I haven’t done a lot of traveling in my life. Outside of an occasional convention or meeting in some distant state, I stay pretty close to Indiana, and I work pretty close to Hagerstown. Susan and I did manage to take a short cruise for our 30th wedding anniversary a few years back, and we’re planning on another one for our 35th anniversary next year.
The first one wasn’t too big of a big deal. We got on a plane and flew to Florida, and then we got on a boat and floated around the ocean for a few days. Then we got on a plane and flew back home.
The next time, they say I have to have a passport. It kind of looks like my drivers license, so I thought maybe that would work. But they said it wouldn’t, so I gave them some money and they sent me some more papers. I’m not sure if I need it to get on the boat or off of the boat. Maybe both. And we’re supposed to have some more papers to show them at the airport if we decide to fly to the boat again. I’m still up in the air about that one.
Like I said, most of the time we work pretty close to Hagerstown, although occasionally we do venture into neighboring counties. We hadn’t worked in Randolph county for a while, but we started a job up there this week. In the snow:
The last time we worked in Randolph county things were pretty simple. The customer hired us, we did the job, and came back home. This time they told us we had to go up to Winchester and give the county $50.00 for a Certificate of Registration. Well, here it is:
It’s awful official looking, but I’m not sure what it amounts to, other than that Randolph county wanted $50.00 from us. Susan won’t let me tack it up on the living room wall, and I don’t have any more room in my office, so I’m not sure anybody’s going to appreciate how official it looks, or know that we’re duly registered anyway. But we are, just in case anyone asks. I guess eventually it will end up in one of the boxes I keep of a lot of other papers the government told me I needed. I never really knew what most of them amounted to, either.
Thomas Jefferson said that there is a natural tendency for government to grow and for liberty to yield.
And the bigger it gets, the more paper it takes.
I’m afraid one of these days it will wipe us out.