Several days ago, I noticed what appeared to be bicycle tracks going through my lawn. Now, I was a kid once, and I remember biking through that old guy's lawn to cut 3 minutes off of my ride to 7-Eleven. This is what kids do. The old guy would frequently yell at us as we rode through his lawn, and though I don't remember exactly when it happened, there came a point when fear kicked in. From that point on, we stopped riding through his lawn, because that dude looked crazy.

While I do hope to one day be a crotchety old man who yells at neighborhood kids, I'm simply too young to do it now. Let's face it, I'm hip. The kids think I'm one of them. I have an iPod, I pronounce Target "tarJAY," I no longer own any VHS tapes, and I even have a myspace account. I'm not sure it gets any hipper. So if I were to yell at the kids, I'm pretty sure they'd sooner try to challenge me to a fist fight or a DDR battle than avoid my turfgrass.

I decided that since I'm not yet at the yelling stage, I could try threatening signs. One of the houses in my neighborhood as a child had a bold "BEWARE OF DOG" sign on the forward-facing side of a fenced in area beside their garage. The fence was high enough to prevent kids from seeing in, and I never actually saw or heard a dog in there. (In fact, I don't know that I ever saw a person on that property.) It was the type of house that didn't look kept, it was always kind of dark, and there was always one broken down stationwagon out in front. It was gloomy looking enough for me to reason that if there was actually a dog, it probably hadn't eaten in a few days, it would be very angry, and there's no way that fence would have kept it from killing me. If it had been a choice between going through that yard or taking 3 more minutes to go pick up a pack of Garbage Pail Kids cards and a Slurpee, I SHO NUFF would have chosen to take 3 more minutes.

In my case, I couldn't pull off the "BEWARE OF DOG" sign, even if there was no dog. There'd be no place to even pretend there's a dog, and I'm not willing to put a broken down car out front. I considered a "TRESPASSERS MAY BE SHOT" sign, but I'm not really prepared to follow through on that. Then there was the more lawful "TRESPASSERS MAY BE SUBJECT TO MERCILESS TICKLING" sign I found, but who's going to be scared of that? In fact, that might encourage a certain segment of the population.

So, after careful consideration of local laws and what is considered neighborly behavior, I came up with this:

vole sign

(Thanks to RaJ for pointing me to this article.)

We'll see how brave those kids are now...