I'm waking up to construction noise in the mornings. For a couple of months, it was all dirt and gravel trucks every few minutes from around 7 am to almost 6pm, now it's concrete trucks revving their beastly engines to make it past our house on our hill.

Suburbia is slowly infringing on the little rural enclave we moved into almost 5 years ago. We live outside the city limits, BUT, the zoning commission re-zoned our area as an "urban growth area" last year, and like magic, peaceful woodlands and under 2000 square foot farmhouses on their 5-50 acre lots are being replaced by million-dollar boxes on 1/2 acre lots in fenced communities like mushrooms after a rainshower.

I've got conflicting feelings about this, I don't care for the suburban type of housing, or its people, who often live in a community type setting ruled by a dictatorial HOA without ever talking to each other over their high fencing, but on the upside, high speed internet inches closer to us (we got quoted $26,000 for the cable draw from the then edge of Suburbia by Comcast 3 years ago. yikes. We stuck with our potato speed internet connection). More importantly, the housing boom is bringing much appreciated equity to even our little farmette. We were able to refinance our mortgage for a smaller payment, which freed up money towards my new tractor!

I'm sometimes wondering what a developer would pay us for our acreage, and if we could afford to retire with the money and get a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. Presumably still with potato speed internet.