As you perhaps know, everybody should have set their clocks ahead so that they could arrive at worship on time. This we did, and after services some of my kids (and their kids) came by our house after church for some of our usual eating and fellowship. They arrived here before we did, and were astonished to find Jackie Woolf, one of the Intoleristas, on our property. If this is not a familiar name to you all, her alter-ego (J. Ford) posts regular attacks against Christ Church, New St. Andrews, and me on Vision 20/20. When the kids first got here, she was up on the neighbor’s property southwest of us, and the neighbor was pointing items of interest out to her. After that, she hiked down onto our driveway (on our property), and then over onto the hillside under our house (also on our property) overlooking our lower acreage, at which time she began taking pictures of it all. So there she was in our yard, although it must be admitted that this portion of our yard that she was standing on has to be considered as sort of a feral yard. So let me tell you what happened then.
My son and daughter went down to our lower drive and Rachel said, “Hey, Jackie. Whatcha workin’on?”
She replied, “None of your business.”
Nate said, “Well, it actually is, because you’re on our land.”
Then she said, “It’s not your land.”
And Nate said, “Yeah, it is. See that fenceline?”
With that she said, “Whatever,” and harumphed off, taking her camera with her and (one presumes) some excessively incrimating photos of early spring at My Place.
When I got home, and these amazing events were related to me, my wife and I decided that we really ought to call the cops. This is not because we hyper-ventilate when neighborhood kids use our driveway to get to school. “Be our guest,” about sums up our philosophy on these things. But we thought that we needed to have some legal record of the event, which we now have.
I had no idea that the Intoleristas were into Special Ops. We are dealing with people who might have a War Room in somebody’s basement, with a map of my land on the wall, with red and blue pins sticking in the map, and grease pencil stratagems sketched out, though the complexities of daylight savings time are apparently beyond them (“Hey! What are thy doing back from church already?”). We are dealing with people who probably have satellite photos of our land, and it follows from this that they really ought to have a better notion of where it actually is.
This also presents me with the opportunity to proclaim to all who are interested that our private driveway is not a city-owned fire lane, or city-owned anything else. It is a private drive that runs spang through the middle of our three acres. And this may serve as my formal public notice that friends, neighbors, and other friendly people are welcome to drop by anytime. But we would really prefer that those of Hostile Disposition try to get a grip, unless it is a grip on a camera while hiking on our land.
This sort of thing really makes me wonder how often folks have been tromping around out here when we are at church. It also makes me wonder how many people among the Intoleristas are actually involved in it, and if any of them will express any kind of embarrassment over this. That is not impossible, but we have been dealing with this kind of thing for so long that I have to say that I would be surprised if they do. The Eagles had a great song that I think really ought to become our theme song with regard to all this — “Get Over It.”