Hi Ho, Hi Ho

           My husband currently works in downtown Houston and is able to ride the Metro to work. It goes through the Medical Center and he walks about 6 blocks to catch it to downtown. Usually I walk with him and we pass by several hospitals and several museums to get to the Metro station. As is true with most metropolitan areas, several of these museums and hospitals are under some kind of ongoing construction. So every morning, there is a steady stream of hard hatted workmen (and a few women) going from a parking lot to the museum construction site. These workers arrive between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. and there is a line of them, like busy ants, crossing the road during that time frame.

            These construction workers put in a long day. Most of them are not walking back to their cars until I walk back to the Metro around 5:30 – 6:00 p.m. That makes it a twelve hour day for the construction workers. As such, most of them are heading to their construction site in the morning with their lunches, their snacks, sometimes their tools, and whatever else they might need for a whole day out in the elements, up on a scaffold, or digging in the dirt. They carry their lunches/tools/equipment in a variety of containers; everything from a child's colorfully patterned Star Wars lunch box to industrial sized tool boxes to tailgate party sized coolers. These are usually pulled along behind them on wheels and sometimes even slung over their backs in backpacks. While we hadn’t seen any of them put it onto a pole like a hobo pack and we hadn’t seen any picks or shovels either, we were reminded greatly of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the other day. The sun was coming up and the light was shining down the street and in the distance there was a steady line of men crossing the street in a single file line. Each wore a hard hat, a brightly colored reflective vest, boots of some type, and trailed something behind them but all were full of bounce and vigor as they made their way to work. We were far enough away that the light made them look like Little People. Definitely Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work they Go.