Weather, construction takes toll on this writer

DOVER-FOXCROFT — It’s hard to get away from complaining — er, I mean conversing — about construction nowadays. Or the weather for that matter. Some sort of goofy weather system coming through the area is almost as much of a given as a 10 minute traffic delay due to road construction in these parts.
That being said, there are four things I noticed this weekend that have left me scratching my head, leaving me with more questions than answers.
The first happened Friday, when a freak cold front pushed through the Penquis region. It brought with it a quick, nasty rain storm that seemingly dropped trees on power lines throughout the entire region. I rushed over to the Dover-Foxcroft Fire Station when the call came out for help clearing trees out of the road and off the lines when I heard the same call go out to the Brownville, Milo, Charleston, Bradford and Dexter areas. The storm came through quickly, dropped a little bit of rain and seemed to have a little wind to it, but it didn’t seem like it would bring the whole forest down as well. Luckily no one seemed to be hurt in all that.
Shortly there after, I get a call from my dad back in Wisconsin to break the good news to me: they finally got some rain. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? After the summer we’ve been having, it’s strange to hear someone nowadays happy to see rain falling from the sky.
In that part of eastern Wisconsin, it’s not uncommon for the region to go through a few weeks of drought-like conditions before it rains again. This year seemed worse than most and Dad is counting on his corn crop a little more this year than in the past so he needed rain in a hurry.
Well, he got it from the sounds of it — in the way of 2.75 inches of rain. However, it’s actually dried out to the point where Dad’s already looking for another inch of rain if he could get it. I’m still telling Dad he can have all the rain he wants from here.
After all that, I just walked out the door of the Observer office Friday evening for my softball game at the fairgrounds when I was greeted with a cold breeze that sent me running back inside for a jacket, sweatshirt — something more than the T-shirt and athletic shorts I was wearing at the moment. That storm front that moved through dropped temperatures from the 70s to the 50s in a hurry and I was stranded in Dover-Foxcroft with nothing but a thin track jacket to fend off the cool night.
It was August 8, for Pete’s sake. I didn’t think I needed to start leaving a sweatshirt in the car for cold Maine nights, especially seeing that the sun hadn’t set yet. Those nights were supposed to be reserved for late September.
Monday I made my way back to Dover, back to work, softball and rain. Packed next to me in the car was a sweatshirt next to my camera and notepad. I learned my lesson from last week.
Of course, as I turned onto Route 43 outside of Hudson, I was met with a Maine Department of Transportation road crew tearing up the road installing a new culvert to alleviate flooding along the low-lying roadway. Instead of actual human flaggers, however, this crew was using a remote-controlled flagger trailer that had traffic stopped — for no reason it seemed — for over 10 minutes. I could see traffic held up on the other side of the construction zone, waiting for the armbar to rise and light to turn from red to blinking yellow signifying “You may finally move forward now.”
That’s when it occurred to me how much I missed human flaggers instead of these obnoxious robots. At least with people standing there they can react to a situation and move traffic more efficiently. And at least with people there you can see that something is being accomplished, at least some of the time. That, and it’s hard for me to get that upset at a person doing their job.
Then again, if I start getting frustrated about robot flaggers, or the weather for that matter, this late in the season, I’m going to have a meltdown by November —just in time for snow, ice and potholes to kick in.