Odd Days: Freedom to be a lunatic

You can get away with a lot when you live in Colorado. Even the democrats seem to have a libertarian bent. But let's face it, that bent could be construed as a free pass to some bent people.

In the somewhat benign category of bent people in Colorado, you have the guy who rode his horse into a bar in Boulder. In the terminally weird category, you have the frozen dead guy in Nederland for whom authorities carved out an exception to the laws against storing dead bodies. And in the scary crazy category, you have the guy who shot an unarmed burglar in the back to test Colorado's famous Make My Day law.

In the simple "Aw leave her alone" category, there's our crazy newspaper lady. Surely I have mentioned her before. She's the one who found it impossible to deliver our newspaper (at 3 in the morning) without driving through our landscaped stones so that she could get really really close to the mailbox. Soon her car tires had dug a hole so deep that the neighbor kids asked if they could ice skate around our mailbox.

Because I was loathe to greet this woman at the mailbox (at 3 in the morning), I simply filled in the hole with rocks and boulders, whereupon she left me a note asking me to move the boulders because she could no longer get really really close to the mailbox. I demurred, so she moved them herself (at 3 in the morning).

So I called the paper and said I would prefer that our bent newspaper lady not drive in our stones and that if it was too tough to put the paper in the mailbox, she should toss it into the driveway. No problem.

It was then that her boss said, "Oh Geez, I don't know. She really does get kind of riled up when things don't go her way. I'll tell her, but I hope she doesn't do something -- like to your house or something. She probably won't. I'm just saying...."

WHAT?????

"Well, she's a single mom and everything. I really don't want to fire her. But she is kind of...rowdy, I guess you would say."

CRAP!!!!

In the end I stood my ground and left the boulders in place. She in turn continued to put the paper in our box. But she also TP'd our ash tree. Did you get that? She wrapped our ash tree in toilet paper!

Give me a few more years in the wild west and I'll clear out those boulders and put some spikes in that hole.