-striped barricades that jogged my memory. You would think I would have remembered sooner—miles and miles sooner, as in, before-it-was-too-late-to-take-an-alternate-route sooner, especially in light of the fact that these same barricades sucked a sock up my vacuum cleaner on the way to my girls’-night-out viewing of White Christmas on the big screen with one of my besties only a few nights earlier.
Even with the diversion, we arrived at the lab-o-trauma at 11:42, a full 18 minutes before they close for lunch. Which would have been a tremendous victory, had there not been a sign declaring “We’ve Moved!” on the door.
Mason really doesn’t like being strapped into a car seat. And the only thing more injurious to his happy mood than being buckled in is having to be buckled in again after having finally enjoyed a brief taste of freedom.
Four kids back in the car, buckled, one frustrated round of, “What do you mean, you’re not buckled? What have you been doing for the last 3 minutes?”, and we’re on our way to the lab-o-trauma’s new location, which happens to be smack-dab in the middle of the construction zone we’d just detoured around. Which probably explains why I drove right by it, then had to make a rather awkward T-intersection U-turn. It might also explain why we found ourselves driving on the wrong side of the pylons, into the path of an oncoming 18-wheeler. Luckily, Riley notices things like oncoming 18-wheelers that might escape the notice of someone who’s squinting out the window, mumbling “Where is it? It’s gotta be one of these buildings….”
In spite of our little unscheduled adventure, we arrived at 11:54, a full 6 minutes before they close for lunch. I’m not sure what time the other 15 people who were already in the waiting room arrived, but they did not look amused to see our rowdy party-of-five enter.
That place should really hire a second phlebotomist.
Mason doesn’t sit. Did you know that? It’s probably pretty apparent from most of my posts.
So, for the next hour-and-five-minutes, I did my best to keep the 35-pound-ferret corralled on a 2-person bench. I read magazines (Luckily, Better Homes and Gardens has lots of pictures of dogs and cats this month), I played several hundred rounds of “Kiss-me-right-here….you missed! Again?”, and sang Somewhere over the Rainbow, Fly Me To The Moon, and the ABC song…repeatedly. I let Mason practice his hairdressing skills (until he attempted to remove large sections of hair using his thumb and forefinger), and offered my body up as a giant jungle-gym. And I did it with a smile on my face, and while admonishing certain other family members to keep the peace, stop kicking each other, and get their own gum.
Finally, at 1:00, the poor-phlebotomist-who-worked-through-her-entire-lunch-hour called us back to the torture chamber. Now, Mason has an uncanny memory, but maybe the new office threw him. He recognized her as someone he liked, and he immediately turned on the charm. Even as she tied the blue-rubber band around his upper arm, he smiled and flirted. It wasn’t until the needle physically pierced his skin that the look of recognition swept across his face. But he’s a tough one, and even as she was putting on the bandage and apologizing profusely, he was doing his best to smile at her through his tears.
By the time we stepped across the lab threshold, Mason was fully recovered. Mommy, on the other hand, could think of little other than a session with Dr. Merl Ot. And I still had Wail-Mart, SuperTorture, and KroGrrr on my to-do list.
Every once in a while, a rare glimmer of sanity peeks through the otherwise impenetrable wall of my incompetence. This was such a time. Rather than drag all four children around town to run errands, I drove 20 minutes home and dropped them off to The Hubby, armed with all the sympathy-rousing-patheticatude I could muster, then proceeded to make the 20 minute drive back to town.
It was shortly into my proceeding that I heard the siren.
Now, if you know me, you no doubt know that I can’t do things in any way that could be deemed ordinary. It’s not that I don’t, as if I’m striving for some sort of zenith (or nadir– depends on your perspective I guess…) of eccentricity. It’s that I can’t.
So it may come as no surprise to you to hear that I was pulled over not by a police car, or a sherriff, or even a county constable…but, by a Texas Wildlife Officer.
The answer to your question is, “Yes, evidently they can.”
Since it is already November twenty-somethingth and I have yet to do an “I’m thankful for” post, let me take this opportunity to say that I am thankful that the Texas Wildlife Officer let me go with a verbal warning.
I will close with a dramatic re-enactment of the incident, which may or may not offer a glimpse of why the Officer didn’t detain me to write a ticket:
Me: Hello, Officer.
Texas Wildlife Officer: Ma’am, I stopped you today because you ran that stop sign back there. And you didn’t just run it, you ran it fast. Is there any particular reason you did that, ma’am? Anything going on that would have caused you to not just run that stop sign, but to run it as fast as you did?”
Me: Well, officer, it all started because I had to take my 5-year old to get bloodwork done….
