I was at work the other day, doing my sacred, sworn duty as a security guard, keeping the rich people who live in an exclusive community safe from any interaction with normal people who weren’t being paid to be there, when I spotted some hot air balloons nearby. As I have said, I see these all the time, so my main interest in them was to be sure they didn’t land inside the exclusive community, thereby forcing our residents to have to come face to face with people who were raised out in the wild.

I did… something… that kept me busy for a few moments, and then glanced up again at this incursion into our airspace. And now there were three balloons. Okay, no big deal, maybe I just counted wrong.

I did something… whatever it was… for another few moments, and glanced up again. Now there were four balloons. If the photos I took with my cell phone have led you to believe that more than a few brief moments had past, that is a false conclusion. The clouds have only moved in relation to where I stood when I stepped out to take the pictures. A total of less than one minute had past.

This has led me to leap to some obvious… but unlikely… conclusions of my own. Either we are developing stealth hot air balloons, or else there was some hot balloon sex action going on up in the clouds, and new balloons were being born.

Yes, I suppose they might have just risen from behind that line of trees, but that isn’t nearly as funny, is it?

Another sunset picture from my little guard house… which is actually almost half as big as my real house, better landscaped, and has a fancier, Spanish tile roof.

And a last photo of one of the balloons, thankfully passing right over the property… with its 800-or-so houses… which are all much larger than my own house. I joke with the other security officers that we should put anti-aircraft canons on the guard house roofs. But there is already a strategic plan of action to limit the number of times these majestic balloons infringe on our area of responsibility. We aren’t supposed to allow the follow trucks onto the property. This means that the balloon pilots and their paying passengers have to carry all the parts of the balloons… the big gas tanks, baskets, tubular metal frames, and the giant, rolled-up balloon itself… out of the property by hand, if they land inside. I have never seen this done yet. Maybe the other guards are just messing with me.