You don’t know Jack. Well, actually I do. Jack Hammer.

We live at the end of a long driveway. I don’t really like to call it a lane. Yes, we are out in the country, but a “lane” seems long, and straight, and flat, to me. The kind where dust rolls up behind the car when you drive along. No, ours is a driveway.

Our house sits on the top of a hill, which is a good thing, when the high waters rise from the creek. The driveway is windy and loopy up that hill. It is 3/10ths of a mile long. At one point it passes a pond on the right side, and a rather steep drop-off on the left. Steady as she goes, I always say. But during the icy season, it can be a bit unnerving.

Anyway, we started building this house in 1995, and were moved in by 1996. The driveway now is one of blacktop, and I’m not quite sure when the current version was put down. Regardless, it has needed an overhaul for more than five years. Right now, it looks like war-torn Afghanistan.

We are finally getting that overhaul.

We’ve decided on concrete.

And. We are getting older, so we are putting in a ramp, instead of steps, at our front door.

All of this, as they say, will cause an inconvenience.

The first of those inconveniences started with jackhammers on our front porch. The porch is three hefty steps high, a rounded mass of concrete more than three feet deep. Solid. The workers have had two jackhammers running three solid days in an effort to remove it. And we are just getting the ball rolling.

The thing about jack hammers, is the noise they make. We build space stations that are orbiting 240 miles above the earth. You would think we could come up with 1. Quiet jackhammers, and 2. A better way to do colonoscopies.

Regardless, it isn’t me I’m worried about. It is Lou and Ollie. They are deeply troubled by the racket, and get terribly upset when the doorbell rings throughout the day, over and over again. Eventually, though, the demolition will be done. Then comes the grading, and eventual pouring of the concrete.

We’ve fashioned a make-shift driveway at another location on the property. Also on a hill. A different hill. From there we will have to walk to the house during the new-driveway-process. This will be fine and good. I love to walk. But there will be those days when I am hauling bags of groceries. Worse yet, and this will happen more frequently, there will be the occasions where I have to pee so bad that my eyes are floating. Which will make it hard to walk because I won’t be able to see.

And most likely, I’ll be the one to accidentally step in the freshly poured concrete, and not the rampant dogs, or Jimmy Hoffa.

So there you have it. Hopefully, they will work diligently and rapidly, and we will be driving home again. And on the bright side. This will be an inconvenience at best. The payoff, will hopefully be more than worth it. Which is true of many things, when glitches appear in our lives. The glitch will eventually un-glitch. And we will find ourselves back into an air of normalcy. And for that, we can be grateful.

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“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein

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“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

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“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

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