Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, Bad Fences are Just Annoying

80. Either finish or remove the silly fence in my front yard. 

I hadn’t planned on attacking this project for a while, but events transpired that drove the issue.   I received a couple of calls in the past week from the owner of the house next to mine.  It seems that there was a leak in the water service line that supplies that house and it was creating something of a bog in their front yard.  After a bit of line-locating, the plumbers discovered that their house didn’t connect directly to directly to the city’s main pipe but instead ran across my front yard and connected to my water service pipe.  This sort of situation is not uncommon in Red Lodge and it isn’t terribly surprising either as the two houses were once owned by the same family and actually look very much alike. 

To properly deal with the issue, my neighbors and their plumbers suggested digging  a hole in my front yard to expose the valve and junction where their pipe attached to mine.  We’d then cap and abandon their old pipe while running a new pipe from their house directly to the street and the city’s main.  Of course this junction lies pretty much directly below a portion of the silly fence in my front yard that has made me just a little crazy since the day I moved into the house.  So that portion of the fence had to come down, at least temporarily. 

You can see part of my silly fence in this picture.

 

Why do I dislike this fence so much? Well, there are a few reasons.  Despite what Robert Frost might have you believe, I don’t think that good fences make good neighbors.  In fact, I think that especially in small town neighborhoods fences have the opposite effect.  I have some great conversations with my neighbor which start with him coming over to retrieve his great dane Jackson who likes to lie down (and poop) under the trees in my yard.  If I had a full fence, those conversations might never happen.  That brings me to the second thing I don’t like about the fence.  My lot is 125 feet deep, but the fence only goes back for maybe 40 feet of it, so the fence is strictly for show.  It doesn’t effectively fence anything in or out.  It is also a very funny shape.  In efforts to keep the apple tree and as much yard as possible inside the fence but have the driveway and garbage can outside the fence, it has a very strange even convoluted shape.  And finally, the damn thing is just difficult to mow around. 

So that’s it.  I don’t like the fence, so it is coming down.  I asked the guys who took down the first section to dig the hole to not bother putting it back up.  Now I just need to get motivated enough to take the rest of it down.  And I need to figure out what to do with all of that fencing material. 

39. Read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. 

This morning I began reading John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty.  I’ve been looking forward to reading this essay since I first came across a quote from it: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”  I agree with this sentiment and I think it is a great expression of my opinion of much of what is going on politics these days.  Don’t mis-understand, I’m not signing up for any tea party gatherings.  I do however think that the more people have things provided for them, the less they are motivated to provide for themselves and those who depend upon them.  While I agree that everyone should wear a seat belt while in a car, I’m not sure that “Click it or Ticket” programs are the best use of limited government resources. 

When I sat down to start reading, I grabbed a highlighter because I had a feeling that I was going to find a lot of quotes that I’d like.  I was right.  I’m only about 20 pages into the essay and I’ve already found a few quotes that I like.  The one I liked the best was this one about the freedom of religion. 

 Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. 

It’s a good point about freedom of religion and consistent with some of the things I pointed out in my last entry about my views on religion.  While Mill’s writing style is a bit wordy and difficult to digest at time, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this essay and probably the other 3 essays of his that are in the same book. 

7. Make it through an entire softball season without a major injury. 

There was another night of softball last night, and still no major injuries.  The bottom of my left foot is a little sore today though.  I think my body is just not accustomed to running so much.  Despite a loss, I played well after subbing in about half-way through the game.  No errors in right-center field although I came very close to mis-playing one fly ball.  I charged in a bit too much and the ball almost sailed over my head.  Fortunately, the long arms that tend to run in my family saved me.  I was able to reach up at the last moment at snag the ball, but just barely.  I batted well too: 2-2 with a double and a home run.  After my in-the-park home run, my teammates gave me a fair amount of grief about my size, but admitted that I could run pretty fast for a guy my size.  There we several references to freight trains and tree trunks.  Oh well, a home run is still a home run.

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