Thanks to road construction that didn't get finished last fall, this is what our street has been like for most of the winter. Okay, maybe it was frozen for
most of the winter, but this is what it looked like every time it warmed up slightly. It was so muddy Ray would park the wrong direction so he could get out of his pickup onto the sidewalk (only slightly better than the street in some areas) rather than sink to his knees in the mud hole.

One of our neighbors, not known for her pleasant disposition, went in to City Hall to complain. After she yelled at the engineer, she kicked off her muddy shoes and left them in his office. The local newspaper happened to be there to catch it all and pictures of her yelling at the engineer and her muddy shoes lying in his office ended up on the front page of the paper. I just wanted to know if she went home barefoot. They didn't say. The part I thought was funny is that this complaining neighbor never parks on the street, she parks on her front lawn (not kidding) so she had to have made a special trip out into the mud before she went to complain.
Anyway, the next day (planned long before the complaint ever surfaced) they put down some gravel. It has improved things immensely on some of the roads. Ours is much better, even though they didn't get gravel all the way to the edge of the road.

However, Ray lodged a complaint to the City. After all, they ruined his conveniently close-to-home mud bogging. He just sent an e-mail to the engineer (who happens to be a friend of ours, since I used to work at the City). I told Ray he should have written his complaint in a letter to the editor, or, better yet, sent it to the mayor. I thought that would have been quite entertaining.