I guess it’s just the price we have to pay, but still, I would rather be checking out Las Vegas vacations.

The little town just north of here is spending money like crazy. The race track in Wheeling needed a kennel to house all the greyhounds, and the county and the track reached a deal. Now, the town is falling all over itself, buying souped up police cruisers, huge granite monuments that haven’t been engraved to say anything, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Quite a bit of the spending seems a little silly, but some of the projects are also badly needed. And that’s where I find myself having this dilemma.

The main roadway, good old State Route 2, is the only way to get through unless you take the overland route, following the cow paths up and down over the hillside, and that’s never a good idea. Right now, crews are out digging up the place to install sewer lines. Yeah, I realize the need for good reliable sanitation, and besides — we had to tie in and give up our septic tank years ago. It’s about time these folks catch up and get their monthly bills, too. But I have to drive through to get to work, and there’s no good way, so far as I can tell, to figure out just how long I’m going to be sitting there, burning my gas, waiting for the diggers to let me pass.

Yesterday, I was running a couple of minutes behind my normal departure time, and I wound up being stopped by a flagger for 17 minutes. Thank goodness nobody was looking to pass out speeding tickets once I got through that mess. I was still a few minutes late.

I over-compensated today, leaving about 20 minutes early. You guessed it: I drove right through, arriving at the construction site just as they were allowing the northbound traffic to go.

A mile or two further up the road, another group of workers is out scratching big holes in the pavement so their patches, once they get around to putting them in, will stick better. They propped up little signs saying “Rough Road.” No kidding. Hard to tell how long it will be until that little project is finished.

The worst, though, are the utility workers who create gaping holes in the middle of the street, leave the dirt piled up next to the hole, stick a couple of orange cones and a sawhorse around it, and disappear. That one could be there until the snow flies.

Sometimes it feels like a conspiracy.