Shaking my fist at that got-dern Google Van!!

I'm not living in the wilderness out here.  We're in farm country, all set out in little 50-acre and 100-acre lots, with neighbours in view but just far enough away.  We can get to a Tim Horton's for Jethro's daily coffee fix in less than ten minutes.

So we're not isolated and cut off from the world.  But the world is encroaching!!

Some of you may have heard of a thing called Google Street View.  It's a great party trick. Hey, look up the house you grew up in and see what it looks like now!  Wow, check it out, that's the variety store we buy our People magazine at!

Well that's fun and all, but then you realize that this is for real, and holy heck, this is kinda CREEPY!

Zoom in -- you can see folks hanging around on their porches with their faces blurred.  Their cars are parked out front with blurry licence plates.  You can see who's got their curtains open and what kind of plants are parked on the windowsills.

Wow.  As if living in town wasn't nosy enough already.  I say this as someone who lived in town for most of my adult life and sort of didn't really get the whole curtain thing.  Apparently they're supposed to be closed.  My bedroom now only gets the curtain pulled when Jethro wants to sleep in.

Good thing Street View doesn't extend its creepy lurking presence out here in the land of fields and farms, eh?

I mean, they don't even have that satellite view in detail this far out of the big urban centres.  In town people can zoom in and see the bubbles in their hot tubs, but we can't see much more than blobs for trees and boxes for buildings.  That's okay; we ooo and aww and remark on the shape of our property, giggle over the two white grains of rice in the field that represent our horses, and then we're done.

Ha, not quite!

Imagine our shock when we discovered on Sunday evening that the Google Van happened to meander past our place on its way from one small town to the next.

Seriously, there's the farm.  Right there.  On the screen.  Yikes.

To our credit, the place looks great.  Green grass, Mom's flowers blooming beside the house, nicely trimmed lawn, straight fences.

However, any place has its blemishes, and sure enough, we got our blemishes.  Yep, the spittoon on the front porch, undergarments flappin' on the washline, dog lickin' himself, it's all there!

I'm kidding.  We don't have a spittoon.

What irritated me was the unfinished project on the barn bank.  I'd pulled a few pieces of *ahem* lawn equipment out of the barn to return it to its rightful owner, who'd likely forgotten this stuff even existed.  So there it is, right out on display.  Hey world, check out the junk.

And my ol' man had a few unfinished projects down by the garage.  Well that's just ongoing.  It's a constantly evolving project down there.  See, it's just that now, people don't have to actually drive past to see how the projects are coming along.


I guess I shouldn't be too vexed about it.  Just last week I was riding my horse  in the corral when a particularly loud small plane flew overhead.  Phoenix had to look up and watch it.  Days later, we got a notice in the mail from the aerial photography people.  They'll be knocking on our door soon to show off a nice bird's eye view of the farm and try to talk us into buying one.

Good thing I combed my hair before I went out for a ride that day...