So, ... your neighbor can be disagreeable.

Yes, she's a mean drunk but that doesn't mean I have the right to wake her and the rest of the neighborhood up with horrible noise....

I'm a quiet neighbor and I pick up all trash and glass I can see in the street from anywhere on my property .

No loud parties, etc., etc...

Throw trash, run the stop sign or spray paint anything near me and I get disagreeable prettydamn quick too .

__________________
-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

Same. I avoid esoteric controversy with neighbors in pursuit of cohesiveness. It seems to work. Despite the the stereotype, most f the Piney Woods folks I live with are somewhere between populist and socialist, though they would likely utterly deny it and claim to be totally conservative!

It would be so easy to get them totally pissed-off. But why? To what good end? Not my thing.

Last weekend we got stuck in traffic on Berthoud Pass Colorado.
While we were sitting at a stand still I asked the wife "Wanna bet the issue has Texas plates?"
25 minutes and a 1/2 mile down the road just past the summit was a F-150 on it's side with Texas plates.

In the early days of marital bliss the survey company I worked for offered me a substantial raise, per diem and a company Bronco if I’d go help out on a contract in Cody WY. Wife and I were young, adventurous and naive. I prefer naive to recklessly stupid. I said yes. Left Traverse City MI and headed west.

We got to Rapid City and looked at maps to get to Cody. Larger highways looped around but we spotted a smaller road straight through the Big Horns. How bad could it be? We headed west up into the Big Horns in our Datsun 710 wagon with dog and everything we owned. It grew dark.

Near the summit we encountered hard snow on the paved road. We had lived in Michigan so I knew the drill. Get out, put on chains. Drive on. Soon we saw two headlights up ahead. Vertical. Not good. Got to the vehicle on its side in the road. 4wd Bronco on its side. Hmmm. Yep, Texas plates. Nobody home, went on.

Got to a ski lodge, no room at the inn. Keep going. Now mostly down hill towards a town called Tensleep. Sounds promising as we are both tired. What’s a “runaway truck lane”? Saw a truck upslope buried to its axles in sand and snow. Uhoh. Got to Tensleep about midnight. Nobody home.

We made it to Cody with a sobering lesson in planning.

Whew ! .

That's quite a story .

I grew up in snow country but didn't really drive much until after I'd moved Way Out West, I quickly earned that driving on even thin snow requires practice ! .

Some how I've never wrecked nor slid off the road, I don't go to the snow anymore...

__________________
-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

About 14 years ago there was an ice storm in McAlester, OK that left the place powerless for THREE WEEKS! And this was, of course, in winter.

The railroad that runs through town started buying generators to run the crossing signals. Then people started stealing them.

One guy drove to Dallas and bought five generators. He came back to McAlester and parked by the side of the road. He sold four generators at enough profit to pay for his trip and his generator.

So the next polar vortex everyone should not just buy some generator company stock but some actual generators. If the power goes out they will sell quickly.

AND...... I was traveling through Oklahoma recently after their big ice storm. No hotels for 50 miles in any direction since so many people had lost power and moved into all the rooms.

I had to push on until I had outrun the power outage area.

That happens after every hurricane in Louisiana. People buy as many generators as they can in say, Dallas, then sell them off the truck in maybe Biloxi.

Shameless profiteering? You bet!

Or you can wait a week for Lowe’s next shipment. Or drive yourself. Etc.

Same deal in California : folks get a wild hair going and suddenly every genset in town is sold out .

Then you wait a year + and there's hundreds of them for sale on craigslist....


Then 2000 rolled around some of the employees at the city stole the work site (smaller, runs a drill or lamp) generators right off the city trucks .

__________________
-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better