Sick babysitter

So the people who watch my little one are sick at the moment, and by sick I mean ill, not "smacking penguins with sex toys" sick. So my wife and I are shuffling around our schedules so we can make sure someone is always watching the boy. He is nefarious and conniving, so someone needs to be there at all times to make sure his plans do not come to fruition.

Unfortunately, I have to go to a public involvement meeting tonight. I am surprised that the project manager wants me to go. Usually I go to the first PI meeting associated with a project, and then the project team decides that it is in the project's best interests for me not to be seen in public ever again. My company used to have me sequestered in the basement, so even the clients could not see me when we had internal meetings. Go figure. Anyway.... we have a public involvement meeting tonight where we are unveiling 4 potential alignments for the extension of a parkway. In the corridor area that we have (larger than the alignments) there are about 30 something homes, but contained within these 4 new roadway alignments there are only (I think) 8 individual residences. So there should be significantly fewer people unhappy after this meeting.

I don't want anyone out there to think I am being callous about this new road being built by taking people's homes. Of the 8 homes potentially being taken, 6 were built less than 10 years ago, and of those 6, 2 were finished last month. While I understand that people will be unhappy about having their houses taken, these people are also the major part of the transportation problem occurring in the area. The county in question is one of the top 4 growing counties in the entirety of the US, and is the number 1 top growing county in Ohio. If things stay constant there will be 27,000 more cars traveling through that particular area of the county in question in 20 years time. The same people who are moving into the area causing the infrastructure to be compromised are the one complaining about the construction of this road. They do not want a road to ruin the rural characteristic of the area, but they and people like them (and we all know how I feel about people) who have recently moved into the area and are continuing to move into the area are necessitating the construction of the very facility that they do not want.

I do feel somewhat bad for the other 2 home-owners in the potential alignments. Their residences are at least 80 years old and have been in their families' possession for multiple generations. That being said... they have been selling off their respective family's land to residential developers and individual home builders in the last 15 years, so they too are part of the problem. Progress happens whether we want it to or not. At least it is paying my bills.