Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Mailbox Drama!

First of all, set yourself up for the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard!

Are ya ready?

Let me set the scene. We live at the end of a private road, zoned residential. A few years ago, well maybe like 10 or so, our zoning board decided to "enforce" a few of their ordinances like number of animals per acre, unlisenced vehicles, number of storage sheds, stuff like that. Again, we're at the end of a private road, like 3/4 mile back in the woods where in order to "see" all of the treasures that we hoard in order to live a more self sufficient lifestyle, you'd actually have to drive back there and look!! It would have to be intentional, such as someone who is looking for a reason to create a problem. (Don't ya love people who just look for reasons to be unhappy?).

So, here we are with our farm, on our 26 acres (6 owned, and 20 adjacent leased) minding our own business in a residential zone.

Someone decides that they don't have anything better to do than cause problems, so we end up in a zoning dispute. No problem, we are bordered by farms, and agricultural zoned property, and we meet the criteria, so after a few raindances and jumping through of hoops, we have our property rezoned to be agricultural. Hmmm, amazingly, a lot of the problems went away.

Now, the latest......

Seeing as how we live technically in a subdivision, while at the same time we are a farm, we all have our mailboxes at the end of our private drive. They used to be all different heights, different lengths, a mixed up cluster of, well, mailboxes. I'm sure you've seen it. No problem, not the prettiest, but who in the h^&*&**I#$%$ cares? It's in the country, everyone's mailbox looks like that!

Well, one of our neighbors takes it apon himself to "pretty things up", bought 4x4's, and built a very nice, stable, even pretty mailbox post for all of our boxes. Planted flowers between the boxes, stabilized it, made it look very nice. Take a look:



I mean seriously, who could not see this as a vast improvement over the cluster of mailboxes usually found all over the country?

Well, apparantly our Road Commision is who! First they told us the side posts were too high, a safety violation, ok, we'll cut them off, no problem.

Then it was the metal plant hangers on the ends, ok then, I guess we can eliminate them, and the latest, there are only to be 2 mailboxes per post along with the paper boxes, it's an ordinance, a law, and for heaven's sake, we can't go against the Road Commission's "ordinances".

Well, I've never been real good at math, but if you count real close you can count 6 mailboxes, and if you count real close again, you can count 3 posts. Hmmmmm. Never mind.

Another shot at this gross violation of our ordinances (picture taken from behind, obviously, as I drove out of our drive onto the main road):



Just awful, I've never seen anything worse. Maybe it's the combination of the pink and yellow flowers. That must be it.

Stay tuned... hubby will be at the Road Commission meeting this morning, and at this point, he's the one looking for a fight!

PS: Don't ya have a pot hole to fill somewhere???

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

great now we cant go to mexico cause dad will be on the terrorist watch list and wont be able to leave the country.

Anonymous said...

Ha! I thought I was the only one that have to deal with the city officials.

Anonymous said...

Which County Road Commission in Northern Michigan? Your blog is great...