When I bought my house, there was a Nob Hill grocery 3/4-mile in one direction, and a Home Depot 3/4-mile the other direction. Both are gone; I haven’t kept track of how many different Mexican groceries replaced the Nob Hill, but there isn’t a lot that can take over for a Home Depot, so it took a few years for Walmart to move in.

Home Depot had moved about three miles down the road to a new shopping center that must have involved some juicy graft, since it added massive traffic to a main road while replacing a 45-mph corner with a 15-mph corner that causes so many accidents that they add new safety features almost every year. A few more years and I figure there will be a series of pop-up barriers designed to force drivers to walk their cars through.

Anyway, the empty lettuce field across the street from the Walmart is going to be a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center sometime in the next six months. It’ll probably go up pretty quickly once the rain stops, because, y’know, building supplies. It’s a great location, at a major intersection with no accident-prone turns, and very convenient for me, being 3/4-mile down the road.

Oh, wait. The road that’s been getting backed up quite a bit since they didn’t widen it when all the houses were built 15 years ago, or when the elementary school was built in the middle of a lettuce field, or when all those kids grew up and got cars.

So it was nice to see them slip the road-widening plans into the Lowe’s article. The shopping center will come first and make things worse, of course, but some time after that they’ll add more lanes all the way from there to the Mexican grocery, past my house.

Oh, wait. They’re going to widen the main road by my house in both directions. I guess I’ll be going out the back way to Main St for a while.