Thursday, October 28, 2010


A “sign” of the times?

It was to honor them.. but it turned out to be embarrassing instead!

Since our neighbors were helping with our Adopt a Highway road cleaning project I thought it would be nice to change the name on the sign honoring the volunteers and include a reference to them.

The present sign only mentioned our farm because when we started the project about ten years ago we hadn’t asked anyone else to help. It was something we could do by ourselves we thought.

And since only Paul and I were doing the cleaning, we could pick the day we wanted. The sun would be shining and birds singing and folks driving along would wave and smile.

But soon we noticed that the neighbors had also been cleaning their road frontage areas. That made it much quicker for us. And since the paint on our old sign was now cracking, we decided to change the name on it to honor our friends.


The embarrassing part!


I was informed by the county that they were making the new signs smaller to save cost. They told me its new size but keep in mind that this didn’t make any impact on my spatially challenged brain! (I once brought home a Christmas tree that looked fine when we chopped it down out in the woods - but was probably twice as tall as would fit in our house!)

The new signs would have two pieces so the county only needed to replace the smaller portion when someone new took over that section of road.

The previous sign that had been mounted all these years was four feet across. This new one would have the top section be 2 feet by 2 feet with the Adopt A Highway notice. on it. The bottom section would be 2 feet by 1 foot for the name of the group. You would be allowed two lines for the name with a maximum of 18 letters per line.

The original sign put up years ago had caused a lot of chuckles. I had sent the county the name I wanted on it: Spirit Song Paso Finos (Horse Farm). I emphasized that this was all I wanted on the sign. I did NOT want our personal names on it.

But when the large sign was placed on the county road we saw it had our names on it. Plus, it was misspelled!

The county agreed to come and paint over it - or do something - but I said that we were all laughing so much that they could leave it. And no more cost to the county.


A surprise!


But I figured I wouldn’t be surprised this time. We chose the new letters for the sign to read: Paul and Rosie And Friends.

And yes, the spelling was correct on this sign.

But the size of the sign brought new laughter! Having been used to seeing the large signs honoring volunteers on highways across the state, this one got lost in the outdoor space along the road and looked like it was the size of a postage stamp!

And I had to tell the neighbors that this had been done especially for them!

Guess I’d better think of some other way to thank them.



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