The day after Monday

Also known as Tuesday, it's always a better day than Monday. I didn't used to hate Mondays so much, but Mondays in Ridgecrest...

Anyway, Tuesday is a better day. For one thing, we get a newspaper. The Ridgecrest "daily" newspaper, known as the Daily Independent, comes 5 days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. On Sunday we buy the LA Times and on Monday we read some more of the LA Times. This weekend we were in Northern California, so we didn't buy an LA Times, but then we bought the Monday LA Times, which did make Monday slightly better than usual. I'm still reading it today (it only took about 15 minutes to read the Daily Independent).

The babies don't go to daycare on Tuesday and we don't have a regularly scheduled activity, such as story hour, but we usually manage to fill the time. Today we took our walk a little later than usual, and we had an adventure. We walked on the bike/pedestrian path all the way to China Lake Boulevard without seeing any interesting wildlife, but when we turned around to walk back to Downs, we did see a few things. There were two very large gray and white lizards, those were interesting. Then a very large rabbit ran in front of us. No quail today. I have learned to look for what I call the Sentry Quail. The Sentry Quail perches at the top of a bush, and the baby quail and the other parent carry on their quailish activities below. I don't know what sort of alarm signal Sentry Quail might give, but it seems pretty clear that he/she is on the lookout. Anyway, no quail today. But as we walked west I started to hear a loud motor coming from behind us, and suddenly I realized it must be on the path with us, and then VROOM, it whizzed past us, missing us by inches, one of those dirt buggy things with two teenage boys on it. It wasn't going very fast, so I yelled to the guys, "This path is for bikes and pedestrians only! No motorized vehicles!" The guy on the back turned and gave me the coldest, least impressed look I have ever received from a teenage boy. I glared right back and reached for my phone. Then I remembered that (1) I only had my work cell phone with me, and that's not supposed to be used for personal calls, and (2) I didn't know the non-emergency number of the Ridgecrest police department. So I walked on, glaring at the boys. They stayed on the path for quite a ways, completely obnoxiously.

It occurred to me that school just got out, and so maybe I will be seeing more of these young men on the path. That could be dangerous. So when I got home, before I even gave the boos their snack, I got out the phone book and looked up the Ridgecrest police department. I found a number for "Police/Sheriff" so I called that. A woman answered and said "Ridgecrest sheriff's department." "Is this the right number to report a misuse of a bike path?" I asked. She paused, then said "in the city or the county?" I said "city" and she said, "no, you need to call the police department. I think their number is xxx." So I called that number and got another woman who said "Ridgecrest police department." I repeated my question and she said no, and transferred me to another number, where a third woman also said "Ridgecrest police department." (All these women sounded very similar, by the way. Is there a Ridgecrest accent?) I repeated my question and there was a long pause. "Where is the bike path?" she asked. I explained that it was the long one between Rader and Bowman, and she seemed confused. "Which street is it on?" I said it wasn't on a street, it was a separate entity. Clearly she had no idea what I was talking about, so I went on to describe what had happened. She asked me when, and I said about half an hour ago. I explained that I was worried that with school out, this would happen more often. She said "well, we can put some more patrols in that area." I agreed that that would be a good idea, and we hung up. I don't know where those patrols are going to be put, since she didn't understand where the path is, but I plan to bring my personal cell phone with me from now on, AND the Ridgecrest police department phone number. Ridgecrest police officers are always driving around giving speeding tickets. I am going to give them some more useful work to do. Sentry Quail, meet Sentry Mama.