The Light Stuff

Well, Tara finally stepped off all those planes (one of them went directly over the house on its way to landing at the airport several dozen miles away; she was like, Hey that's my house down there! Get me a parachute, quick!) and it's back to the old nose to the grindstone here at the Best Little Hoardhouse in Massachusetts. So today we packed up the bus once again with a load of 'light' stuff and a side of precious metals, then hauled ourselves off to the scrapyard. Witness:



And the side view:



The guy in the smelter (I'm not sure if he was the guy who had missed us last time; apparently I didn't miss him nearly as much) got talking to Tara about Volkswagen bits and shared a story about a friend of his whose bus was in a fire. In the front of it, which is very unusual, as the back is where the engine is, and, seriously, one of the first things bus enthusiasts will tell you if you are foolish enough to consider buying/restoring/driving one of the damned things is that you should always carry a fire extinguisher. Because apparently the engines like to set themselves on fire. And, by the way, oh no Tara knows nothing whatsoever about that, and, no, a few years ago when she was futzing around with the brown bus (since 'dearly' departed) she did not suddenly come tearing in the house in a panic screaming something about OMG did we have a fire extinguisher?

Anyway, this guy's friend apparently pissed someone off who then poured gasoline on the front of the friend's newly restored (of course) bus and then threw a match at it. So it may need a dashboard, seats, &c, all of which we probably do have. Then again, he may not actually have pissed someone off. I mean it's not much of a stretch for me to believe that there are people out there who just hate the things and want to see them all crushed into little cubes, hacked up with chainsaws, rolled off cliffs, burnt on pyres, wiped off the face of the planet forever and ever and ever oh my god yes. Why that's not much of a stretch at all, I'd say.

At any rate.

So we got it all weighed, and then went around to the back, dodging heavy equipment that was being driven around way too fast if you ask me damned kids these days till we got to the pile of 'light' iron. The same guy who's been there a bunch of times before was there, and asked (again) if it was all from the same yard. Yes, we told him (again). We don't know his name, but we've decided he looks like Mark Twain, with the very light blond hair and mustache. Well, not that Mark Twain had a mullet, per se. Still, it'd be a great Hallowe'en costume for the guy and would totally work.

All told, we made a decent amount of dough today, as the precious category this time included one and a half catalytic converters. (Yes, one and a half, as one was missing a 'biscuit' or something.) The 'light' iron load was actually more than we thought it would be, coming to 560 pounds, which puts our total for scrap iron removed from the property (since we've been keeping track, remember; before we were hauling it to the scrap yard we were just taking load after load straight to the dump) to 28,560 pounds, or 14.28 tons, and our thirty-third trip there.

The crazy thing about this load was that Tara pulled quite a bit of the stuff out of nowhere; seriously, like bits and pieces that were hanging between the rafters of the downstairs garage. Yes, the ceiling. If there's one thing hoarders can put their clever clever minds to it's figuring out how to store stuff. So it doesn't look like much has changed at all. So yeah, there's still more.

Oh and for those of you who are interested in a cat update, Splotch the Crazy One has since taken her kittens somewhere else. I don't know where, but I trust they are all right. I've been playing with and socializing the other little guy, and he's as normal a house-kitten as can be, and not afraid of me at all. We've decided we will properly adopt him (the other two cats are both over ten years old, and I like to overlap cats, so it's actually getting about time I had a new one). I'm going to take the introductions very slowly and carefully, as I'm not too sure about how Sir Isaac Mewton will react. He can get a little odd about things.

So here's the little guy:



He's got a name, by the way: Aleister Meowley. I can already tell we'll be calling him The Beast around here.