When I grow up, I want to be...

An engineer. Of the locomotive variety. No, really. If I didn't have a family and could do anything I wanted, I'd go to work for the railroad and drive trains. 


Everyone wants to be something when they're a little kid. And astronaut, a doctor, a fireman... I always wanted to be a locomotive engineer. I had the hat and the whistle and everything. I got my first electric train set when I was ten, and someday, if I ever get rich, I would love to take an entire room and build a giant to-scale model train system like the kind you would see on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.


I recently moved to this small town in Arizona that happens to have train tracks that run through it, and the first thing that EVERYONE told me when I started looking for a house was, "Don't buy a house south of the tracks!" 


Well of course I ended up buying a house south of the tracks. I didn't do this intentionally, it's just that I looked at a million different houses and the one I fell in love with happened to be south of the tracks. True it now takes me a lot longer to get anywhere because I'm always stuck waiting for a train to pass, but I never really mind. Just like a little kid, when those red lights start flashing, I get all excited and about fifty percent of the time I still sit there and count how many cars go by. 


I love being in a town where I can see trains all the time, and I live just far enough away that I can still here the whistles blow, but they aren't loud enough to wake me if I'm sleeping. (It's an insanely busy track and I've heard two trains since starting this blog.) 


Anyway, I'll stop boring you with this because according to my husband trains are lame and I'm the only one who cares, but I've just been thinking about it a lot lately since I am around them so much. And seriously, I really would get a job driving trains, and I would love it!  Here. I'll post a couple of pictures just for kicks...


This is when I took my family on vacation and actually made them travel by train...

And here's one from when I made my family go to the train museum in Sacramento...

And, of course, the picture that shows how my husband feels about trains. This is what he looked like the entire time we were at the museum unless being instructed to smile for the camera... He gives me that same look every time I see a train and get excited.