Do you have a path like this?

Some of my days at work are very long. And dusty. And end with bad, flattened down hair and oddball stains on the front of my shirt. I leave in the morning and I come back at night. I bring my lunch in a little sack decorated with tiny deer, which holds various tupperwares of yogurt and sandwiches and 2 big bottles of water since the hose water comes off an ag well, and I'm not sure about drinking so much of that. My office is in a trailer and my bathroom's out in a porta potty and I do a lot of yelling out there at work and have nice times and irritated times and do probably too much heavy lifting.

It's probably a lot like your job except I may go through a lot more sunscreen than you do at yours.

I thought it was funny over the weekend when someone asked me, is your blog your main thing you do? Because I like to put on airs as if I'm a millionaire who's full time job is to train my dogs and write amusing things about it in my blog with little photos and drawings, and you might not know, aw heck. I am just a working stiff like you are.

Some days on the job are better than others. I think this is the same at your work, too. Unless you're a drug addled sex slave kept in a locked shipping container behind a truck stop in the desert or maybe have to sew Hanes underpants waistbands together until your fingers bleed. I hope those aren't your jobs.

Some days on the job are worse than others. Shit happens. Or maybe it was one of those days that was just fine. Just another day at work. Then you drive back out of the hills and across the county and sit in the freeway traffic and back into town and those dogs are in the back of the car, and they just had a day at work, too. Maybe one of them snored her head off on an old wool blanket, and one of them got up the desk like she isn't suppose to, to stare at the window and see if it looks like it's quitting time. Or one of them might have sat in the office doorway and stared at the glittery tape on the sprinkler on the hill, that flutters in the breeze, just so.

Although I have to say, he hasn't been doing that, as of late.

Those long days, afterwards we end driving out to the edge of town, to the path that walks out to the bluffs, alongside the mobile home park with the lamest graffiti ever limply sprayed on it's cinderblock wall. We all know that path, lately by the time we get there the sun is starting to head down and you can tell the season is changing by the way that light is starting to glare across the scrub brush and into squinting dog eyes. Some of us walk, some of us run, some of us chase rabbits into the greaseweed. We all check for ticks.

We just walk as far as the ocean bluff, where the wind picks up and tonight there were about 100 pelicans, all flying with purpose towards the north. Not sure what's there for them, in the north, but it's where they think they need to go. In a big flapping v-shape, skimming across the waves and up into the air.

Sometimes a heron stands out there in the field. None of us mess with that thing, a bird that stands maybe as high as me with a beak that looks like a saber. It's nature and all, but that thing looks evil to me.

I don't know how far we walk out there. A mile? It doesn't take too long to walk there and back. Or run. Or trot. Or stop to roll in dead grass, depending on who you are. Long enough to know, that we are all happy how we're ending our day.