Blessings

Over the holidays, I've been blessed to be able to spend time with my kids. What has NOT been a blessing is our being awakened at 7 AM every weekday morning that is not an actual holiday by loud noises from heavy equipment repeatedly opening up the street in front of our house--work that seems to end magically when everyone inside our home finally gets up. Of course, we have never been notified about any of this work or its purpose by the city or anyone else, and although it often causes the street to be blocked off, we are never given any notification of affected access.

Our city and county seen to be especially well-blessed with equipment and assets for an area of our size. Although ours is a small town, we have an enormous complex of expensive buildings and equipment located over near our local high school that exists in addition to the main city and county buildings elsewhere. We even have some lovely custom-painted ambulances (as well as the regular kind), and our police have new SUVs and pickups as well as the normal patrol cars. I once sat down and listed all of the publicly-owned property and assets here that I could think of just out of curiosity, and I was shocked enough by the end result to wonder if some taxpayers might also be victims (since some clearly pay a lot more than others here; I have more information on this).

After considering the matter further, however, I wondered if the local riches might instead be related to something else. In the summer of 2002, my children and I both watched and filmed two city employees who pulled up in front of our front door in a marked city truck, parked, got out, and proceeded to move sausage-shaped bundles shrink-wrapped in tan-colored plastic from the bed of the truck to the front, where we watched them being tied behind and under the front bumper with thin black cord or rope.

When I later told the local p.i. who recommended I hire Ed Hodges (see "My Story" at the beginning of this blog) that I had a videotape of this, he insisted I give him the tape so he could "turn it over to the proper law enforcement authorities". Once I realized these people had conned me, I assumed this video had been destroyed, but I do still have a couple of grainy still photographs one of my kids took with their camera while I was filming. After this incident, we began to notice many, many other instances of suspicious behaviour by local public employees.