A piece of advice … Never, ever, ever buy property on a shared private road. Just when I think the Road Association can’t get more ridiculously dysfunctional, something happens to prove me wrong. The saga of the season is an attempt by those who would “keep out the riffraff” by installing an electric gate at the start of the road. Turns out that what we thought all along (that the riffraff live inside the gate) is even more true than we knew. At the moment we have a $16,000+ gate that doesn’t work, threats of lawsuits and numerous calls to the Sheriff’s department. None made by us (yet) but after somebody tossed hundreds of nails at the bottom of a neighbor’s driveway, we decided to set up surveillance cameras on ours. Our generous and brilliant neighbor, Trux, helped us recycle our old PC into a new life of storing and processing images and, thanks to him, it was cheap and easy. I don’t know if we’ll catch any bad guys but now I have a “horseycam”. I can keep an eye on the corral while cleaning my bathroom bowl! Well almost …

And maybe I’ve got this backwards … shouldn’t I be out playing with horses while while my bathroom bowl cleans itself?