Through The Lens: March in Indiana

I follow Nebraska Through The Lens on Facebook. I don’t know why I do so, or even how I found the page, but it is interesting to see what people deem photo-worthy and in what part of the state the shots hail from. Nebraska is a wonderful place where a lot of our friends call home. The work on the page is beautiful and inspiring and brings a certain light to Facebook that is generally lacking.

Snap back to real life.

This week I decided to emulate their inspiring NebraskaThrough The Lens example, dust off my camera and get out and enjoy the warmer weather.

Home Through The Lens, I thought I'd call this weeks blog.

I changed out of my work clothes and heard the weather guy on TV talk about the breezy evening we were experiencing.

Breezy?
I couldn’t even get out of the house because the grill had blown over, blocking the screen door, a patio chair had landed on top of it and the snow shovel was stacked as the cherry on top. I guess “breezy” was the PC way of saying windy as heck. I used one hair tie and seven bobby pins to get the mop outta my line of sight.

Once outside, I walked around the house and tried to find images of spring.

Home Through The Lens

In search of  beauty.

Inspiration.

Light.

Beauty? No. 

Inspiration? No. 

Light? No. 

Snap back to real life. Sometimes there aren't enough filters in the world to dress up this life. 

When I really started to study our place, all I found was a long list of things that need attention.  

This is what happens when you forget to store the summer rockers:

This is what happens when your house is lacking bleach water and some elbow grease:

I think this is my year to run the bucket loader.

And this is what happens when you have absolutely crazy neighbors:

Let me back up.

Saturday afternoon I was watching the IU basketball game (it was that or Dateline re-runs and you know I can’t watch Dateline alone) and folding laundry upstairs. Only minutes after watching IU win, a slow moving vehicle caught my eye outside. I watched our neighbor - we'll call him "Mike Craig" -  slowly pull his SUV through the hayfield gates that sit directly across the road from our house, and drive east through his field.

What in the world is he doing out there on a Saturday afternoon? I thought. Like any good/nosey/bored rural neighbor, I continued to watch.

Mike then got out of this vehicle, squeezed between his fence and the long row of wrapped hay bales that line the highway, and began shaking a can.

And then the red graffiti started.

I squinted, watched and began recording video on my cell phone as I slowly realized what he was doing. (I have since removed that video from this blog; my language wasn't suitable for ears belonging to young, impressionable people or my grandma.) He was intentionally spewing Pro-IU trash directly into my line of sight.

I opened the window and yelled across the highway, asking him to stop. I could hear his laugh from our second floor bedroom.

There was no turning back. He was adding exclamation marks to his art at this point. 

Now this Sweet 16 jargon is the first thing I see every day.

Living proof that March in Indiana is cut throat.

And I didn't even have a dog in the fight!

As it turns out, his creative graffiti was just the beginning.

The community must really like Mike’s “art” because since he painted the bales, vehicles have honked non-stop. In fact, on Sunday afternoon I laid down to take a much deserved (ha!) nap. Every time I was seconds from falling asleep, some idiot would lay on the horn as they drove by. Cody was out of town and I expressed my frustration with the constant support of the IU wall that had been built across the road from our property.

 

When Cody got home one evening this week he calmly told me that he may have figured out why so many people – cars, vans, semis, implements - were honking as they drove by our farm since last weekend:

I hadn't seen this portion of Mike's "art",  far enough down the highway that I couldn’t view it from our bedroom Saturday afternoon. Positioned precisely so that once people read this, their honk is perfectly timed directly in front of our place.  I'm going to lose my mind.  Is March over yet?

Maybe next week the wind will calm, my blood pressure will lower, the honking will stop, IU will lose and this place can get back to some sort of normalcy. I have legitimate concerns about what Mike will do to the landscape if IU wins again, but we can address that can of crimson spray paint when we get there.

March in Indiana: There is nothing like it.

Thank goodness, for the sake of Purdue alumni and fans everywhere, 

it only comes once a year. 

My evening wasn't a complete waste.

A couple shots of our beloved (depends on who you ask)  Shorthorn herd in it's entirety: