Penny and a Road

Val is on a roll again. Found a penny today! Second day in a row for free coinage.

I headed to Walmart to look for some Chicken Bacon Ranch pinwheels. Of course I stopped for my cemetery visit on the way. It's only a half mile from there. All Walmart had were about 15 of the Italian variety of pinwheels. Nobody likes those! That's why Chicken Bacon Ranch is always sold out, and Italian lingers on the shelf until past the USE BY date.

So...I left Walmart empty-handed, with the plan to stop by Waterside Mart and Casey's to cash in some winning scratchers. On the spur of the moment, I decided to hit Casey's first, instead of on the way back. I was backing T-Hoe to park along the side of the store, by their ice machine, when a white van wheeled around me from the direction of the car wash. T-Hoe doesn't have a working back-up beeper. Good thing I saw the bright white in my mirror.

Anyhoo...that white van went around to the front of the store, and parked all cattywompus. Not that I cared, because I didn't want to park there, and the store wasn't busy. I'm not the parking police. I did look askance at it on my way by, though. Just to show my general disapproval for taking up three cars worth of space.

Funny thing, I never saw anyone from that van inside Casey's. I was the only customer at the counter. Nobody walked in or out. Yet when I left, that white van was gone. I was looking at that space where it had been, and I saw it. A PENNY!

Good luck spotting that without a frame of reference. I just pointed my phone and snapped. The sun's glare prevented me from seeing what I was taking a picture of. I also zoomed it in.

Looks like fortune smiled doubly upon me, because I got that penny right in the center of the picture! If that van hadn't moved, I would have been penny-less today. This one was a 1982 version. Funny how I just wrote something about 1982 in a comment yesterday over at blog buddy Linda's place. Ain't the world just full of coincidences?
_______________________________________________________________________

And now, for all you antipennyites...

Here's another photo, of Hick's recent handiwork.

That's the last hill on the gravel road leading up to our homestead. If you ignore the shade-dappling, you can make out the blacktop layer on the left half of the road. Hick's buddy, Buddy, is a retired mechanic who freelances with his own dump truck. If he's got the last load, and there's blacktop left, the customers often give it to him. Buddy and Hick have a scheme to blacktop this part of the road. It gets all washboarded with ruts, and nobody is going to pay for blacktop and a contractor to do the job right, much less maintain it once it's done.

I've been driving over it for three days now, and I'm no road expert...but I think maybe Buddy and Hick should have bladed the road before dumping the blacktop.

It's still just as bumpy, but now we have blacktop covering the washboarded ruts. I'm pretty sure the people without tractors who never do any work on the roads, or contribute money for gravel...are not-so-silently fuming every time they drive over it. I hesitate to draw Hick's ire by bringing it up. The slightest mention puts him on the defense. He has already pointed out that Buddy has no idea when he's getting a load of blacktop, and that it must be spread right then while it is hot.

I'm no road expert...but I don't think it's possible to blade the lumps out of already-hardened blacktop.
____________________________________________________________________

Let the record show that this is penny #32.