Life is a Highway (hampered by construction...)

Very good friends of mine who moved to Wisconsin a few years ago once told me a local joke: "Wisconsin has two seasons, winter and construction." At the time I just laughed sympathetically, but now it seems to me that the saying applies to Olney as well!

For me, the Road Improvement Season actually began in the Spring, when WSSC showed up in my neighborhood to replace the aging water pipes. For weeks, they dug up the street in sections, making mini-canyons and causing every car trip to feel like a Giant Slalom as we swerved around the mess. When they finished with the underground work, they patched the holes on the surface, leaving ugly craters and long strips of uneven pavement for us to continue to bounce over. Dangerous and unsightly...just how you want your cul-de-sac to be described!

Then of course there's the in-town riot of new buildings. The former B.J. Pumpernickels parking lot features enormous piles of dirt, along with chain-link fencing and a daily monster-truck rally of bulldozers and such. The remaining stores there might be open, but I'm not willing to take my life into my hands to visit them! (The payoff, for me, will be when we get ourselves a Greene Turtle--big-screen-sports and food: a marriage made in heaven!) A few blocks up 108 there's the lovely silver scaffolding encasing the old Stained Glass Pub building. It's so alien-looking, I expect to drive by and see little green men in spacesuits scampering around with power tools as they fix it up. (The payoff here will of course by Chipotle--yum! Or Five Guys for you carnivores out there. Are you sensing it's all about food for me?)

And it seems that everywhere you try to go this Summer, you encounter flagmen blocking off lanes, stopping traffic and directing you around tree-trimming, or lane-paving, or ICC construction...it's a Blacktop Jungle out there, my friends...so buckle up and drive carefully!