Same here. Forty years and a
LOT of less friendly and understanding people have moved in between me and the shop since then.
First it was the military jets making too much noise and scaring the city folk. Now they're gone. Then it was cleaning your guns on the front porch within sight of the impressionable kids for whom guns have always been a "no-no" instead of a normal thing (really the parents. scaring the so-called adults who can't tell the difference between a normal person coming home from a hunt, and a future mass-murderer who should have been put in a place where they no longer get to interact with the public anyway). Now that has to be done hidden away. Then it was the dogs running around the neighborhood on their own in the morning. Used to almost never get into a fight with other dogs and mostly pooped on their own lawns back then. Now there's too much fancy landscaping so the dogs seem genetically inclined to try to mark new extended territories apparently. Then it was any loud noises, including (and especially!) fireworks. Gone. Then it was cars parked for too long in one place, or (heaven forbid!) working on them within sight of others. What? You actually "work" on your own cars? Is that an air compressor I hear? Harumph! Not to mention the occasional dirt-bike foray down the street. Of course, that last just disappeared all on it's own when there really was nowhere left within riding distance to go
TO to ride other than past all the houses. But "they" would never have put up with it anyway even during the short "cleaning and tuning" runs.
Plenty of other things that used to be normal to add to the list of the deceased, and not enough time to list them all. But I digress...
Not that it's all bad of course. It's understandable that as people get more packed and packed together, things each of them do effect more and more people, and those people like what the other ones do less and less. Nobody should be dumping used oil down the storm drains or in the neighbor's property, or leaving derelict vehicles to rot away in front of someone else's house. Or doing something that might put someone in danger just because "I've always done it that way" either.
But the whole "packed together" thing is why all the changes that annoy the old-timers come from the city and the more populated places. Because burning your own garbage was only acceptable when there wasn't another house with kids and elderly right next to your burn pile. Just like pissing in the stream seemed so benign until someone moved in downstream!
So change has to come. If it gets bad enough, you just move to the country so your half-city, half-country ways can then piss off a whole new group!
;D
Uh, what were we talking about again?
Oh yeah, open headers in Galt!
Paul