Photo by Kenneth Schipper on Unsplash. Pigs are cute! If you read to the end, I share how I’ve had times when I adopted a vegetarian diet. Seeing photos like this? It makes me think about doing that again.
I almost made a big mistake this week. My shadow side and ego were definitely showing up.
I had work at 11:00 am Tuesday morning. Normally, I leave my house about an hour early, which gives me plenty of time to make it to town, since the drive generally takes only half an hour. Tuesday was not a normal day, though. The first part of my drive is straight down the freeway to the town where my kids went to school; that usually takes ten to fifteen minutes. But Tuesday? It took two hours.
Two hours!
Not surprisingly, I did not make it to work for my 11:00 am appointment. I did not make it to work until nearly 1:00 pm.
Because sometime in the dark of night, a semi-truck jackknifed and turned over, spilling some of its cargo onto the freeway. Lots of semi-trucks move up and down our freeway, and there are areas with surprising curves. Speeding trucks sometimes misjudge these sections; sleepy drivers cause problems, too. It’s not unusual for the freeway to shut down for a time so the authorities can clean up a spill.
Except the spill this week was unusual. It was pigs—hundreds of pigs.
Some of the pigs escaped and had to be rounded up. Others were trapped in the truck’s trailer and had to be rescued. By 7:00 am, the local news reported that “a handful of pigs were let out of the trailer.” By 8:00 am, crews were trying to load the pigs onto another trailer that had arrived to take them away. Not surprisingly, this was not easy, since the pigs were apparently not eager to be transferred anywhere else. Animal Services was at the scene, and “one of its vehicles had at least five of the pigs that ran loose onboard.”
All of this happened while I was still sleeping, and then merrily going about my normal morning routine without a care in the world. Eventually, I had notice that something might affect my drive time, when a friend texted me that she’d heard the freeway was backed up. I was about to take Biscuit for a walk, but thought better of it, and hopped in the car and was on my way. I made it to the freeway onramp and saw that traffic was basically stopped, so I very cleverly got onto the frontage road and zipped along, spying the stopped cars on the freeway and feeling rather pleased with myself. Until the frontage road also stopped.
And that was the beginning of my disastrous morning commute. It was a painfully slow process, moving up a car length or two for close to two hours.
