Helm, Hard About!

(Sits here grinning, letting the readers wonder that the HELL he’s gonna talk about.)

I know I promised you guys a brief history of my past 3 years while I was MIA, but the more I tried to write something, the more I realised it would just be me crabbing about things going wrong. And who the heck needs that, when the whole bloody WORLD has been about things going wrong for a year-plus. So instead, I’m gonna try to give you updates about my world from a humourous point of view – or more accurately, views of my world through my twisted point of view.

New Neighbours – Yep, we’ve got a new set across the drive from us. Number 11, if I count correctly, in the roughly 14 years we’ve been here – and the house has spent almost 5 years of that time empty. (I guess I’m hard on child-molesting, wife-beating, perennially-drunk rednecks.) Hubby of new family is an African-American. (Sorry, I’m gonna be a bit non-PC and just say “black”. My fat fingers can’t handle all those letters. My apologies to all.) Hubby needs a car, even though he’s unemployed. You know, cigarette and beer runs to our version of a Kwik-E-Mart – the old Fresno schoolhouse. (Yep, we turn schools into 7-11s.) So does hubby get a fuel-efficient little Honda or some such? No, he gets a rear-wheel drive Dodge Ram with a V-8 in write-me-a-ticket Red with silver lightning bolts down both sides. A black guy, in Trump country, unemployed, on beer runs, in a screaming red muscle-car substitute. Welcome to Fresno, Ohio, where subtlety is as common as a college degree. (Sigh.)

Culture – We have a bookmobile that visits our area, coming in from the BIG town of Coshocton. (Go ahead, try to find it on a map. Use a magnifying glass – you’ll need it!) It’s actually kinda cool, using an old bus from the 1950s. They used to stop right across the street from us, which made sense as there are several families with kids around us. But now they make only one stop in Fresno. Where? At the old, closed schoolhouse-turned-Kwik-E-Mart. I guess an adult buying beer and smokes might need a copy of Dr. Seuss or Clifford. (Sigh * 2.)

Fresno Schoolhouse, From Wikipedia

Infrastructure – About 5 years ago, we finally got sewers out here, to replace our pain-in-the-butt septic tanks. Mind you, we still pull water out of the ground through wells at each house, but we take the waste water and ship it off to the next town. (West Lafayette, and before you ask, there is no Lafayette, North Lafayette, East Lafayette, or South Lafayette.) Anyway, they had to tear up the street out in front, that had last been paved decades ago but was in good shape. The township swore the plumbing company would repave the road. So in they came, ripping up whole blocks and screwing the locals over for just shy of a full year. Then, because they were running behind schedule and were running into winter, they hastily repaved the road and vanished. Now, there are numerous potholes, huge cracks, and one side of the road is at a different level than the other – sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Oh, and when they hooked up our sewer lines, they filled the old septic tanks with concrete so we couldn’t reuse them. So now, or shit tanks are well paved, and our roads are paved like shit. (Sigh Cubed)

So that’s a little insight into country living. Next time, I’ll tell you about the Amish around here – the greatest rules lawyers on the face of the earth! (I’ll explain that term, too, so don’t worry.) See ya soon!

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