Tetanus Burger Combo Platter

Well on Monday it was time, once again, to saddle up the old Bus and git us to the scrapyard with another load of rusty hunks of rusty rust. This time it was a trailerful of the hideous remains of I think a Saab Sonett; although maybe it was a Citroën bit, I don't really know. It's a bit hard to tell once you get down to the, well, rust tacks I guess.

So Tara had loaded it up on the really very handy trailer and attempted to bungee it down along with some other jagged bits and I think some kind of axle something-or-other; with that and some assorted other things in the Bus itself, off we went:

(Pictures by Tara, except for the last one, which is by me.)

Now maybe I just have a tendency towards animism, but I swear when we got there and drove around back this time I could feel the Bus getting nervous. Somewhere deep in its little metal Soul it was screaming in terror that it, too, would be left there with the rotting and crushed bodies of so many other cars.

Or maybe that was just my (vivid) imagination; though the smell there that day certainly didn't help. I don't know quite what it was, whether it was foul rusty oily mud, fumes from the smelter, or an actual corpse (or ten) of dead and rotting deer in the nearby woods, but something smelled horrible. It was like paper-mill awful, if you've ever had the misfortune to smell one of those (Savannah, Georgia, I'm looking at you). It was really truly ghastly, and I was worried it would cling to my clothes. (It didn't, and I am very grateful.)

So holding our noses we drove around to the towering pile of rusty hunks of rusty rust, which is always different, and always huge, and never seems to go down very much, and unloaded the Bus. But then we got to the car piece on the trailer. We were standing there, trying to figure out an angle of attack, when one of the guys there asked if we wanted him to do it. The guy with THE CLAW.

Several years ago now we got a new septic system installed; and one thing I learned from the experience is that dudes with heavy equipment are always looking for excuses to use them. The guy digging the septic system asked us after he'd finished digging the GIANT HOLE in my backyard if there was anything else we'd like him to move. We had him bury a very large tree trunk along the stone wall, pick out some rocks, and anything else we could think of and he still came back for more. It's like the best toy ever and they just can't stop.

So when CLAW-guy asked we said Oh yes, thank you. And he got in the thing and one

two

three

up it went in the claw and off the trailer.

All told, though, it wasn't all that heavy; and so Monday's total only came to another eight hundred pounds even. Still that brings our total up to 38,800 pounds of iron removed since we've been keeping track (remember, there was plenty of iron that we just brought straight to the dump back in the day, too) or 19.4 tons. And it was our forty-sixth trip, which is absolutely ridiculous. We'll make fifty, easily, I know. Because, yeah, hey guess what, there is still more.

We generally take the back roads to the scrapyard, especially in the Bus, and being children of hoarders who now have a name for it, we do of course notice other hoarded houses along the way. There are at least three of them I can think of off the top of my head, maybe more, along that particular route.

One broken-down looking old house had piles and piles of Godsknow what covered with tarps in the yard; it almost looked like someone was preparing for a yard sale, but we knew that wasn't really true. And out in the driveway was an older guy, the hoarder himself I could just tell. He was standing by his car (with a stars-and-bars license plate), with the trunk open, like he'd just acquired some more junk. Though we were driving past I got a good look at him and the smug bastard look on his face. And I knew he was a hoarder.

I reflexively flipped him the bird while he watched us go by. We were just coming back from yet another goddamned trip to the scrapyard cleaning up after my hoarder asshole father, and to see that look on his face was just too much. Because I know what that asshole's family are going through living with him.

Anyway. I don't know how Tara's plan of getting that area by the shop cleared out before the first snowfall is going to go, as that's a Hel of a nor'easter pelting us out there; so far, though, it looks like it's just rain. Who knows what we'll wake up to, though. I've seen pictures of other places that got snow from this same storm.

And I guess there's just something about this nasty cold storm that gets the 'hunker down' instinct going, because this is what greeted me in the living room this evening:

That, my friends, is a five cat pile-up, with a sixth on top. It's been a while since I've mentioned the cats around here; they are doing well, though I've come in for rather a lot of schlepping giant bags of chow and tubs of litter. On the top is old Maude, who's been here forever; on the couch, left to right, are, (the back end of) Rory, Ratty, Danny, Aleister Meowley, and Zeffie, or Madamoiselle Zéphirine Chatonne-Gris, who ended up staying when the person who said she would give her a home flaked out on us. (Thanks; I appreciate that, really.) You can see, also, that Ratty is still living up to his name. Oh Ratty. Never change.