A normal day?

What does a normal day look like?  Well, the traffic was screaming past our house all night long.  Where do they come from and better yet where are they going in the wee hours of the morning?  Don’t these people ever sleep here in Maine?

There is this motorbike rider that I call 6am Charlie.  Mash had an episode about 5pm Charlie who used to go over the Mash unit and drop bombs made of propaganda materials.  Most of the time he would miss his target but he came at 5pm on the dot.  Well, our 6am Charlie make his presence known one and one half miles from our house.  He starts at the traffic light at Rte 201 and Rte 3.  He rides a high performance motorbike and he leans forward as he rides to provide little wind resistance.  His bike begins the high pitch scream down at the traffic light as he zooms along Rte 201 and you have to keep your eyes glued onto the road or you will not even get a glimpse of him as he tears past our apartment.   He is like a green blur and I would love to know just how fast he is going.  On the other hand, one false move and he is history.  Two days ago a motorbike rider thought he could beat the garbage truck – his funeral is tomorrow.  One minute he is speeding to beat the truck, then he hit the truck full force and he is no more here in mortality.  He was not wearing a helmet either, but I doubt if the helmet would have been of much prevention or protection for this rider.  My friend Jenny passed the accident soon after it happened and she saw the body under the tarp on the side of the road.  If anyone had told him 30 minutes before the accident that he was 30 minutes away from leaving earth life, I wonder what he would have said.  Perhaps he would have just scoffed at the idea and climbed onto his bike and sped off.

I have been sitting now for 3 weeks working on the York county records – either smoothing them out onto paper to dry out flat, or writing them up ready to be digitized.  I find myself thinking about these people who lived 200 years ago.  Right now I am working on the December papers and I imagine that they had to wade through loads of snow to get to the court room to have the case heard.  Did they have a pot bellied stove in the court room to warm it up a little while it was occupied?  Was the judge stern with the people before him?  Did they have family members come with them to support them?  Was there evidence of clear cut guilt or innocence?  There seems to be the same surnames with each court session that leads me to think that Maine was rather sparsely populated 200 years ago.  Anyway, it is fun to try to put flesh on the bodies that are in these court cases.

Around 9.30am the fire alarm went off.  I grabbed my computer (my written life is contained in this computer) and my shoulder bag and off we went outside the building.  Apparently it was just a test of the system because the fire truck did not come like it did last winter.  That was exciting – the firemen all garbed up in their protective gear and running into the building with hatchets drawn.  I wonder who they hoped to scalp when they got in there.

At 10am the second in command of the office was ushered into the break room to inspect the microwave that she had been told was probably the next thing to go up in flames because it smelled funny.  We were all waiting in the break room for her to come in but instead of inspecting the microwave she was the recipient of a birthday card and cake and we sang happy Birthday to her.

For lunch time today, Bill, Anne and I went over to the cafeteria for lunch.  After lunch, and a very eventful morning, we settled down to Bill doing the digitizing and me writing up court cases.