After writing yesterday's post, I thought to myself, Get your butt up and DO SOMETHING!  

Since we were out of groceries, I got dressed and went to the grocery store.  

On the way up the road, I spied a backhoe digging in a field up the hill, on the same side of the road as our house.  I'd been hearing that backhoe running for days and had been wondering what was going on.  It worried me.  Behind our house is a big gulley that drops into a bottom.  A not-so-heavy rain will flood that bottom fairly quickly.  I feared that whatever digging was going on uphill from us might make the situation worse.  I also feared that some developer was about to put in a subdivision close to us.  As I drove on to do the grocery shopping, I decided that I'd go find out what was going on when I got back from the store.

When the groceries were all put away, I cranked up the Wrangler, drove up the road, and went into the field where the backhoe was digging.   At the opposite end of the field, a guy was working on a tractor, and another guy was sitting in a truck, talking on his cell phone.  I drove over to them and motioned to the guy in the truck to come talk to me.  He turned out to be the guy who'd done some dirt work for us when our gulley caved in several years ago.  I told him who I was, and that I was concerned that the digging was going to cause more water to run into our bottom.  I asked him what was going on.

He said that they were building a shooting range.  They'd already built a berm at one end of the range and were going to build another one at the other end.  He said that the berm on our end would probably make our bottom-flooding situation better instead of worse.

I left the field feeling better.  

Then later that afternoon I thought, SHOOTING RANGE?!  

Geez.  And I was worried about new neighbors coming in, making noise, shattering our quiet!  If the landowner is building a shooting range for his own use, that's one thing.  Being country folk, we are used to hearing gunshots - hunters and people plinking at targets - but if he's planning on some kind of commercial venture. . . .  Rumor has it that the landowner is going to build a house in the immediate vicinity, so hopefully he won't want to live in a neighborhood that sounds like a war zone any more than we do.  

* * * * * * * 

It looks like my retirement will be over, come next week.   Meeting Friday to hammer out the details.