Flying Higher

You can baaarrrreeelllyyyyy see him, flying there in the center...an enormous hawk, sprawling and majestic, but he looks like a tick here.  Actually, he looks smaller even than the tick I pulled out of Scotty's tummy last night when he came out of the woods at the little league playoff game.  Yes, you heard me, a TICK.  *shudder*  If you've started to itch after reading this, imagine my world for the past 24 hours, after plucking that thing out.

Here you go, for perspective, the gray matter in the middle of this one, just hovering** over the mountain, is actually a plane.  It's landing at the Oakland airport.  From where I'm sitting, taking this picture in my backyard, we can watch planes land**** at the San Francisco airport, across the bay there, and here in Oakland, just past that tree on the right, and also at the wee little executive airport in Hayward, to the left of where we are sitting.

I liked these two pictures together because they kind of define where we are living...high on this hill, you can watch the cars and trains pass below you, but the sounds are so distant, it's more like waves crashing on a beach.   Just the rural beauty of a hawk, juxtaposed with the modern mechanics of a Boeing 747...it kind of makes me smile.

**  I once told Erik that he was pronouncing "hovering" wrong, because he was saying it like huv-er-ing.  I told him it was supposed to be said like hoe-ver-ing.   After a full five minutes of this, exasperated, he sputtered out, "But, look, don't you say hover craft?!?"  And I said, willfully and blatantly forging on, even though I agreed with him the whole time, "Don't you say over?"  This was before I had any real hobbies, so irritating him for no reason was the closest I got to entertainment.  This is why I often tell a friend, "Yarn saved my marriage."

****  My treadmill is in the garage, and I used to open up the door and pretend like I was running outside.  I often ran at 10 pm, when the kids were asleep and everything that need getting done had finally got done, and I'd leave the lights off in the garage.  It was quiet and peaceful and I'd watch the planes land to pass the time.  I thought 'mill running was so boring, so I'd play little games with myself, like, when a plane came into view, I'd watch it until it disappeared behind that tree on the right.  If another plane came into view on the left, before the previous one disappeared on the right, I had to watch that new one until it disappeared...and I'd repeat all this, if another plane had come into my sight in the meantime.  But, but, and here's where the excitement kicks in, if no plane broke the event horizon on my left before the previous plane exited on my right, well, then I allowed myself a peak at the time on the treadmill, so I could check how long I'd been going.  Since I'd run for 5 or 6 miles at a time, without this little game, I'd be obsessively staring at the time...and just like a watched pot never boils, a watched timer never ends.  In the 45 minutes I'd be running, I'd only get to look at the timer a handful of times.  Seriously, a lot of planes are landing, all the time.  Except, right after the World Trade Centers were attacked, all air travel stopped for several days.  That was so eerie!  I think it was the first time I realized just how many planes pass through here, on those few days when no planes passed at all.