A couple of weeks ago I participated in my first ever "block party". Our street was blocked off from 10:00 am until midnight and the fire department stopped by for the kids to play on their truck. No, I did not climb on the fire truck.
Besides quadrupling the number of people I know in our community, the best thing about the block party was hearing the history of our house.
It turns out that our house was the first one built on our side of the street in 1954. Prior to that, a railroad ran right down where our alley is now. That explains why I always hit rocks when digging towards the back of our property.
The people who live two doors down from me have lived here since their house was first built and they told us that the houses sold for 30,000 - 35,000 back in the day, which really pisses me off.
Remember last year when I posted about the big random concrete slab in my backyard (the torture deck) wondering what it was? Well, I found out that the owners who lived here the longest were Ham radio operators and the dude actually had a big tower mounted on that slab.
When I researched it on the Internet I found tons of pictures of the foundation that is built for these radios and they all looked just like ours with the 3 steel posts sticking up in a triangle shape. 
Now I'm dying to find some pictures of our block when it was all railroad an no house, and I'd love to see our backyard with a big radio tower back there in the middle of my now garage garden.
image from k9ape.com
