Tetanus Burger

To The Scrapyard

2012-02-24T21:33:00.004-05:00

So yesterday it was supposed to rain; the sky was a perfect blue. Last night it was also supposed to rain; we woke to a dusting of snow. New England knows how to keep her weathermen humble.

Now, Larry the Volvo station waggon has a few quirks; this is not news, I suppose. One of them is that he is absolutely, completely, tragically useless in even the tiniest dusting of snow. Though come to think of it he also has been known to stand there and spin his wheels pitiably given some wet grass and a bit of an incline. The snow thing, to be honest, baffles me: he does, after all, come from Sweden, a decent percentage of which country is north of the Arctic Circle. You'd, I don't know, think that maybe, just maybe they would have encountered snow there, I mean once or twice.

But that wasn't, it turned out, a problem today. Because instead of being a rear-wheel-drive big empty station waggon with no weight over the back wheels, Larry was once again full of rusty hunks of rusty rust, which, despite the rust, still weigh an awful lot.

That engine was the first thing we muscled into Larry; when Tara stepped back to look she noted it was riding kind of low. Poor Larry. We push him, we do.

At any rate, here's another shot of Larry's butt. And yes, that is an old junky unicycle on the top of the pile.

And so that was the forty-first trip to the scrapyard, ai yi yi yi yi, and adds another 640 pounds of scrap iron hauled away from this poor hoarded yard. It was one of the lighter loads despite the engine, since the Citroën bits were on the light but bulky side. Tara did excavate a bizarrely long section of pipe in amongst the cat briars which she then remarkably enough cut up with a dull Sawzall. And that brings us up to 35,180 pounds, or 17.59 tons of iron cleaned up, or at least 17.59 tons of iron for which we have receipts.

Yep. Still more out there.

Odd

2012-02-23T18:29:00.008-05:00

I will never understand quite how Tara's brain works. I'm all right with that.

Because yesterday, out of the apparent clear blue, she came by and started tearing a car apart, with more or less her bare hands. Well, bare hands and her trusty Sawzall, of course. Yes, the weather has been uncommonly warm, and yes, much like Everest it was there, and yes, we all work out our frustrations in different ways, and I suppose that's not any of my business, really, but still. It was odd.

Because Tara had, for some inexplicable reason, suddenly set her sights on Genviève, the green Citroën that's been hanging out over by the shed for the longest time. We've been focusing on that area lately, and have gotten most of it clean(ish), maybe that's why; with the rest of it gone Genviève is rather obvious now, especially since the weeds have all died down for the winter.

Or maybe Tara was just bored. She had, come to think of it, actually come over to burn some brush. But watching brush burn is, I suppose, not a whole lot more exciting than watching paint dry; and I guess Tara couldn't be expected to just stand there when there were power tools calling her name.

Now Genviève didn't actually look that bad. In fact I would have thought she was one of the more intact cars left, especially compared to the Bugs by the shop that have been there so long lichens have grown on them, and no, I'm totally not kidding. But look at her:

That looks like a proper car to me; compared to the rest of them in the yard why it even looks drivable!

Yeah well. Anyone who knows anything about Citroëns, and, unfortunately, that would include me, though I swear, it was not on purpose, knows that Citroëns can contain upwards of 94% rust and still look like a car, even though at that point the only thing holding them together is the tensile strength of the outer paint shell.

But once Tara actually looked at this one, she could see that even by her standards (which, honestly, are pretty low as far as cars go) Genviève's frame had actually rotted away from the inside some time ago.

So she started tearing it apart.

But then something else odd happened.

I looked up and there was an older man on his bicycle in my yard. Now that's not necessarily that unusual; sometimes people randomly stop by to ask about car parts, so Tara went over to talk to him.

A few minutes later Tara comes over to me, and tells me that the guy lives up the street, and had offered to cut up some downed trees for us. Except, he didn't want any money for it, and he didn't even want the wood; no, Tara said, the guy had said that he knew our dad from the Conservation Commission, and that he was a good man, and so he wanted to help.

I kind of just blinked, since I knew your father and Your father was a good man should, technically, be mutually exclusive; Tara did say that she'd told the guy dad was a hoarder. But she'd told him fine, go to town with the trees.

A while later the guy, who I'm going to be calling the Odd Samaritan, comes back with his chainsaw, and makes very short work indeed of the downed apple tree, and the broken limb on the bird cherry, which we hadn't been able to figure out how to approach, since it was this giant limb which was half driven into the ground when it broke.

Then he comes over to Tara to ask what else he can cut up. Tara points him in the direction of this giant pain in the ass stump that's been in the back of the shop forever that we haven't known what to do with; a minute or two later he's like More? and Tara takes him over to the other part of the yard.

Where our Odd Samaritan cuts up another downed tree, and a broken tree limb, and then further cuts down an entire dead bird cherry tree.

At that he comes back over and says he's done for the day. I just look at him. Did he get the chainsaw for Christmas? Has he run out of trees in his own yard to cut down? Does he drive by our house every day and is simply sick of looking at the downed apple tree? I don't know. I tell him thank you, and doesn't he want the wood? No, he says; he owed Dad a favor and was happy to help. My guess is that, like Tara, he had a power tool and just couldn't resist, even if it was someone else's yard.

He watched Tara taking bits off Genviève for a while, then asked her why she was doing that; people will just take cars away for you, you know. Tara told him there were parts she wanted to save off of it; then our Odd Samaritan said, "You take after your father." Oh snap! I thought, but managed not to say anything out loud.

And then the guy left.

Well, okay. Thank you, Odd Samaritan. He certainly saved us a lot of trouble.

But back to poor Genviève. I suppose other cars have nightmares about this kind of thing; it is a little gruesome to watch a car being dismantled like this, especially when said car had a name and all. But you know, I'm strong. I'm pretty sure I'm capable of not letting it bother me.

Here's the sequence from the side, starting with the same picture from above:

And then from the back; there was really not much more underneath it all than a pile of rusty rust. What a shock.

So with all that, guess what the plan is for tomorrow? That's right, an iron run mostly comprised of Genviève bits. Well, that and this crazy heavy rusty Triumph engine that we managed to muscle into poor long-suffering Larry. Said engine was once upon a time shown to the guy who bought the TR3A back in December, to see if he was interested. He took one look at it, then told Tara to "send it back to God;" Moloch, I assume, as it is destined to be sacrificed to the furnace.

It's been a while. We'll see if the guy at the scrapyard missed us.

Lucky Thirteen

2012-02-11T13:05:00.009-05:00

You know, our Rusty Jones is so determined, so tireless, so ruthless in his quest to rid this yard of rusty cars, that he won't even let a little thing like February in New England stop him. Now, granted, this has been an uncommonly mild winter so far, but still. Nothing much usually happens here in February.

So last week Rusty came and took away the old blue Saab 99, the one whose paint is officially called Caroline Blue, and so therefore the car has been called after it Caroline. I mean duh. This was another one that Tara hauled off to her own yard, and, while I disapprove I suppose in general, still, she's legally an adult and it's neither my business nor, and this is important, is it my problem.

So off Caroline went, out of my yard!

Here she is ready to go, up in the driveway, after being pulled up there with Tara's new Bug:

Here's a before picture from last summer, of where she was on the north side of the shed:

And the after, though it's not quite the same view. You can see we've also cleaned up around the area in general since:

And that, my friends, puts us as thirteen cars out of here and thirteen cars left, since we started this blog, anyway. If we count from the mid-nineties, well, I don't know but it's whatever seventy-eight minus thirteen is, more or less. My count, incidentally, may be a little off, as there are some, well, half cars here that I'm not sure how to tally. But for now I'm going to say we're at an even split, with fifty percent of the (recent) goal met. And that's pretty damned good!

On the kitten front (the lingering business that is taking so much of my time believe it or not), now it's just Zéphirine the shy kitten in the dining room. And with her brothers out of there, it was only a couple days before she decided she was lonely and came out begging for me to pet her. So she has, astonishingly, turned a corner, and in fact will now climb into my lap and demand to be pet. She's still pretty shy, though, and needs more work, but putting her back out as feral is thankfully no longer an option. She also has a home lined up, a friend of my mother's who knows cats and knows she's a shy one, which is good because I'm not sure she'll ever be up to the level of being able to handle a shelter situation, with all the other animals and the noise and smells and such. That friend won't be able to take her until the middle of March, which actually works out fine since that will give me time to get her solidly tame.

So there's a light at the end of that tunnel, finally, and yay!

The Tetanus Burger 2011 Year-In-Review

2012-01-09T23:19:00.011-05:00

Figured an annual tradition was the way to go, though I'm a week late. So let's see what we got accomplished last year, in our ongoing cleanup at the Best Little Hoardhouse in Massachusetts.

First up, our visits from Rusty Jones, when Rusty tooketh away a total of seven rusty hunks of rusty rust. I will admit that's not as many as I'd hoped, but, still, progress is progress:

Next a montage of all the iron and other junk metal we got out of here in 2011, featuring our stalwart Larry the Volvo station waggon and Tara's old red bus, who were admittedly somewhat worse for wear from all the haulin':

So I pulled out all the receipts (or at least the ones I could find) and added them up. Oy. Math.

So for the iron, the rusty hunks of rusty rust, the bulk of the metal we hauled out of here, the total comes to 9080 pounds, or 4.54 tons, and twelve trips to the scrapyard. Surprisingly enough my back (and Tara's as far as I know) seems to be okay.

Next the precious totals:

190 pounds of electric motors
109 pounds of sheet aluminum
77 pounds of magnesium
74 pounds of batteries
66 pounds of insulated copper
56 pounds of stainless steel
51 pounds of brass
48 pounds of aluminum wheels
18 pounds of insulated aluminum
14 pounds of copper
11 pounds of irony aluminum
7 pounds of transformers
7 pounds of irony aluminum radiators
7 pounds of zinc
and three and a half cats. Speaking of which—

I figured they deserved their own montage. They were (still are, since they are not all out of here yet) also a lot of work.

Top row: the one who started it all, grrrr, Spot the cat, with her first (that I know of anyway) two kittens, Splotch, and Smudge. You can probably figure out how they all got their names. Those are older pictures; they are since missing the the tips of their left ears, and their reproductive organs yay.

New row: Aleister Meowley, Spot's next (single kitten in the litter far as I know) one, then Splotch's batch: Morris Minor (since killed) and Austin.

Then in the next row, Healey and Spridget. Last in that row the first of Smudge's set, Ratty, who, is, yes, curled up in the chow bowl. Why? Because he's Ratty.

Then it's the other two from that litter, Danny Lyon and Maurice, back when he was Snotty. And then it's Rory, who is still in my dining room with his two littermates.

Those are (bottom row) Flufius Maximus and Mademoiselle Zephirine Chattonne-Gris, and no, I still don't know if she's a she, really. She's been really slow to warm up, though I did get to pet her today for the first time since she's been indoors. Wish me luck with that one. She's proving really, really shy.

All told, that was a lot of work in 2011, wasn't it? Goodness.

Go Me!

2011-12-30T21:20:00.008-05:00

If I do say so myself. I think I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Tonight I caught the last of the kittens, thanks to the local shelter letting me borrow a smallish trap. She (at least I've been assuming it's a she; I still don't really know) is in the dining room right now with her two brothers, Rory and the one I've been calling Flufius Maximus. (Latin, you know; in the Greek it's μεγαφλωφιος, if you're wondering.)

I'd caught the second one a couple weeks ago now. He was quite shy at first, enough that I wondered if he was ever going to warm up to me; but over time he saw Rory running to greet me purring like crazy and came to the conclusion that I was probably all right. Plus, I had ham.

So he, too, warmed up to me little by little until now he sits at my feet and mews at me to pick him up so he can also purr like crazy.

I took them in for their first round of shots &c at the shelter yesterday. They were very good with the car, and I am grateful.

Hopefully the two of them will be able to convince their younger sibling that I am okay in the same way. I don't know; this one has unavoidably been left till last and is probably older than is ideal. But I'm going to make a go at it.

I don't have a picture of the new little fluffy one, but I do have one to show you of her fluffy brother, Flufius Max, a.k.a. Fizgig, a.k.a. Young Scratch:

So with any luck, that should be about it for the feral cat situation around here, or at least as good as it's going to get. In theory, there shouldn't be any more unspayed mommy-cats showing up on my doorstep, since the ones that are here are an established family group and this is their territory. With luck.

ETA: Also, the three smaller ones we took in, Ratty, Danny, and Maurice are all neutered as of last week, so that part is done, too, yay.

But do you want to see something strange? I noticed about that time that Danny had two fangs on one side of his mouth, the top right side. I got a picture, even:

Well that's weird, I thought. Then I went and checked Maurice and Ratty, his littermates, and sure enough each one of them also had two fangs on the upper right. My guess is that it's a baby tooth thing and the grown-up teeth are replacing the littler fangs. It would make sense that keeping the fangs working at all times, even as they are being replaced would be a priority in a predator; lose one fang and maybe not make it through the winter, you know? I don't think it's some kind of shared genetic mutation; they are since back to one fang each in that spot. Still, who knew?

One Out One In

2011-12-06T15:39:00.010-05:00

Goodness! It's only been three days, yet who should show up again but our Rusty Jones? Our tireless, persistent, ever cheerful Rusty Jones. What a thoroughly decent man.

So today the red Saab convertible's lease on life was up. Or rather, it's lease on its parking spot in my yard was up. This one didn't actually get junked; it was simply moved to Tara's yard, where, since it is after all her car, she can do with it as she will. I suppose technically this could count as churning from Tara's point of view, but from mine I'd say it's all good, since it's no longer here at the Best Little Hoardhouse in Massachusetts, and that's what counts.

About a week ago we moved it to the driveway, to make getting it on a ramp truck easier. Here's the spot over by the shop where it had been for a while. I don't remember how long, but it was long enough to kill the grass under it.

And here it is up on the ramp truck in an action shot of it leaving the driveway:

Woo-hoo!

So that then puts us at twelve cars down, with fourteen to go. One more and we'll be at an even thirteen/thirteen split. (Why that's my lucky number!) It occurs to me now that if from here on in we can manage to get rid of one car a month, it'll be all done in a year or so. I hadn't thought of that.

*****

Now. On to the important stuff. Or at least the really, really cute stuff.

Because I have a couple more kitten pictures. When last we met, Splotch, Smudge and Spot, the three feral mommy-cats, had had their mommy abilities surgically removed, and all their previous kittens had been fostered and adopted, or were hanging out in the kitchen getting up to no good as permanent residents. That left the last batch of kittens, the ones Spot had sometime in September (though maybe it was October. It all kind of blurs together honestly, and kittens have a way of both slowing down and speeding up Time). At any rate, that's three more kittens to socialize and give up for adoption. The last three, knock on wood.

I feel I must clarify something, though. I got a bit mixed up with them, because two of them look exactly identical and at first I could not tell which was which. So one of them managed to get named twice, the bigger of the two extremely fluffy kittens. That was the one whose face looked like the grouchy old tom-cat Old Scratch, so I'd called him Young Scratch; he was also however the bigger of the two and I'd also named him Fizgig, not realizing he was the same kitten.

I am about 90% certain that that twice-named kitten is male. It is surprisingly hard to tell, because, seriously, his butt is just way too fluffy. It's all just a haze of grey fur which is hiding important details like oh the possible presence of testicles. But I got him to play a little and roll over and I think I spotted some.

The third of the three however has been quite shy and I still don't know. So it's 50-50 with that one. Though I'm paranoid it may never warm up to me; it really is quite shy. If it's male, then that's not a big deal; it'll just be a tom-cat, which, while not ideal, is still okay; if it's female, though, I will have to trap it and spay it or the whole thing starts all over again.

I do think that probably with some more work it will come around. I have played with it a bit, so the process is already under way. It's really a very dainty little thing, with a face that is much sweeter than Young Scratch's; if it's a girl, I shall call it Mademoiselle Zéphirine Chatonne-Gris. If it's a boy I'll have to come up with something else I guess.

Anyway last week I managed to entice Rory into walking into the cat carrier. I promptly shut the door on him then, though he didn't like that at all, hoo boy, and brought him into the house to the dining room, which is where we'd had the other kittens over the summer as it's out of the way and can be easily closed off from the rest of the house. Rory of course promptly spent the next twenty-four hours or so hiding in a corner, poor little guy.

I was worried about him, a bit, though I know that cats hate being moved into a new environment and it can take them a while to get used to it. Place and familiarity are so very important to them.

I needn't have worried, though. By the next night he was curled up in my lap, purring himself to sleep, and in the not quite a week since he's been inside he's really become a first-rate house kitten. He instantly knew just what the litterbox was for, I can walk around all tall and up on my twos and not freak him out, I can even pick him up now and he'll just purr and purr and purr.

I am hoping the next two will be as adaptable. I'm aiming to get Young Scratch inside in the next couple of days.

So anyway, you know you need some pictures. Here is Rory (code name: Rory Adorable) in his grey and white splendor. The grey spot on his right back foot, which envelops one entire toe, just kills me.

And the out-of-focus close-up:

He really is such a good little guy. Whoever adopts him is going to be one lucky, lucky person.

Triumphant

2011-12-03T17:02:00.008-05:00

I wasn't honestly sure I'd ever see this day. It was just too impossible, too far-fetched, too dreamlike. But remember: with Rusty, all things are possible.

For today was the day the Triumph TR3A, that poor sorry beat-up dry-rotted bondoed mess of a British car that has been hanging out in the upstairs garage since Time Immemorial (or at least since the late 80s), went away. And not only did it go away, someone actually gave us a pile of cash to take it away. That's right; the guy paid us money for it and brought his own trailer. (Well, his buddy's trailer).

Do you believe this? Here it is, out in the sunshine, something it hasn't seen in oh thirty years:

Ostensibly the guy is going to fix it up. Though frankly I've heard that one before. Still, it's no longer my problem, now is it? And for that I say REJOICE.

And here it is, up on the trailer, just prior to going away:

And now for the best part—feast your eyes on that big hunk of empty space. I don't think I have ever seen the garage look like that.

So that puts us at eleven rusty cars out of here, with fifteen left to go. Two more and we'll have gotten half of them out of here. Well, half of them counting from when I started this blog, anyway. If we start from the seventy-eight junk cars that were here when the yard was at its very worst in the mid 90s? That gives us sixty-three down, with fifteen to go. Which, doing the math out of curiosity, means we have gotten rid of 80.8% of the cars here since the mid 90s, and only have 19.2% of them left. That's pretty impressive, even if it's taken more than ten years now. So go us!

ETA: Swapped out the trailer picture because Tara sent me a better one. So if it looks different it's not you.

ETAA:Whoops, did the math wrong on that; I've fixed it above. I subtracted the eleven when it should have been the fifteen left.

We Came, We Sawzalled, We Conquered

2011-11-30T17:02:00.005-05:00

I have to give my mother some credit. Because for Tara's last birthday, my mother gave her a Sawzall. You know, the type of hand-held reciprocating saw that cuts up just about anything you can put your mind to. Boards with nails in them, hunks of fiberglass, old panelling, irritating neighbors and/or their Jack Russell terrier who just won't shut up oh my God I hate that thing, and of course, our specialty around here, rusty hunks of rusty rust.

Between the shop and the shed there is the front end of an old Citroën DS; it's been sitting there for ages. I mean at least I think that's what it is; it's a little hard to tell what with being a rusty hunk of rusty rust and all. But no more. Because today Tara took her trusty Sawzall, and hacked the thing up a treat.

Tara loves her power tools. Her enthusiasm is a little frightening, at times, to be honest. But so long as I stand back, and pray, she seems to get the job done just fine.

And so today we shoved the pieces (all except the engine proper, which is still too big and will need more bits taken off it probably) into good old Larry the Volvo station waggon and hauled it away. It would have gone into the Bus, except on the way over the other back bearing decided to start going pop-pop-grind-grind-grind-crunch. I suppose that's not surprising as the two back bearings were original to the car and therefore the same age and in the same state of wear; of course Tara sounded a little less than enthusiastic about doing that job again.

Here's Larry:

Though the pieces were rather big, still they were on the light end; and though it looked full enough it turned out to be one of the lighter loads we've taken, only weighing in at 460 pounds. Still, it brings our total up to 34,540 pounds of iron removed (at least; again, before we brought it to the scrapyard, where they give us proper receipts, we'd been bringing it straight to the dump. And we did more than a few of those loads let me tell you), or 17.27 tons. And, this time marks our fortieth trip, which, honestly boggles even my brain, and I'm sorta used to it around here. And of course, ha ha need you even ask? THERE IS STILL MORE.

I didn't really get a proper before, but here's a shot of the same area from a little over a year ago. The thing Tara Sawzalled up is that dark hulk on the left. The other stuff has been going away a little here and a little there over the summer.

And here's today's 'after', from more or less the same viewpoint (note Tara's energy drink over there on the right, directly in line with the tree trunk):

It's getting there.

Rust Bus Run

2011-11-21T19:09:00.005-05:00

Well, after resorting to a blowtorch, the freezer, and a Sawz-all, Tara finally got the back bearings out of the Bus. You know, the ones that were going pop-pop-grind-grind-grind-crunch for a while there. And so she was then able to put a new set in, hurrah. Which means that today, finally, after rather a protracted period of parole, the Bus was back to its purgatorial task of haulin' junk. So after muscling some sort of engine block (don't ask me what kind; they all look the same to me) and the cart it had been sitting on into the thing, off we went. Here's the side view:

And a close up of the usual rusty hunks of rusty rust:

We also got rid of several old vacuum cleaners, ones that we would have thought were enticingly vintage; except when Tara put them up on Craiglist, no one seemed to care, or if they seemed to, never came through. So they went too, and the flakes of the world missed their chance. Which, I suppose they do most of the time, don't they. Poor flakes.

It was a moderately warmish day today for November in New England; and, yes, I have to admit, the air coming out of the defrosters just inside the windshield of the Bus was kinda warmish. Though perhaps the word is more like warmesque. It did appear to have increased by maybe half a dozen degrees (Fahrenheit, let's not get ahead of ourselves here). So while that is certainly a step in the right direction, still I can't in good conscience call it heat.

So it was the usual not-particularly-comfortable ride in the thing. But it's done now! Although, Tara has already said she wants to start putting stuff aside for the next iron run in a few days (holiday notwithstanding I guess). Because, yes, there is still more. Duh.

So, even though it doesn't look like a whole lot in the pictures, today's total was a solid 1080 pounds of iron, to bring our totals up to 34,080 pounds of iron, or 17.04 tons removed so far, and marks our 39th trip to the scrap yard since we've been keeping receipts, which has been about three and a half years. I can imagine we easily have another ten or so. Well, okay, I can't imagine it, since I can't imagine this place actually clean, since that state has never existed in my lifetime, but at any rate I don't see how ten more trips would finish it off. So we'll hit fifty trips, sooner or later.

Fifty. Holy crap.

Interview Up

2011-11-06T14:43:00.003-05:00

Also, I have apparently been completely out to lunch for the last couple of weeks: the Writing Goddess over at OCPD - Scattered Thoughts from the Front Lines has an interview with me up over there. I mean it's not like I didn't know I'd been interviewed, I just hadn't realized she'd posted it. I have been totally out to lunch.

Warning: there is rather a lot of honesty involved.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Quick Note

2011-11-06T14:07:00.006-05:00

I am very pleased to announce that Spot the Cat's kitten-making machine days are now officially over.

Friday I brought her in to the clinic, after trapping her Thursday night, which, hoo boy was a job. What with her skittishness, and Smudge and Splotch's lack of skittishness, she just wasn't going in the trap. For a while there it was everybody but her, including her little kittens, who, luckily enough, don't nearly weigh enough to set the thing off. But still, I'd put the tuna out and everybody but Spot would gobble it right up.

But I got her, finally, around eleven-thirty pm, after having started the whole endeavour around five-thirty.

I put her in the garage overnight, with a sheet thrown over the trap to calm her down. When I went to get her in the morning, though, the sheet was gone. The trap was closed, and she was still in there, but for a moment there I thought she'd pulled some weird Houdini disappearing thing.

Then I looked closer. Somehow, through the night, she'd managed to pull the entire sheet into the trap with her. Not a corner of it was sticking out. The wires in the cage are like an inch apart, and yet, there it was, neatly inside the cage, fluffed up into a little nest, in the middle of which was Spot, clearly satisfied about the whole thing.

Anyway, just thought I'd note her new lack of a uterus. She's the last of the three mothers, so they are now all taken care of. And guess what? I haven't seen (or smelled) a tom-cat in ages. I'd have thought they'd stick around for the friskies, but no, female cats in heat are higher on the priority list. Who knew.

Now it's on to Spot's kittens. There are actually three of them, though I haven't gotten any good pictures yet to show. There is the little grey and white shorthair (the one who was climbing the tire a couple posts down), who I have named Rory, after Rory Pond, and there is the little fluffy one called Young Scratch; and then there is the big fluffy one who is Young Scratch's bigger, fluffier twin who I am calling without any exaggeration at all Fizgig.

I am working on them now, playing with them and bringing them food and such; they are pretty skittish, still, though they are better than Aleister was, and I managed to socialize him just fine. Aleister, in fact, is a total absolute trusting sweetie. You can (well I can) hold him in your arms and he'll just sit there. He'll even start to groom himself he is so comfortable with being held. (I'm really, very proud of the job I did with him. I mean, I know, his personality has a lot to do with it, but it was work.) So hopefully quite soon I will be able to grab them and bring them inside, get them their shots, de-fleaed, all that. They look healthy so far, and very importantly, have no eye infections.

As for the yard clean-up, it's been on hold a little as we've all been having car troubles and that's been the priority (as well as cleaning up downed tree limbs from that freak snowstorm we had). Tara did yank some of the giant ugly creosote-soaked posts out from where the Pen was over by the shop, but we wanted to make more progress over there first. There isn't much to show just yet.

Kitten Addendum

2011-10-13T00:10:00.005-04:00

Just as an update on what-all is happening/has happened to the older kittens around here:

Healey and Spridget went off to the shelter, finally; I don't know how quickly they were adopted but I'm quite sure they've found lovely homes by now. Tara took Austin, so I get to see him here and there still. When she brought him to her house he was (of course) all wigged out being in a different place; but one of her other cats, a real sweetie named Xander, pestered her and pestered her to let him in to Austin's room, so, after some thought, she did.

Austin immediately came out of hiding, tail up, and proceeded to fall in love with Xander, and Xander with him; since then they've been fast friends, and Austin is doing quite all right.

The other four, well, I'm keeping them myself. There are various reasons, some of which are rather long stories all on their own, but as the house is big enough, we'll do all right. I do figure it is in part my responsibility to take them in if I at all can, since they come from my yard; the fewer going into the overburdened shelter system the better chances other kittens (and cats) have.

Would you believe this:

That grey and white cat on the left bottom is Aleister Meowley, who has already been neutered, yay. The top yellow kitten is Danny Lyon, who, let it be said, purred all the way through his last vet appointment. Well, almost all the way through; they did take his temperature after all. But for the rest of it there he was standing on the exam table purring up a storm. (And no, it wasn't that scared purr cats sometimes make, though I've never heard it. The vet himself said, his eyebrows raised, 'No, that's a happy kitten purr.') I'm surprised I made it home with him; the vet techs were so in love it's a wonder they didn't try to sneak him out the back.

The next one down is the Kitten Formerly Known As Snotty, now thankfully just Maurice.

And that grey one on the right? That handsome, handsome grey and white kitten with the green eyes? That, my friends, is Ratty.

I guess it was just an Ugly Duckling phase after all.

Event

2011-10-12T22:17:00.006-04:00

Now it may seem like all kittens all the time around here lately, though I suppose I won't apologize for that because if you're going to start complaining about kitten pictures, well. But there is still a yard around here that has things other than kittens in it.

Like old Volkswagen parts. Well, okay, most of those weren't in the yard, per se, but in places like the garage (upstairs and downstairs), the shop (up and down), the shed (again, up and down, though they've been having to share the upstairs with a few raccoons lately) and the cellar, not to mention the breezeway, on occasion.

So this past Sunday Tara and I bundled both ourselves and more than a few boxes of parts up into her old red VW bus and got up to that annual old VW festival we've been hanging out at a couple of years now. You remember the one. The one we made a killing at last year.

The day promised to be unseasonably warm. The morning was a bit cool, of course, and so I wore long pants. I didn't wear my jeans, as I figured it would be too hot, but I didn't think long pants would be too much.

I way, way, way, overdressed.

It was really really freakin' hot. And sunny, too; and where we ended up setting up on the showfield there was no shade at all. And given that, like last year, people immediately swarmed over as soon as we started unpacking, we didn't get much of a break. Well, Tara didn't get much of a break; I was a bit freer to say run off and buy bottles of water since I wasn't the one setting the prices and can't, really, talk knowledgeably about the stuff. Which is fine, great, even; it means I've successfully repressed all that old VW blather my father used to keep up incessantly. Go me.

Check out this spread:

I did feel a little sorry for the vendors to either side of us. Next to what we had, they had nothing much at all. Then again, one might look at that as just the tiniest bit of payment for growing up with a hoarder father, and dammit I'll take what I can get.

We even got a nibble on that old Triumph TR3A that's been sitting in the garage for a couple decades now. We'll see if it pans out, but it would be great to get that thing out of there. I still have plans to turn the garage into a wood shop one of these days.

Poor Tara, though. By the end of the day she wasn't quite right. I know, I know, So what's new? har har. But in the restaurant afterwards she drank glass after glass after glass of water before she got her core temperature cooled enough to feel all right. Dehydration can really sneak up on you, and that's not good. But she was all right in the end. Well, you know, as far as I can tell.

All in all we did pretty well this time, though not quite as stupendously as last year. Still, it was a decent chunk of cash and will enable me at least to pay off my tab at the local cat shelter/kitten clinic.

The crazy thing is that even with all the stuff we must have sold, I can't really tell that the amount of stuff went down all that much. I mean it must have; we did get to throw away a couple of moldy boxes and consolidate the rest. But the bus looked just as full on the way back as it had on the way up.

I guess that's not necessarily bad. People will actually pay for this particular type of stuff. But how long is this going to take?

The Plan

2011-10-12T20:21:00.011-04:00

My father could argue with a lot. His arguments, in fact, could be absolutely completely stone-cold-from-another-planet illogical (not to mention more selfish than the average three-year-old's), but that made no difference to him. Of course; the main point was to defend and justify the hoard at all costs. Logic was such a little thing.

But somehow, my father couldn't really argue with gardens. I don't know why; he certainly didn't care about flowers. And usually he didn't care about anyone else at all or what they wanted (or what they needed, as in actual physical needs). But something about the amount of effort involved with gardens meant he would generally leave them alone. Or at least he did when he got older, after he retired.

It was about then, when he was in his late seventies, that he was persuaded (by Tara, and I don't begin to fathom how she did it) to actually start getting rid of some of the junk cars around here. I don't know why. I don't know if being retired made some kind of difference to his thinking, or if he started to not care so much anymore because he was older, but in the late 90s and early years of the 2000s he and Tara started, in earnest, to get rid of some of the cars.

I was back here by then. And I was afraid, with good reason, that these newly clear areas would soon get refilled with junk, either through new acquisitions, or through shuffling other crap around. So I made a plan.

It was a loose plan, but it worked. When he moved a car, or a pile of junk, or wood, or whatever, I planted a garden. Now not everywhere, of course; just in the places that made sense, like along the back of the studio, or in front of the shop. And, because we're talking about me, that means I double-dug those gardens, and hauled in compost from the dump er recycling center, and bought the plants myself and everything. I don't know why it worked, but it did. Somehow, and in a way I would have thought completely uncharacteristically, he was actually able to accept that I would have some kind of legitimate grievance if he then parked a car in front of (or on) that nice new garden I put in.

Honestly I still don't know why that should have worked. Maybe he just got tired in his old age, I don't know. But it did.

So when my sister rented a wood chipper (oh my gawd the warning icons on those things!) and reduced the giant pile of brush sorta kinda over by the shed to nothing much at all, I immediately claimed that space for my vegetable garden.

It's still there, though this year it was rather neglected, both because I was busy with kittens and because even though I managed to rabbit-proof and groundhog-proof the thing there was no chance of it being deer-proof. The fence just isn't high enough.

But I was out there today anyway trying to see if maybe there was some kind of harvest I could make, it being the day before grocery shopping and so a bit of a scrounge in the kitchen.

And as I was wondering I saw Spot. Spot the Cat. Spot the mother cat who had some kittens presumably about three weeks ago now. I hadn't seen her for a few days and was worried she'd do one of her disappearing acts, like she did this summer. Because, you see, she's scheduled to be hysterectomized at the end of the month, when those presumed kittens are around five weeks old, old enough to eat solid food and be without her for the day or so it takes to trap, spay and release her.

She was just sitting there, curled up over by a tree not far away. She was watching me, but not moving, which is a bit unlike her. She's pretty skittish usually, though she is one of the ones who will come all the way up into the breezeway for some cat food.

She was just sitting there, watching me. And I realized that probably meant that her kittens were not far away, probably in one of the junk cars around there.

So there I was standing at my garden fence, just by that brown Saab that has been moved from out back, wondering.

And then two little grey kittens came out from under the car, right by my feet.

I was shocked. Not that there were kittens after all (though I was certainly surprised to have found them without even trying), but that they didn't look very young at all. I had figured they should be about three weeks old now; but these were walking around just fine, and though they were quite round they were steady on their feet. They looked more like five weeks old to me.

I guess my math was off rather a bit. Which means that old Spot can be getting fixed sooner, rather than later, probably. So now I am going to see about getting her an appointment for next week.

Later I came out with some food and my camera. As far as I can see there are two of them, or two of them brave enough to come out into the open a little, anyway. I suppose I don't know that there aren't more.

The braver of the two is in the front here:

There is a tom-cat around here I've been calling Old Scratch, which is, actually, a name for Satan himself. Old Scratch (the cat) is kind of a grumpy-looking thing and a bit rough around the edges. I think he may be the father, since this second one is rather a dead ringer:

I am naturally (and provisionally) calling the second one Young Scratch. To be fair, he only looks like an evil grump in this particular picture. Otherwise he looked like a fine young cute little kitten, in a lovely dark smoky grey with the loveliest little silver feet.

I did manage to get a decent look at the first one's butt, and he is quite certainly a boy. The other one I'm not sure; s/he may be female, actually.

Here they are together:

Not long after I took that picture the little grey-and-white guy started climbing the tire of the Saab. Would you look at that:

I was surprised because I really didn't see how they could be that old, since as far as I know a kitten has to be about five weeks old to be doing that. I don't know. I've since googled kitten pictures by age and I don't think they can possibly be any younger than four weeks.

So, here's the plan. It's the usual one.

-Get Spot to somehow get herself into a trap, again. This may be a bit tricky as I've already caught her once and she naturally enough didn't really care for the experience, though I let her go once I saw she was lactating. I figure tuna will be my friend here.

-Win those kittens over and then get them inside. This will depend on how friendly they already are; with Splotch's set they just ran right up to us, but with Aleister, who is Spot's kid, it took a lot of work and patience.

-Foster and socialize them, then get them to the shelter to get their shots &c and eventually let them be adopted. Thankfully their eyes seem nice and clear, i.e. no infections.

Oddly enough I would have thought that would sound overwhelming; after all it's what I've been doing all damned summer. But I feel glad and relieved to have found them. Because if this gets done that's it, and it feels like the home stretch. Because in this case, hopefully, knock on wood, this is not a case of there is always more.

Wish me luck. Again.

Spotted

2011-09-29T21:56:00.004-04:00

You remember all those kittens, right? And you remember the mother cats who gave birth to them, right?

It all started with a cat named Spot, after the big triangular grey spot on her nose.

Spot, bless her heart, is the one who originally showed up in my breezeway last December, her three little kittens in tow. And in the early spring she had Aleister; but not long after that she looked to be pregnant again. A kitten-making machine, our Spot, her modus operandi being to give birth to them and then abandon them on my doorstep. Thanks, Spot.

But then she disappeared. I had assumed at first that she was off somewhere I couldn't find nursing her kittens; but something like three and a half months went by and I saw neither her nor any sign of any kittens. I honestly thought she was dead, and even went as far as to break the news to Aleister.

Then about a week and a half ago I look out the glass door into the breezeway and there she was like nothing happened. She was not even a little bit dead; however she did look like she could be a little bit pregnant, maybe. Great.

The next time I saw her though she looked perfectly normal; not scrawny, but not roundish either.

That's when I finally got my hands on some traps, after calling and calling and calling every local charity, animal shelter, and animal control office I could think of. It was Boston that came through, though they aren't particularly local and are a bit of a drive. Luckily though Tara was going over there one night and picked them up for me.

So last night I set them up, with the irresistible bait of some nice smelly tuna. And to my surprise the first one who showed up was not one of the grouchy old tom-cats like Old Scratch, but shy skittish Spot herself. She found the tuna on the plate outside the trap, then followed her nose to the little dollop just at the mouth of it; she gobbled that up then walked a couple steps to the second dollop, a little further in; then on to the third one, just before the trigger-plate. And there I stood in the hallway looking out at her with my fingers crossed holding my breath hoping hoping hoping; and then she stepped all the way in to scarf down the prize of the big pile of tuna way in the back.

And triggered the plate and the door came crashing down and hey presto! she was trapped.

I ran out there and threw a sheet over her so she'd stop freaking out, because she was, rather.

After she calmed down I picked up the trap, because I needed to see something. After a few minutes she finally moved enough so I could see her belly, and sure enough, she had some serious nipples going on there. She was lactating. Which means she has had a litter of kittens, somewhere hidden in this yard or nearby. They would be, I'd guess, not much more than a week old right now. And since week-old kittens cannot survive without their mother for the twenty-four hours she'd be away from them if I were to bring her in and get her spayed, I let her go. I didn't have much choice. I don't know if I'll ever get her in a trap again.

After Spot scrambled off to who knows where, I set the trap again. A few minutes later Splotch saunters up the stairs. Intrigued by the inviting scent of the additional tuna I'd put out, sure enough, one, two, three there she goes into the trap, all the way to the back, stepping on the catch plate.

Except this time nothing happens. The door stays open.

I stand there and curse.

I open the door and Splotch of course runs off. I reset the stupid thing, with more tuna, this time making sure the door is barely held open by the catch. The traps I did get a hold of are larger and sturdier than the usual Havahart traps; I think they are really designed for larger animals, and so maybe these little feral cats just don't weigh enough.

I went back to waiting. Sure enough Splotch is back in a couple minutes; and having learned that the trap—I mean luxury dining quarters filled with free tuna—is safe, has no problem walking right in all the way to the back. This time the damned thing snaps shut and Splotch proceeds to freak out. I throw the sheet over it and she calms down. In a couple minutes I put her in the garage and set up the second trap.

It took Smudge a while but she eventually came by. And sure enough, she didn't set the thing off first try, either. But I got her on the second try.

So after staying overnight in the garage, with no food after midnight, they got packed up in the car stupidly early this morning to go to a clinic in Rhode Island. I dropped them off and then picked them up this afternoon. They are now missing both the tip of their left ears and, and this is very important, their uteri. Splotch, by the way, was already pregnant.

So that's two of them, anyway. Yay.

They are now in the garage again, recovering for a day or two, after which I'll let them go. I imagine they'll eventually forgive me, especially since I have a big bag of cat chow I'm willing to share.

The lady at the shelter said to try again for Spot in a month's time, when her kittens are five weeks old. If, that is, she doesn't just disappear again. And if she brings her new kittens by, if they survive (Aleister was apparently either an only child, which I've never heard of, or the only one in his litter who survived), well then here we go again because I'll have to catch them and socialize them, and foster them and give them up for adoption and all that all over again. Because if I don't—it will never stop.

Wish me luck.

Ironing It Out

2011-09-16T22:19:00.005-04:00

A couple of days ago must have seen that rarest of conjunctions, Mercury, Mars, and ex-planet Pluto aligning with the galaxy just by Orion's belt; for, a couple of days ago, Tara got a sticker on the bus. And it wasn't the kind with a big red R on it.

Well, rather, she managed to scotch-tape and bondo the thing together for the fifteen minutes it takes to pass inspection. Which is no small feat, don't get me wrong.

Of course, later, as she was crowing about how everything now actually worked on the Bus, I noticed a tail light that didn't. However a quick whack to the back of the thing and it came back on.

But wait! I hear you say, hasn't she been driving it for like a year now?

Why yes. And?

So today we took the thing on its first legal trip to the scrapyard, loaded up with the bits and bobs of 'precious' metals, as well as a fair amount of regular old iron. Most of the precious being a pile of old wiring and some VW generators, and including a prized catalytic converter. Although, looking at the receipt now, I don't see that particular precious thing on there, though I see something labelled 'Aftermarket' that net us a whole $5, about $70 less than a cat should fetch. I will call them in the morning; the guy who sorted our stuff looked to be new, as I didn't recognize him and he had to ask the other guy what some of the codes were. I will assume it was an honest mistake for the time being. We shall see what they say tomorrow.

At any rate even with that omission which will be cleared up even if I have to use my Scary Bitch Voice (trust me, it's handy sometimes), it was a decent haul. Here's the side view of the bus:

That hunk of rust at the bottom may look unassuming, but Tara assures me it was so freakin' heavy it required an elaborate system of levers and platforms to inch it up high enough to get it inside.

Also, we're apparently being haunted, to judge by that 'orb' left bottom. I suppose it's just the Ghost of Volkswagens Past. Those poor shades do linger about the place, even with the best efforts of that most excellent exorcist Rusty Jones.

And here's the back view:

Those cylinder things are the old VW generators, which are also way freakin' heavier than they look, apparently being made of either dwarf star alloy, or that stuff in the little cube that Avon opted to shove out the airlock instead of Vila. I mean, not that it was his first choice.

At any rate it was our thirty-eighth trip to the scrapyard, and we got rid of another 620 pounds of iron, bringing the total of iron removed from the property since March 2008 up to 33,000 pounds even, or 16.5 tons.

Ai yi. There's still more.

Bug Out

2011-09-01T18:30:00.007-04:00

Well it's been a while, I have to say. I was beginning to wonder if maybe our dear old Mr. Jones had forgotten all about us. Why I was fixin' to have my heart broke, I was. But he came through, old stalwart Rusty.

But not before he had a bit of a tease with us. A couple of weeks ago my sister ran into someone interested in buying one of the old Bugs. Now, I'm not sure there's much left to the things, as I'm pretty sure the only thing holding them together at this point is rust molecules and memory, but I wasn't going to argue with someone who would pay us actual money for the thing. Ostensibly the guy is going to make a rat rod out of it, which, if you don't know what those are, is I think a hot rod that looks like a piece of crap. And no, I can't fathom why anyone would want to do that.

But someone does. Someone who cut a check, which cleared. So we moved the thing out from behind the shop up to the driveway, so it could be picked up more easily, without someone having to manoeuver a ramp truck down back.

They were going to pick it up a couple Tuesdays ago.

That Tuesday came and went. Then they were going to pick it up last Saturday.

Well, we had a hurricane coming, and so the Bug stayed where it was.

Now, yes, hurricanes are a bit of an exceptional circumstance. Still, I was a bit worried about it, especially when I heard that the guy was trying to get it home when his wife wasn't looking. Crap, I thought, we've just enabled another hoarder. Or at least an inconsiderate jerk, you know?

I was also worried because it was beginning to sound an awful lot like something that has happened before. My father, way back in the day, once sold a pair of I think Spitfires to some guy. Who paid for them. They even ended up in the driveway, I assume to make it easy for the guy to come and get them.

He never came.

And when I say never, I mean the damned things sat there for ten or fifteen years. I still haven't heard anything from the guy; dude's probably dead.

But it put them in this weird limbo. My father, never one to throw anything out anyway (just in case you hadn't heard), of course couldn't even imagine touching them at all since they were officially someone else's; so there they sat. Couldn't junk 'em, and certainly couldn't move them, since the guy could come by at any time. No, it doesn't make sense. Nothing much did, with my father.

I think we did eventually junk them, finally. At any rate they aren't here now, that's for damned sure.

Of course with this blue Bug I was going to give the guy a bit of a chance. Like I said, I understand about hurricanes. But if I started getting the runaround I was perfectly willing to start charging the guy rent for the use of my driveway, say $100 a week. Yeah, I'm dead serious. I have no patience for that kind of crap anymore, as you may well imagine.

But today when I got back from an appointment the thing was no longer there. I don't recall noticing it when I left, come to think of it, and since yesterday I didn't even get out there to the driveway I'm honestly not sure when it went away. But it's gone now, and that's what counts.

So, here's a before, of the spot over by the shop:

And the after:

I do love me some empty space.

So that puts Rusty's countdown at ten rusty cars down, with sixteen of the damned things to go. We've cracked the double digits, hey. And this one was special (well, to me, anyway), because it was one of those damned old Volkswagens, which you've probably heard by now that I hate hate hate. So it's extra wonderful to see one of those things go.

*****

As for the kittens:

They are all still here, though two of them were scheduled to go last Friday to the no-kill shelter to be adopted out. Except of course the exact two who were to leave miraculously came down with diarrhea the day before. A little too convenient, if you ask me. It's been this whole crazy juggling act where as soon as I think I've got one thing under control another thing pops up, since they can't go anywhere until they get the all-clear healthwise, i.e., no fleas, no eye infections, and have had all their shots and meds. But whatever they had wasn't contagious (I have my suspicions that they chewed on a Christmas cactus they shouldn't have been able to reach), and wasn't even toxic, just disagreeable, since they are now fine and will Gods willing go to a nice lovely home via the posh shelter in the northern part of the state, where, I heard, the last batch of kittens the local shelter brought up there were adopted out within an hour!

We've been keeping Aleister and Splotch's batch in the dining room, which given the way this house is built puts the windows in the back right at ground level by the patio. Now, I feel I must publicly apologize to Splotch (well, not that she reads blogs, I don't think) for assuming she was a bad mother. Because she has been outside that dining room window every day looking in on her kittens. She has in fact taken to sleeping on the other side of the screen, on what there is of a windowsill on the outside, and when her kittens mew for whatever reason she brrrrtts! right back, all concerned. She has also, on occasion, left dead mice on that windowsill, even though her kittens can't reach it and have plenty of tasty Kitten Chow of their own. So, I'm sorry I doubted you, Splotch. You are a good, good, mommy-cat.

Kittens

2011-08-04T18:17:00.014-04:00

So. About those kittens.

We've brought them inside for now, with the intent of giving them up for adoption later. Unfortunately there are only seven of them now, as sweet Morris Minor was killed, probably by a coyote. I hadn't thought they were in that kind of danger, but I was wrong. He was a real sweetie, and so very friendly. Poor guy.

Not that any of this is much to do with the hoarding situation here, though I suppose the whole junk car thing and the open shed means the local feral cats can find plenty of shelter here.

But I thought y'all might like to see some pictures of them. Because, I mean, really: kittens!!

First of course is good old Aleister Meowley, who is at a very handsome thirteen weeks old:

It's that built-in eyeliner. It's irresistible.

Then there is Splotch's batch, the three that are left. They are around nine weeks old. These are the ones who were born in the back seat of an MG Midget and are named after cars. There is Austin (pardon the blurriness of that image; he simply would not sit still):

And Healey (what a face!):

And her sister Spridget, with her little Girl Hitler moustache:

The lady at the shelter marked them all down as long-haired when I took them in last week to get them de-wormed and de-fleaed. I can never tell when they are little, but I'll take her word for it.

Then there is Smudge's set, who are just six weeks old today, which in my fairly extensive experience with kittens is when they hit the absolute pinnacle of adorability. This first one has been dubbed Dennis the Third, as we have in the past had two solid yellow cats named Dennis (the Menace, of course). But while he certainly fits the pattern I'm thinking maybe his name is really Danny Lion. My mother, just last night, announced that she had fallen in love with him and didn't want to give him up. So he may be staying too.

Then there's his brother. Poor thing; when he was a few weeks younger he had a terrible raging eye infection, enough so that his eyes were glued shut and rather swollen. I got them open, but (and I recommend you avert your eyes NOW if you don't want to be grossed out), they were filled with either pus or mucus which just oozed and oozed. But I got them clean, and kept them clean, and he's since had antibiotics. He's still a bit sniffly, but is much much better (and not blind, which can happen when the infections are that bad, so I hear). His name is probably officially Maurice, in memory of Morris Minor, but the nickname he's ended up with is of course Snotty.

And then there's the last one, the little grey one who had the nasty cuterebra parasites. The one I bottle-fed for a week and a half or so. The one I thought was a girl. It's still remarkably enough a little hard to tell; I think that's a little knob of something under its butt-hole, but I could be wrong. I would not be surprised if it's a little delayed compared to its brothers. It is an odd one, that's for sure. Not, mind you that it's, well, slow, or anything, as it's healthy and running around and playing and all just like everyone else, but, well. It just has this way of looking at you all wobbly. Maybe the wounds on its neck have made the muscles there a little weak for the time being, I don't know.

It still doesn't have a name. It's gone through some nicknames, sure, mostly to do with its oddness. Stuff like Sticky, Icky, Stinky, when it was completely covered in formula; but even since I gave it a good bath with baby shampoo it just doesn't look quite right. We've also been calling it Twitchy and Tweaky, as well as Sméagol, but the current name it's got is Ratty. I mean, look:

It's better than it was, certainly. At least it looks kind of like a kitten now.

Which isn't to say it isn't a sweetie, of course. When you pick it up it instantly purrs like crazy and then starts rolling around in pure delight, all while looking at you adoringly. Or, well, at least it does that for me, but then I bottle fed it.

And not like it isn't here to stay, rattiness or not. I do hope it's just an Ugly Duckling phase, though. Cause, man. Look at that thing!

Leap of Faith

2011-08-04T16:05:00.004-04:00

Despite the fact that the two of us are leaving on a road trip tomorrow and still have like a gazillion things to do, Tara felt we could squeeze another iron run in today. I do sometimes wonder just how much her world view is colored by the energy drinks she apparently mainlines; but despite the tight schedule there we were filling up the bus again with rusty hunks of rusty rust, which this time included an actual rusty bucket of bolts. As well as some aluminum, brass, copper and a good old double-biscuited catalytic converter, which was most excellent.

All told it was a smallish load, as far as the iron part of it went anyway. Still, when we add on the 560 pounds of iron, from our thirty-seventh trip to the scrapyard, it brings our total up to 32,380 pounds, or 16.19 tons. And yeah, there's still more.

Back view:

And side view:

To top it all off, by which I mean, literally, piled on all the other stuff in the bus like a cherry on a rust fudge sundae, we also got rid of the dryer.

Now, that may not seem like a big deal. So let me explain.

In the old days under my father's, well, regime, as in, the way things are run by a totalitarian dictator, if the belt broke on the dryer, which is what it did a couple of weeks ago, not only would there be no chance of fixing it, there would also be no chance of throwing it away. Now in the case of this dryer, true, it's pretty much unfixable, or, really, way too much of a pain in the ass to bother with, as the broken belt is in this crazy impossible place. Which Tara knows because she looked.

My father, on the other hand, would have just assumed it could not be fixed. Or, well, not quite: he would have assumed it was a huge impossible deal to fix, but he would also have assumed he was capable of doing it nonetheless. Not, of course, that he would actually fix it, oh no of course not. And not that he would let anyone else fix it either, as that would involve spending money on something that he could do, and as I believe I have said more than a few times already he was a miserly bastard. So it would have sat there.

And because it was 'fixable', even if, realistically, it was never ever going to be fixed, no one would be allowed to get a new one, either, since we had what my father considered a perfectly good dryer. Yes, that's right: in his eyes it was of course still perfectly good. Even though it didn't work. Even though pretty much it was never going to work again. And of course if anyone had the temerity to remind him that he had said he was going to fix the dryer and when do you think you might want to do that? he would freak right out and go straight to ranting about how he didn't have time now, or he had all these other things to do, or he couldn't do it because he had to do this this and that first, and anyway everyone always nags him and didn't he have any rights and you couldn't make him! Yes, seriously. That sounds an awful lot like a badly behaved five year old to me now, though of course we didn't see it then. And yet he had so much power over us.

So in the end we would have been dryerless for years, most likely. And since he didn't do laundry, he didn't exactly care, did he. It would only make our lives miserable, and we didn't count.

But anyway. Back to the way things are now.

So the both of us are going on this road trip, and won't be back for a couple weeks; so the plan is (since we have a lot on our plates already) to find a working one via Craigslist after we get back. My mother has said she can wait and doesn't mind hanging clothes out for a little while. Me, I find it a huge pain, and am frankly sick of towels that feel like sandpaper and underwear that feels like cardboard, but hey, it's her butt, right?

But even though we didn't have a replacement lined up, there we were hauling the old one to the scrapyard. That kind of thinking, the thinking that allows there to be a gap, a space in time between one step and the next, would have been completely impossible for my father. Because what it comes down to is a leap of faith. Faith that the universe moves, and faith that it will, that we will, actually follow through.

The Treasury

2011-07-21T21:22:00.008-04:00

We weren't even looking for it, you know; what we were trying to find last Friday was a little grey kitten who was late for her doctor's appointment. But when Tara removed a jumbled woodpile from the little hollow under the breezeway stairs and peered in, this is what she saw:

In Tara's* own words:

"At first I could see nothing, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the space within emerged slowly from the mist, strange shapes, metal, and rust—everywhere the glint of rust.

"For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement, and when my sister, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, terrible things...'"

Yes, it was yet another jumbled pile of rusty hunks of rusty rust; this find, this treasure was made up of several metal drawers (quelle surprise) full to the brim with bolts (again, quelle surprise), with some copper and brass thrown in which we surmised had been left from when the pipes in the cellar got redone. Tara seemed to have a vague inkling of the stuff having been put there somewhere around 2003, though I didn't remember it; but given that that's just the kind of information I resent using up my precious brainspace, I can't say it particularly bothers me that I successfully repressed it.

And even though it didn't really look like a whole lot of stuff, it was really quite dense, and man, hauling that crap around on a hot day like today (though I hear tomorrow is supposed to be worse) sure worked up a sweat, oy. Here's the butt-end of Larry, per usual:

Doesn't look like all that much, does it?

All told though it came to a whopping 1180 pounds of scrap iron; with the brass, copper and aluminum bits added in, it weighed just over 1200 pounds. Poor Larry. He's a very good car, that Larry the Volvo station waggon.

So that was our thirty-sixth trip to the scrapyard; and our total of scrap iron removed from the property (since we've gotten receipts from the scrapyard, which isn't all of it, since we took numerous car loads before that just to the dump) now stands at 31,820 pounds, or 15.91 tons. And yes, of course, there is still more.

The little grey kitten, by the way, is healing quite well and is quite lively and vigorous. I've been bottle-feeding her and have begun weaning her (she's four weeks old even today). There is one thing, though—she may actually be a he. Hard to tell, still; s/he's just so teeny!

*Well, okay, maybe not Tara's words so much as Howard Carter's. Details.

Of Cats and Cars

2011-07-15T20:37:00.014-04:00

Holy Mother of the Cats—where on Earth do I start with the day known as Today?

I woke up early, which for me means the actual morning, because I was so worried about the cats. There are a couple batches of kittens out there, you see. Of course.

Now before anyone goes all OMGeleventy!!1! on me, let me just say that I've already contacted the local trap-neuter-release people. Because there are going to be some hysterectomies around here dammit.

You may be familiar with Splotch's batch of kittens, the ones charmingly named after various cars, as they were born in the back seat of an MG Midget; I've posted a picture of all four of them a few posts down. But of course Smudge, her sister, also had a batch of four.

She had them, in her infinite wisdom, on top of a pile of wood in the downstairs garage three weeks ago. She moved them shortly after to some place we couldn't find them; but the other day she'd moved them again, back into the downstairs garage. Into the trunk of a Citroën DS, to be precise, which she accessed through where the back seat should have been.

Now though we are cleaning up the yard and getting rid of old rusty cars and in general making decent progress, still, there are places we haven't got to, which includes the downstairs garage. And so this Citroën was of course full to the brim with hunks of metal and rust and sharp edges. And the kittens were there, in the back, on top of it all.

So we (well Tara, mostly) cleaned it all out the day before yesterday, even though she got soaked in a downpour moving pieces of car out and away into the back yard; and we managed to make a nice cozy place inside that car, with no sharp edges, no places they could fall into or out of, and with a nice cardboard box lined with a towel.

Two of the kittens however were not in good shape. One was just tiny, not even really half the size of the others; and the second had some kind of open wound on its neck.

And so I was worried about them, of course. Last night when I last checked the first tiny one was so weak and lethargic I couldn't imagine it living through the night.

It didn't. I buried it this morning, over in the area we have buried all our beloved cats, the ones we've known for years. The poor little thing didn't even get a name, but I put it over there with the others.

Now I do understand that something like one in four kittens just doesn't make it, and that that is how Nature does things. So I was sad, but not surprised.

The second one though had what looked like two abscesses on its neck. The were large swollen areas about the size of marbles. Now I am not a vet, and though I hear it's not that tricky really to lance a boil I'm just too squeamish. And I couldn't imagine it getting better on its own, and so I figured the little thing would eventually catch a raging fever and slowly die.

But here's the other thing. In my state rabies is not uncommon. And so, by state law, if an animal comes into the vet with a 'wound of unknown origin' it is supposed to either be quarantined for a whole six months, or put down. I didn't for a minute think it was actually an animal bite, as it's too young to have been in a fight, and it's been with its mother all this time and so protected; I can, however, imagine that it fell out of whatever cockamamie nest Smudge thought adequate and cut itself on some sharp bit of something. But bringing it to the vet looked like it might also be a death sentence. How would I quarantine it for six months?

Still, when the choice came down to almost certainly letting it die slowly and miserably if untreated, or possibly being put down quickly and painlessly, I called the vet. They made an appointment for 4pm. I know. It's a feral kitten. But I couldn't abide letting it suffer.

Then Tara came over. You see we were scheduled to do an iron run today, a load of light stuff in the bus. But since we were getting a decently early start, we figured we'd have plenty of time to get back for the appointment.

So we loaded up the bus with old doors and hoods, most of which came from behind the shed, where Tara wants to be able to mow. It's almost there now, but not quite yet. The pictures:

The usual side view, filled up with junk:

And the back:

So, despite all the drama with the kittens, otherwise it was all going along just fine.

We got about halfway to the scrapyard when the gas pedal went all the way to the floor and stayed there. Now luckily it wasn't accelerating or anything; but something had definitely come undone. We coasted to a stop in a parking lot full of trucks, one of which incidentally was a car-carrier full of old rusty things. Could we hook a ride, I wondered?

Now Tara I swear is a miracle worker. She got right down in the dirt under the front of the bus (the gas pedal is after all right there) and found that the throttle cable had come undone. And luckily, luckily there had been a rusty plate attached to the bottom of the bus that had caught the nut and bolt which had held the throttle cable in. So Tara simply bolted the thing back in, and in less than five minutes we were on our way again. Go Tara!

When we got to the scrapyard we drove around back to the light metals pile. The light blond guy who looks like Mark Twain was up sitting in The Claw, tidying up the place and consolidating the piles. At one point he gathered a fistful of what looked like old crumpled chain-link fence, and using it almost like a dustrag, swept the pile together, making sure to get all the little finicky bits. It was a sight, let me tell you.

I was surprised that The Claw, given its size and power, was so well-suited to such delicate work; however it wasn't long before it was back to its natural state, brute force. Here, apparently, is The Claw's method of engine removal:

I stood well back for that, let me tell you.

Even though it was a smallish load today, 'only' 820 pounds, we managed to pass a major milestone in our total. Because today on our thirty-fifth trip we passed fifteen tons. To be exact, we're now up to 30,640 pounds of scrap iron (not including cars), or 15.32 tons of iron removed from the property since we've been keeping track. And there's more set aside already, including a cache of my favorite, buckets of rusty bolts that we uncovered behind a wood pile today.

And we got back in plenty of time, even with the side trip to the fast food joint, and with Tara swinging by the repair shop to pick up her sewing machine.

Except.

When we got home, Smudge of course in her quite finite wisdom had moved her kittens. I don't know if she was reacting to the nice space we made her (they never like that), or if it was because we'd had to handle them some, or if Venus had moved into Scorpio, who knows. Well, there was still one left in the box, but of course it was not the one who needed to go to the vet. Of course not.

We looked everywhere. In the downstairs garage behind the Citroën, in the corner in the Austin-Healey, up in the battery compartment of both that and the MG in front of it, up on the woodpiles under the windows where Smudge had given birth to the things in the first place; nothing.

Then we looked in the shed, where Aleister and the other kittens have been hanging out. Also nothing. We looked and looked and found no sign of them, save for the yellow kitten who was left.

Four o'clock came around. I called the vet, and told them I couldn't come in, since I couldn't find the kitten. I started to worry again.

Tara mowed the lawn a little, and I took Aleister inside where he was safe (the others are little enough that they hide). That didn't last long though as the mower ran out of gas pretty quick.

Then, for some reason, Tara got the idea to look over by the shop.

You have to understand. The shop is on the north edge of the property. It's rather a ways from the downstairs garage, or the shed. Not that far for a human, no, but for a cat, dragging a kitten?

But underneath one of the old bugs there it was, a kitten, the yellow and white one. We listened for mews. After a few minutes we determined that yes, the other one was there. I called the vet back. They could still take us. So Tara fished the poor thing out and we bundled it into the cat carrier and all three (myself, Tara, and my mom, plus I guess the kitten makes four) went down to the vet. And he examined it.

Well. The good news was that it wasn't actually a 'wound of unknown origin.' So the state didn't need to get involved after all, and there was no choice between a lengthy quarantine and putting it down.

But now this is where it gets pretty icky. Because what it was was this:

There are these things called cuterebra. Basically they are a type of botfly larvae that find their way under the skin of some animals (usually they go in through the nose or mouth), mostly rabbits and squirrels, but sometimes also cats. Each 'boil' contained a, well, maggot, basically. You can Google it yourself (I did) if you have the stomach, but I'll warn you there will probably be pictures.

The vet removed them, over in the back room where we couldn't see it, bless him. He asked if I wanted to see the larvae and I said HELL NO, thanks.

So. This is where we are. This kitten is three weeks old yesterday, born to a feral mother. A feral mother who isn't exactly going to be winning any Mother of the Year awards. Why if there were such a thing as KPS (Kitten Protective Services) you bet your ass I'd be reporting her.

And given her natural stupidity I'm pretty sure that if we just put the kitten back with its siblings Smudge would just move them again. I have no idea where exactly she'll move them to, but I'd bet good money it will be some place completely inaccessible, down in the dirt and the rust. And that little kitten we brought to the vet has basically an open wound, one that needs to stay nice and clean, and which will probably heal fairly slowly, as it's rather deep. The vet even gave us antibiotics, though the amount I have to give it is so small there isn't even a line on the syringe.

This kitten mind you is otherwise quite healthy; it mews plenty and is very squirmy and strong, and it's nice and fat and well-fed. And we'd already gone through all the trouble of getting it treated, and so it seems counter-productive at best to just throw it back out in the wild to take its chances.

So I'm bottle-feeding it for the time being. At three weeks old it doesn't require the round-the-clock feedings (seriously, like every two hours) that newborns do; it should be able to start eating some solid food, or even drink the formula from a bowl, in a few days or a week. Still it's a bit of work.

So I guess we have a new cat, in addition to Aleister (that makes four total, which is still totally doable here). Because from what I hear, bottle-fed kittens turn into very lovey and devoted housecats (after all the person feeding them is basically their mother).

What we don't have though, is a name for the little thing. We're pretty sure it's female (it's pretty small still and hard to tell). Tara of course suggested Maggie, which, though I like the sound of Maggie the Moggie, still, ewwwww. The intake form just listed her as 'kitten', which on the typed-up label for the antibiotics ended up as Kitty Mymom'slastname, so perhaps Catherine would work too. Any suggestions?

What a day. I hope the rest of it is peaceful.

Uncomfort

2011-07-11T13:50:00.018-04:00

This past weekend my sister and I actually managed to wake up early enough both days to get ourselves to another car event. This time however it was not exclusive to Citroëns, though there were a few there (including my sister's Deux Chevaux), but to little cars and the people nuts enough to like (and own) them.

And when I say little I mean little. Micro, in fact.

Most of them were made in Europe and date from the 50s and 60s; I'm not sure quite what that says about Europe, though I suppose being infested with medieval towns with tiny alleyways is a reasonably plausible excuse.

There were Goggomobils

And old-school Minis

And the type of Messerschmitt that doesn't fly

Little Fiats (which I understand is short for Fix it again, Tony)

Wait, let's get a bit of scale on that:

As well as a few Isettas, which, and I am not making this up, are actually BMWs:

And in other things I am not making up, the Isetta was created by someone who also designed refrigerators, hence the door:

There was even an old Beetle there, though it was one of the bigger cars and looked, like the Deux Chevauxs, comparatively ginormous. Luxurious, even.

And again, though I don't generally care a whole lot about cars, I will admit to being amused by these tiny little micro cars. They're just so damned odd. And the people who own them and repeatedly attempt to get them running, in spite of the obvious and regrettable lack of common sense and sanity, are for the most part very nice, and quite funny, too.

So we had fun this weekend, and saw some friends. But it got me thinking about whether I'd ever want one. I don't know.

Because my main criteria for a car is comfort (well, reliability is good, too). And these, well, they're not exactly comfortable. First of all if you are a full-grown adult human you don't so much sit in one as wear one. Second, there is no such thing as air-conditioning in them, and in fact some of them don't even have windows that open, which, I'm sure you can imagine, is a whole boatload of fun on a sunny weekend in July. And honestly I don't know how anyone can drive a Goggomobil and remain conscious, what with the cloud of two-stroke fumes it doesn't have the power to get ahead of.

Because that is one of my bottom lines now: I will be comfortable. Because being uncomfortable is one of the things I remember most about my childhood. Now that may not sound like much; it's not really a big deal to be uncomfortable, right? It's not like actual physical pain. Except that it wasn't a temporary thing, a little thing. This was permanent, and across the board.

It's one thing to do without running water for a few days if say the water main outside your house bursts, or if you are camping. It's another thing to have no water at all most summers because the well went dry, and no water in most of the faucets anyway because when they dripped, and they all dripped eventually, my father's solution was to shut them off and walk away. Or to go without hot water for decades, because your father can't be arsed to install the water heater, which is sitting right there. Just like it's one thing to go outside and be cold in the winter, but another entirely to spend a long, long ride in a car with no heat at all, and then come home to a house set at 55 degrees. You simply never get warm in the winter.

It becomes the default, this lack of comfort, this profound unease. In winter you exist from that center of cold-in-the-bones, and any moment of warmth is the temporary thing. It always settles back to being cold, being uncomfortable. Worse yet, if I ever complained I was mocked, told it was nothing, not a big deal, what was I a princess expecting a life of luxury? That was the word my mother threw at me, princess.

And the old, shitty, non-heated, falling apart cars were of course a large part of all of that, especially since my father insisted on dragging all of us to all kinds of places like Import Auto Parts that we could not have cared less about. It was about control on his part as usual, I guess, or something to do with that personality disordered profound lack of understanding that people who were not him didn't naturally like everything he liked.

But getting back to the little car meet-thing. It's not exactly a big community, the micro car enthusiasts, especially given it's Massachusetts. And though the old Volkswagens aren't exactly micro cars, there is a fair bit of overlap in the communities. So there were more than a few old VW fans there.

Now my father worked out of a garage (or shop) on the property for something like thirty years, up until the mid 90s or so.

Saturday afternoon some of the little car people got talking about project cars they had (and trust me, little cars are invariably project cars). They were comparing numbers, how many of the things they had at the worst before they sobered up and came to terms with the fact that some of them were just never going to be fixable, and that they were just never going to have the resources to sink into some of the more hopeless cases.

I interrupted right there, and told them I had them all beat. Seventy-eight cars in the yard, I said. Then, when they looked at me in shock, I explained that my father was a hoarder who was also a Volkswagen mechanic, and one of the things he hoarded was old Volkswagens.

Then one guy looked at me and said, Are you Walter's daughter?

I am. And he knew. Despite the fact that my father hasn't been here in five years, and that he'd retired another ten years before that, and even though we were fifty miles from home, still, he knew my father, and he knew the property.

But then there's this part, and I don't know what to do about it.

Now I know that these people love their little cars; I get that and I think it's great that people have hobbies. I have more than a few myself. I can even, if not truly understand I suppose, accept that there are some people who simply love old air-cooled Volkswagens without being bad people, perhaps in the same way that someone can be fascinated with the history of Hitler's rise to power without being a Nazi. I get that, and while I will never understand why on a gut level I can see that it is true.

It's when they start going on about how great my father was that I get lost.

Although I can even sort of understand that part of it, I guess. If you only knew him through the Volkswagen stuff, if you'd only come by to look at parts, or ask him about your Bug (and he was always very happy to talk and talk and talk about VWs) you might think that he was just some nice older guy who was a bit eccentric, maybe.

Well maybe. Because how could you then look around at the yard and still think that? How could you see seventy-eight cars, even if in your eyes they weren't 'junk' cars, which were obviously taking over the yard, which were everywhere, in every space they could possibly fit, along with all the car parts and all the other stuff that was obviously junk, and also, also, know that there were children there, (Are you Walter's daughter?) and not think Wow this is fucked up? I suppose I could see if the person doing the observing was also a hoarder, but so far few of the people I've had this conversation with have given me that vibe (although occasionally someone really really does).

And then what do I say to that? Yes, I'm Walter's daughter. While I'm not expecting that you should have called CPS on my father's ass, how is it that you are standing there smiling at me about all this? I just said my father was a hoarder. I even asked if you'd seen that TV show and you smiled and said yes. Are you just not thinking? I understand this is a fairly shallow conversation, and I even understand that most people are not as ridiculously introverted as I am (and so deep conversations are not the default for you as they are for me), but really? That situation was obviously fucked up, you saw it, and you are standing there telling me about how my father had all this great stuff?

Over and over that is the reaction.

So where does that leave me? The older I get, the more I recognize and acknowledge the truth of the situation here, the less tolerance I have for just smiling and nodding when people start in about how great my father was and Oh wow all those Volkswagens! The hoarding, which included all those marvelous bugs and squarebacks and fastbacks and busses and campers and 411s and 412s and even that white pickup truck and the odd MG or Spitfire or Triumph or Datsun or old Saab 95 or 96, was child neglect and abuse. Making us live in all that, because his needs came first, was child abuse.

No, it's not that his needs came first, and this is the part that is so hard to articulate and make anyone understand, it's not even that; that implies that there was a hierarchy in his mind, that he had some kind of list in his head of people's needs that he had put in order, with his own at the top. The reality is that he was incapable of seeing or imagining that other people had needs at all. I have no idea, really, how my father perceived other people. Were they simply shadows cast on a wall? Things that could be talked at? Something that makes dinner? Noise, things moving, like some TV that you couldn't turn off? Something that's always trying to take his money? I honestly don't know. I really don't. Can someone tell me?

If I try to tell people well no actually you don't understand about him, he was a hoarder, it was hell growing up in that house, he was profoundly mentally ill, and this last one, that he was 'profoundly mentally ill' was an exact quote to this guy I was talking to on Saturday, it just gets glossed over. Like I said I understand a conversation with me sometimes, because I am so stunningly introverted, can be like wading into the shallows and suddenly stepping into the Mariana Trench. I get that. But they just nod and continue the conversation. I don't know what to do.

But that's the thing. I can't not say something. I can't just smile and nod when they go on about my father. I don't, really, I don't think, want to make someone feel bad, to grab them with a gotcha, to imply they are enabling something, glossing over child abuse like that; but at the same time, not saying anything is for me just more invalidation. It's me keeping silent, once again, as I always did.

I was trying to think the other day about what my father said that was so invalidating. And I couldn't really come up with anything. My mother, sure, oh I could think of plenty she said, but my father, no, I was coming up blank. And yet the almost overwhelming feeling I have of him is of invalidation.

He didn't need to say anything, that's the thing. Everything he did was invalidating to the people around him, his family. He didn't need to tell us we didn't deserve hot water; his adamant refusal to install the water heater until he did X, Y, and Z was invalidation enough. Especially since his reasoning was all couched in terms of his rights, not just what he wanted, but his rights; that he didn't have to, we couldn't make him, we didn't have the right to make him. And that is telling us that we didn't have the right to hot water, that we didn't ever have the right to be comfortable, to heat, to running water, to a yard not full of cars, to not be publicly humiliated (because everyone knew the yard was a junkyard), to have friends over, to have enough to eat, to be warm in winter, to have the lights on in a room with the window open in summer because the bugs could get in with the crappy screens we had, to eat in peace, to dislike certain foods, to have a closet to hang our clothes in, to get a gift that was our own; and anything we did get from him (and it was all from him, as he was the one with a job) was always so grudgingly given, couched in terms of how we should be grateful for getting even that and never forget that he was always entitled to a piece of it as he paid for it.

And still, when I mention any of that, these acquaintances who knew my father as the VW guy still stand there and smile and talk about how great my father was, as if they knew him better than I did. When I try to explain most of them just don't want to hear it. I know we have a problem with dealing with child abuse in this society. I do honestly think has its roots in that this society counts on certain kinds of inequality to function, and so not only wants to look the other way but must. I really do believe that. So nobody wants to hear it, to the point where most people out there will make excuse after excuse for abusers, even the really violent ones, oh he was such a nice guy when I saw him at the coffee shop, blah blah blah. But I just want to scream:

Dude. I knew my father. You didn't. You chatted with him about a mutual 'hobby'. You are making a whole lot of assumptions about him probably based in your own motivations, in your own way of doing things, assuming that he thought about things the same way you do and because you believe yourself to be a good person my father must have been one as well. And then when I say Well no he wasn't you don't want to listen. Do you know what you are saying then? You are saying that you who chatted with my father over a hobby knew him better than I did. Can you not see how stupid, how belittling, how arrogant that is? How profoundly invalidating that is of my own miserable experiences?

I don't blame you, I don't. I understand you don't want to hear it. But it is true, and I lived it.

I just don't know what to do with that.

Reclaiming

2011-07-01T21:39:00.015-04:00

Remember how just last night I idly wondered,

...hopefully then that means that stockade fence will also come down soon, and the whole thing can start to get mowed and added to the yard.

Well. Last night when I talked to Tara she mentioned she might come by today; lo and behold there she was this afternoon, with that selfsame stockade fence dead in her sights. Well, she was here for that and for gathering up some more rusty hunks of rusty rust for another iron run sometime probably next week. I mean, duh.

So she started banging away at the fence pieces, and hacking off the weeds and overgrowth with the manual weedwhacker (basically this blade-ish thing on the end of a stick), and yanking up the posts all by herself, and filling in some holes and smoothing things out, and getting the ubiquitous pile of rusty iron out of there for the above-mentioned scrap run, and moving some rotten lumber into the 'fill' pile (or the 'to be burned later' pile) nearby. I don't know whether to credit the energy drink(s) or if it's some kind of working-out-of-issues thing, but hey; and all the while she was being watched by this little guy:

Though he's only eight weeks on this Earth, little Aleister Meowley instinctively knows to give Tara a very wide berth when she's 'working.' Smart guy.

After clearing most of that out, even though the afternoon was wearing on, she then set her sights on an old dead birdcherry tree nearby, one of several in the yard that will need to come down.

Alas, energy drink(s) and repressed anger were not enough in this case. Because it turns out that our little electric chainsaw just couldn't handle the pressure here at the Best Little Hoardhouse in Massachusetts, and after getting about halfway through the hardwood trunk, well, let's just say the poor little thing died a noble, if really stinky, death:

But she didn't let that stop her, and so instead turned her sights to mowing the lawn, while I took the kitten safely inside to 'help' me with the dishes; and even though the area where the Saab corral was was mostly jewelweed or goldenrod or brambles and not in actual point of fact grass, still, once mowed and somewhat evened out it looked a lot better. Like, holy cow. Here are some befores and afters, so you can get the gist.

The before from the north, taken just a day or so ago, after we got the convertible Saabs out:

And the after:

The before, from a better angle:

And the after:

And here's a shot taken from near the property line on the north edge, looking towards the shed:

Look at all that lovely expanse of lawn, or soon-to-be lawn. Very nice. It will need a bit more smoothing out, as there are some ruts and low spots, but still. Aside from Caroline the blue Saab and the stack of fence pieces, both of which won't stay here, you'd never know there was a little mini-junkyard of cars there just the other day. Sweet.

The goal now is to get those fenders and stuff to the left of the shed above junked or consolidated/put away, so that Tara can then mow all the way around that building, which, we were realizing, is something we've never seen done here.

Nice bit of progress, isn't it?

Another One Bites the Rust

2011-06-30T21:32:00.010-04:00

Now I do love me some Rusty Jones, our rust-busting more or less out-of-copyright mascot, even when, especially when, he operates in stealth, as he did today. I went out for an appointment and a round of errands with my mom, and when we got back, POOF!! another car was gone. Oh, Rusty. You can steal my rusty cars anytime. You've already stolen my heart.

This time it was yet another newish black Saab 900; it's tempting to imagine that we're stuck in some kind of chronic hysteresis (no, that's not a gynaecological problem), but, no, these have all been entirely separate newish black Saab 900s. Honest.

Anyway this third one was a little different, in that it was a convertible, with a lovely black cloth top. Well, all right, it might have been lovely once upon a time, perhaps a previous life in which it had egregiously misbehaved, so as to come back looking like this:

Let's get a close-up of that back quarter, shall we?

And that's after Tara scraped most of the lichens off it.

Anyway there it goes up on the ramp truck, hurrah!! and GOODBYE!!!

(Saab pictures by Tara, by the way.)

Now I didn't really get a before for this one, as inexplicably I never got a before of the little fenced-in area for the Saabs (the 'Saab Corral?' Yee-haw! or whatever that translates to in Swedish). But not too long ago there were six Saabs in there. We are down to one left inside it, though two of the Saabs that were in there have just been moved to easier-to-get-to locations in preparation for also leaving the property. Still, that's three that were in there that are now gone.

Here's the closest picture I could find for a before, from last month:

See that bit of headlight just peeking 'round the fence? That's this car. So, the after isn't all that impressive from that angle, but here it is anyway:

You can see that that red one, also a convertible, has been moved. That blue one, named Caroline after the color ('Caroline Blue,' apparently) is now the only one left in there. And hopefully then that means that stockade fence will also come down soon, and the whole thing can start to get mowed and added to the yard.

Here is a better shot of what it looks like in there now, though it's a beforeless after:

You can see the two empty spaces where it and the red one came from. (And my shadow as I take the picture. You see that lush-looking fairytale tree in the back, with the deep green leaves? That's all poison ivy, oh joy.)

So, that brings our dear old Rusty's total to nine cars down with seventeen to go. Though, looking at the cars the other day I think I may have actually miscounted by a couple when I first made the list. It is hard to tell; some of the 'cars' here are really more like half-cars, and what do they count as? So, dammit, I may eventually have to add to that total, which is a little discouraging, though nothing's really changed. Still, so far we have gotten nine junk cars out of here in something like a year, along of course with all the other clean-up and removal of scrap iron, rotten lumber, other junk, &c. So that's all good.

***

And now, because we've got 'em, kitten pictures!

This is Aleister Meowley again. My, look how he's grown!

And now here's the funny thing. Remember when I said that Splotch the cat was not the brightest bulb, and could apparently only count to one when she in fact had had three kittens? Well it turns out she can count better than I can, as she actually had four:

Clockwise from lower left they are: Austin, Healey, Morris Minor, and Spridget. I take no credit (nor blame) for the names; they were Tara's idea.

Au Cimetière des Voitures

2011-06-21T23:32:00.011-04:00

For the last few days our righteous de-rusting mission has been on hold, as Tara and I spent the weekend (and a couple of days before the weekend) up at this car meet thing in New York. And no, we didn't go to sell anything; this was just for fun. Now, I will admit that I'm not generally all that keen on cars myself. Oh, they're good for getting around town in, or for hauling stuff or groceries or what-have-you, but I'm not particularly interested in them as objects on their own, especially if the damned things are of a 'vintage' type. I just have too many nasty memories of those old air-cooled Volkswagens, which besides never having any heat in them, or often, precious little floor in the back (I can recall watching the road go by through the holes) were perpetually unreliable.

Though, come to think of it, when I have talked to other people about old VWs, they almost always say something about how they just don't stop running; the engines are supposedly very good (if simple), and not actually prone to break down. And yet funny enough my father's cars, the cars of my father the professional Volkswagen mechanic, were always held to be very unreliable—we, well, my mother, really, weren't supposed to go too far in them because they might break down. Which makes me wonder what exactly was going on, you know? I can think of a few possibilities, from innocent to not-so. Was it that my father always had the cars that were truly on their last legs (wheels, I guess), since he was a mechanic and could coax the things along? Was it simply a case of the shoemaker's children going barefoot? Was it just more of my father's relentlessly negative thinking, that the worst possibility must always come true, so oh my God never, ever, risk anything? Or was having (or pretending to have) a perpetually unreliable series of cars just one more way of having control over the rest of us? I have always assumed old VWs were just piece-of-shit undependable cars, but if it comes down to the rest of the world's opinion vs. my father's, well, I know whose I'd consider reliable.

But despite all that I do find the kind of cars at this meet actually amusing, perhaps because they were not a part of my childhood. Or because they are French. That's right, we went to a Citroën car meet.

Tara has a 2CV. That's French for Deux Chevaux ('two horses,' yes, two horsepower, though supposedly that's some kind of tax designation and not actually indicative of their power. Sure sure), and the first time I saw one (on a visit to England, actually), I thought it was a VW bug that got squashed between two snowplows.

Here's a picture of one I found on the internet (Wikipedia, I believe):

It looks like something some French guy suffering from an excess of patriotism and a shortage of sleep Frankensteined together during the hard times of World War Two; he wasn't going to let minor things like, oh, a scarcity of metal stop him from telling Hitler casse-toi! you know? Mais bien sûr! the chicken coop does not really need a roof, non? For a hood it would be excellent! Eh bien, look at this box of buttons and switches! They do not all need to match! Voilà, these lawn chairs would make fine seats!

Seriously, every time I get in it I am amazed that as passenger it is not actually my job to turn the windshield wiper knob by hand. They are beyond basic, they are beyond ridiculous, they are beyond anything any reasonable or sane culture would come up with.

I did say they were French.

So, in this case I will—begrudgingly, mind you—admit to a bit of fondness for the things. They're just so damned weird.

So at any rate we went up and had some fun, among all the other Citroën-loving weirdos, though it must be admitted I followed Tara all the way there (and back) in her new Beetle, as the 2CV was being a little testy shall we say (as usual), though it did make it. So though I missed the fun of riding in the thing I did get to actually listen to music, which is a lost cause in a 2CV as you'll never hear it over the engine. Ha! Like they have radios.

So after a day of recovery back it was to the old day in day out; and there Tara was today with the Bus, which she had handily filled with (yet) another load of scrap, mostly some more car doors and this old lawnmower, with some aluminum thrown in. Ah, old lawnmowers. I don't myself recall how many we used to have, but Tara would probably know. I do know they were one of my father's very favorite things to hoard. I mean, as if my father was capable of picking a favorite. That was the problem, now wasn't it.

Alors, the pictures. First, the side view:

And from the back (pictures by Tara):

Surprisingly enough this load came to more than we would have thought: 1260 pounds of iron, plus another seventy-one pounds of combined aluminum and stainless steel. Which brings our total of iron removed from the property since we've been keeping track to 29,820 pounds, or 14.91 tons, and marks our thirty-fourth trip to the scrapyard.

Et oui, il y a toujours plus.

And yes! The translation for 'junkyard' (well, at least according to the usual online translation places) means cemetery of cars. Now that's a satisfying phrase!

The Light Stuff

2011-06-03T21:42:00.008-04:00

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.

Purring Like A Kitten

2011-05-25T16:58:00.010-04:00

I know, I know, you're not supposed to feed stray cats.

But when three very tiny kittens showed up on my doorstep the first week of December, what was I supposed to do? They were born out of season at the beginning of a New England winter. I just didn't see them surviving. So I fed them.

And yes, I know that cat populations tend to increase exponentially, and what that means down the road. Still, I didn't see any options. Well, any moral options.

Two of the three are still here; one of them disappeared around the end of March, and I assume it was killed. The two that are left have been given the working titles of 'Smudge' and 'Splotch' because of their facial markings. Splotch, especially, has this funny face with what looks like a drip of India ink right down her nose.

See?

They aren't exactly tame, Smudge and Splotch, but they do sleep on the doorstep, just by the glass door, where I can see them at night. Splotch will even purr when I talk to her, though she runs away when I approach her outside.

In late March their mother of course had another litter; this time, though, either she only had one, or only one survived. This little guy (or girl; I can't tell yet) is probably just coming up on five weeks old right now, and is the fattest roundest roly-poliest chubbiest thing you will ever see. He is sublimely, ridiculously, outlandishly cute. I mean, I know, that's what kittens do for a living, is be so adorable that you simply cannot resist feeding them. Still, Holy Mother of the Gods, look at this:

So, you're asking, just what-all has this to do with hoarding? Well, because it always comes back to those rusty hunks of rusty rust, the junk cars of this place.

Now Splotch is a little odd. She's not even full grown, yet she's of a distinctly round shape. I figured she was just getting too much chow, and started to cut back (they will all eventually have to revert to catching the mouses all on their own anyhow, or, at least, that is The Plan). My mother, however, wondered if she might be pregnant herself. I have been watching her, with this in mind, but she didn't seem to be getting any bigger.

Last night around midnight when I put some food out in the downstairs breezeway the little grey and white chubby kitten came running up to me. He does this, as he quite likes the chow; and he lets me pat him while he stands there with all four feet in the bowl. He will, in fact, even purr as I pat him. But after he'd eaten a bit he wandered back into the downstairs garage and started mewing. It was strange. What? I asked him, What's wrong? But he kept mewing.

Thing was his mews sounded funny. They sounded, well, double. Like two kittens were mewing at the same time.

So I walked over to where he was. Sure enough, the extra mews were coming from the car, the yellowish MG Midget, one of my dad's junk hoarded cars.

There in the back, where there really isn't a back seat, in an area still filled with rusty junk, were three newborn kittens, fallen down behind the driver's-side seat. I could just about see them.

Splotch not only was pregnant, she'd gone and had her kittens. In the back of a junk car. Of course!

I folded the driver's seat forward a little and fished them out. If I hadn't been able to pull the seat forward I don't know that I would have been able to get to them; as it was there wasn't room for a mother cat to get herself in there to rescue them. They were wet-looking, very squirmy, and still had their umbilical cords. As far as I could tell there were three, and once I put them in a box lined with a blanket they quieted right down.

I couldn't see Splotch anywhere, but I could hear someone growling. So I put the box in the front seat of the MG, not far from where she'd had them, and assumed she would find them once I left.

I then went and looked up everything I could find about newborn kittens. I know that if they are not fed within the first twenty-four hours they won't live, and I was worried. I researched emergency formula, and what it takes (a lot!) to bottle-feed newborn abandoned kittens, just in case it came to that.

When I went out an hour later one of the kittens was gone. I assumed that Splotch had found it and taken it somewhere she thought more suitable. They never like the nice nests humans make for them.

But when I came back just before going to bed the two kittens were still there, and hadn't been moved. Ai yi. And while I figured she wasn't far, how on earth was I to find her amid all the junk that is still there? We've made some inroads in cleaning out the downstairs garage, but there are still corners that are inaccessible. Well, inaccessible to humans.

So I stepped over by the other car, the Citroën by the front of the MG, and just listened.

And there it was. A loud purring. A very loud purring, the kind a mother cat makes when nursing.

It was coming from under the hood of the MG.

You know, where the engine is.

I had no idea how that was even possible, as an engine is not exactly enclosed, and has all these tangled bits and air pockets and just what the Hell? But I went and got a flashlight anyway. Now the front end of that car is missing some bits, having been in an accident; so I could shine some light in there from the front, without opening the hood. I couldn't see anything, but when I aimed the flashlight at certain areas the purr changed to a warning growl.

Eventually I had no choice but to open the hood, though I didn't want to disturb her.

And there she was, up by the dashboard, in what amounted to a little metal box; Tara tells me it is actually the battery compartment, though there is no battery in there now.

I was afraid that she'd take off; but she seemed willing to stay put despite the growling.

So I picked up one of the other newborns, and brought it to her. She growled some more at me, but seemed very interested in the kitten. I wasn't sure quite what to do with it; I thought she might take it herself but apparently she didn't want to get too close to me, so in the end I dropped it next to her. (Turns out it wasn't far at all, just a few inches, though at the time I had no idea where she even was or what it looked like). I did the same with the second kitten, and soon heard little mews and slurping noises.

So, crisis averted.

I'm guessing though that Splotch is not the brightest bulb. For one thing, apparently she can only count as high as one. For another, really, inside the engine compartment of a rusty old hunk of rusty rust is an appropriate nest? What?

We tried to get some pictures, but I didn't want to disturb her by opening the hood again. I'm afraid she'll relocate and only take one of the kittens with her if I do, to some place I really can't get to. But we did get some video:

Crazy thing. I wish them well.

Saab Off

2011-05-17T20:07:00.006-04:00

Goodness, is it that time already? Our Rusty Jones is so eager, so righteously aggressive in his fight to say Goodbye! to rusty cars that this time he was even here a day early. This black Saab was slated to get picked up by the junk guys on Wednesday; however when I called today to try to get an idea as to what time they might be around tomorrow, I was told, Oh hey, actually the guy's free this afternoon. Would that be okay?

Would it? Like they even have to ask. Silly junk guys.

Compared to a lot of the cars in the yard this Saab 900 was practically fresh from the showroom floor, being a 1988 model. Why that's only twenty-three years old!

Youth or no, however, it went. For Fate may not be cheated.

Here it is up on the ramp truck. As you can see, it's had a few parts picked off it, and those tires aren't exactly regulation; that back driver's side one being held on with a single bolt. Good thing it went on the truck itself and wasn't towed. (Note the appearance of Junk Guy Rob's left boot just there on the lower right.)

Before Tara left town (part of what is accounting for her crazy schedule this month) she cleaned it out; I believe it had been hers at one point, so it held a few remnants from her teenage years, such as the odd David Bowie cassette which had been roasting in the sun for godsknow how long and an awful lot of Doritos wrappers, as well as this charming vignette, located just behind the driver's seat:

Hey, works for me. Although, to be strictly honest, the 80s Average Joe look on the guy, while certainly subversive for him, just doesn't do a whole lot for me. I much prefer this look:

Mmmmmmmm. Tasty tasty scrawny glammy gothy draggy art boy goodness. Oh yum. Fruitcages and honeybees and heaven ahead in number eleven and all that marvellous May loveliness. Oh sigh...

Wait. I was talking about something. What was it now?

Oh right. Cars. My favorite. Grumble.

Here's the (more or less; this picture is from last year) before, from its spot over by the shed:

And the after, with the patch of dead grass it left:

So off it went; this time though Junk Guy Rob followed me, as the regular tow guy was on vacation, and he was subbing in from another location and hadn't actually been to the one in my town so didn't know where he was going. After the usual business with handing in the title (this one actually had one!) they cut me a check. Very nice.

So that puts Rusty's countdown at eight junk cars out, with eighteen left to go; three more and we'll have hit the halfway mark. Well, halfway as of this latest push, the one we started last summer. If you count it from the seventy-eight cars that were here in the 1990s, we're more than three-quarters done with the cars, down to about 23% of what was here. Which is pretty damned good, really.

It is getting there!

The Swap Meet

2011-05-15T20:09:00.003-04:00

Despite the fact that the weather in these parts has been quite lovely, there hasn't been a whole lot to report on the yard clean-up effort the last couple of weeks. Mostly that's because Tara's schedule is ridiculously full this month; as for myself, most of my outdoor efforts have been focussed on the more ordinary yard tasks of edging and weeding gardens, digging new ones (as if there aren't enough already!) and planting new stuff. Which is, it is true, refreshingly normal for yard work, and very satisfying; or well it will be if I can keep up with it. May, you know. If the gardens get ahead of you in May, you're doomed—doomed!—for the rest of the season.

But we did make it to this swap meet thing yesterday.

This gigantic swap meet thing.

Now, understand: when I say gigantic, I mean you can see it from the surface of the Moon.

There were literally acres of vendors, spread out over at least nine lots, though there may have been more. We were stationed at number nine ourselves; we kind of lost count after that.

Acres of vendors selling all kinds of stuff; my understanding was that it likely started out as a car-parts swap, but branched out from there. It was advertised as a flea market/antiques fair, but I didn't see any genuine antiques.

Most of it was frankly junk. Old lawnmowers, beat-up fiberglass dinghies, rusty go-carts, old bikes, entire old rusty cars on trailers, old shelves that had been sitting in someone's barn, giant used Barbie dolls in not very good condition, old crappy books from the 70s on useless subjects, all this junk, this random junk. Some of the vendors did seem to have a theme going, and a few (like the guy across from us selling fancy truck hoods) did seem to be selling actual new stuff, but for the most part, it was filled with pure, and purely random, crap.

I even saw, with my own eyes, one of those lady's leg in a fishnet stocking lamps, holy fuck. Alas, (or hurray) I forgot to bring my camera, so you'll have to take my word for it.

We went to try to sell some old VW car parts, of course. I had never heard of the thing, though it was pretty local; the way it had been described to us I'd thought it was more a car part thing. Still, we did sell a few parts, though how anyone found us among all the pure chaos of it was beyond me.

Now, I grew up poor. I am no longer convinced that this was entirely the hand of fate, as it was drummed into us as children by our parents; I'm quite sure that my parents actually, well, made sure that's how it was. I really think they (yes, both of them) were so in love with the idea that life was hard, impossibly hard, that they did everything in their power to make that come true. Especially my father, with his hoarding and his extreme miserliness; with him anything good that happened was always negated by something bad.

Here is an example. It's more recent, from after I moved back in with them a while back, not from when I was a child; but it's pretty characteristic of how he thought.

One day, out of the blue, he got a check for $200. I don't know why, but it was, as far as I know, a legitimate thing and not some kind of mistake, so to my father it was $200 out of thin air. A good thing, in other words.

The next day he broke his glasses. It cost, guess what, about $200 to fix.

Now, the way I see something like that, is that, Oh wow, I broke my glasses but look! Money out of the sky to fix them! Isn't that amazing, and wonderful? The Universe is looking out for me!

How did he see it? Those glasses, or the fate that made them break, took away that $200. His rightful $200, that good good $200! That's always how it works and it's so unfair! That was my money and it was just taken away like that! Stolen!! UNFAIR!!!!!

He ranted about that for ages, about the unfairness of it all, and how everything everywhere was always trying to take his money from him. His rightful money, that was his. He'd still be ranting about it now, I imagine, except his brain is very damaged after the stroke.

So anyway. I grew up poor. I know what it is like, and I know there are plenty of circumstances that contribute; many, if not most, of which being out of the control of the average poor person. I understand that, and I do not blame poor people for being poor, not one bit. I get it.

But there are unhealthy attitudes about things, too. My father was so wedded to the idea of being poor that I swear he would deliberately sabotage things rather than risk having things change. Because change was bad, always bad, to him. Everything with him was about making sure nothing had any ease to it. Keeping the heat at 55° in the winter? Making sure it is a big production to take a bath? If you make things as near to impossible as you can, then you get to gripe about how hard life is.

I know, that doesn't make sense. But I swear that was part of it. Maybe because then he got his beliefs confirmed, and in some grim way that was comforting to him. Or maybe it was simply about control. That was at the root of just about everything with him, I think. He had to have that control. Hoarders give all kinds of excuses as to why they absolutely must keep things, but I think in my father's case anyway it did come down to that fear, that abject terror, of change, any kind of change.

But back to the swap meet.

I'm sure some reporter who hasn't lived it would probably have found it all quite charming and fascinating, a real human interest story, in its kitschy Americana way. But for us it was a hoarder's paradise, filled with people thrilled to be buying pure useless shit after having probably talked the vendor down to next to nothing. I mean I suppose I shouldn't complain; we did make some money, after all. But it really squicked us out.

We were supposed to go today, Sunday, for another day of it. But late last night Tara decided she just couldn't, and I agreed. I mean, the rain predicted for today was a factor, of course; the idea of sitting out in it all day was decidedly unappealing. But beyond that was the thought that the event was enabling other hoarders. I suppose I shouldn't judge; I don't know that all (or any, for that matter) of them were hoarders. But it had that vibe, of unhealth, of deliberate poverty, of getting something for nothing, of miserliness, of the thrill of accumulating useless, broken, dirty, rusted-out crap; and we just couldn't.

That is probably unfairly judgmental; but I am glad we didn't have to go back.

Precious Memories

2011-04-28T23:17:00.004-04:00

Despite the fact that it was Tara's birthday today (how old is she, you may ask? Well, let's just say she's the square root of forty-nine, plus one less than six, times a score, minus a gross, divided by three, plus two cubed, and leave it at that) we managed to make another precious metals run. Also despite the on-again, off-again drizzle and rain (not to mention wind, which threatened to blow away all the aluminum at the scrapyard) which means my feet are still wet. Here's the butt-end of faithful old Larry, yet again:

Good old Larry.

So we got rid of a bunch of copper and brass, some irony/insulated/old sheet aluminum (including this impossible weird aluminum cable thing), a good deal of rusty hunks of rusty rust, er, I mean, #1 iron, plus the odd battery. It netted us a decent chunk of money, which was quite nice for both of us, even though it wasn't my birthday personally.

When we got there, after sorting it all out, the guy in the smelter asked us where we'd been over the winter, like he'd missed us. Awwwwwww.

Since I was going to go back and cook a birthday dinner for Tara, we forwent our usual celebratory Burger King stop, instead hitting the drive-thru at local empire Dunkin' Donuts; when we got back, as I was cooking, Tara took it upon herself to bounce around in the drizzle and uncover a whole bunch more precious stuff (including a prized catalytic converter), enough pretty much for another run in the quite near future. While I've no doubt the unexpected chunk of birthday cash had a lot to do with her enthusiasm, I also have my suspicions about the French vanilla coffee + two chocolate honey-dipped donuts + energy drink she'd had earlier for breakfast. I swear sometimes it feels like we're in that Star Trek episode where Kirk gets into some alternate space-time continuum and is all sped up and Spock keeps hearing this little mosquito whine. I stand here with my eyebrow raised, but I can't understand a word of it.

So yeah, that'll be another run sometime soon, because:

There is always more.

Life in the Scrap Lane

2011-04-22T20:09:00.005-04:00

We finally got to that iron run today; Larry after all needed a couple more minor adjustments (something about a bright red light on the dashboard that read BRAKE FAILURE) before we went back to abusing his clutch. Did you know burning clutch smells rather like popcorn?

So here's the pic from today. That big flat rusty hunk of rusty rust on the bottom is (was) some sort of snow plough attachment for I guess a pickup truck. Holy cow was that thing heavy. But we managed to get it in (and out), and Larry's bumper is still even intact.

Today's load came to an even half-ton; that puts our totals for scrap iron (this does not include cars) removed from this place since we've been getting receipts (March 2008) at thirty-two trips to the scrapyard, and 28,000 pounds of iron. That's fourteen tons even.

We already have a sizable pile of stuff for a precious metals run; after that we plan on another one with the lighter stuff in the bus (doors, hoods, fenders, &c).

Yes, there's still more.

More Progress

2011-04-15T23:06:00.016-04:00

Goodness, look who showed up on the doorstep this morning—it's our marvellous Mr. Rusty Jones, here to once again help us bid adieu to rusty cars! Oh Rusty. You make my little heart pitter-patter so.

So there we were in the actual morning, holy cow (I believe I have mentioned once or twice that Tara and I generally keep vampiric hours, yes?) watching the junk guy haul off two more rusty piles of rusty rust, one of which was even, I think, originally actually painted rust-red. Mind you, this was a different junk guy than the one from the place that couldn't be bothered to call Tara back last week. Oh well. Their loss.

Or ours, which, totally like HOORAY. Mr. Junk Guy Mark II took both the old reddish Saab 95 and the Général de Gaulle Citroën DS (or what was left of that old Citroën DS, anyway, which wasn't an awful lot). That's right. Both. At the same time. Voilà:

There was some concern as to whether that back driver's side tire on the Saab would hold air; that proved completely grounded. Luckily it wasn't too far and only had to go across town; still, it made a noise, let me tell you, which we could hear even in the hermetically sealed compartment of Tara's new Bug. Junk Guy driving the ramp truck either didn't know or didn't care. I mean, not that it really matters, as it was strictly a one way trip from whence it shall never return.

Being a different junk place this one did things their own way, and didn't quote us a price first; instead they paid by the ton, which, surprisingly enough even with most of that Citroën hacked off or crumbled to rust came to more than two tons, after they weighed it on the big drive-on scale. We were impressed; driving up we didn't think they would realistically top one and a half together.

So that means that if we wanted to count the cars removed as iron hauled (which, in essence, they are), that would add something like another seven tons of iron taken out of here since last June. Cripes.

And by the way the number of cars left to get out of here is now in the teens, which, though it may not sound impressive, is when you remember that at its zenith (nadir) there were seventy-eight of the damned things here.

Since we got all that over and done with around noon, Tara then figured we had plenty of time to light some more stuff on fire, especially since she had been over the other day and hacked up some of that downed apple tree over by the shop. And while that may not sound like hoard-related cleanup, and while it isn't actually my father's fault it fell down, still, it is blocking something that is. Honestly, my father really did hoard just about anything. That included piles of rocks.

I know, I know, this is New England: we got rocks. I hear though they are originally native to Canada, having been introduced with the glaciers. I have double-dug many a garden here and hit many a rock; and I have been known to stop, shake my fist in a northerly direction, and cry, Damn you, Canada!

And no, we're not exactly sure where this particular pile of rocks came from. It is, however, up near the road with a couple of piles of dirt, which I'm pretty freakin' sure were once piles of sand from the road that someone from The Town didn't know what to do with; when my father said he'd take them they happily dumped it there. Enabling fuckers.

Where they sat, and still sit, of course.

Anyway that apple tree is in the way of accessing those rocks which we'd like to use to finish the stone wall by the back of the garage; so the tree has to go. And yes, there will be rental equipment involved. Some of those rocks are big.

So those bits of the apple tree went on the pyre, as well as anything vaguely brush-like within arm's-reach (or saw's-reach) of Tara, including a good deal of the overgrowth on the pile of dirt in the back by the shed, which is also slated to get moved when we rent the Bobcat.

When that had all burned to cinders, and after a bit of tidying (and the discovery, of course, of more bits of rusty rust within the leaf-mould), we sat back and stared. Because there was so much empty space.

Here are all four panoramas of the area, in order, so you (we) can get a real feel for all we got done:

And the ones taken from the south:

You can see the grass is getting greener in that last shot.

Why yes, I'd say it definitely is.

Clutching the Sky

2011-04-13T20:48:00.013-04:00

One may not be surprised to learn that given this

and this

and these

and this

and this

and this

and this

as well as this

this

this

this

and this

that Larry the Volvo station waggon was suddenly sorely in need of this:

(That's a clutch disc, kids.)

Poor Larry. His get-go had been getting slower and slower, and that pedal on the left lower and lower, until finally Mom had to have him towed home because he'd pretty much stopped moving entirely, though he was still capable of making loud brrrrum-brrruumm!! noises.

So Tara (our handy go-to grrl mechanic) checked it out and concluded that the clutch had finally ascended to heaven. You've been a very good clutch, Tara said the angels sang; Come into the light!

After three day-long sessions in her trusty (albeit filthy) speed suit Tara got the thing switched out, though it involved (if I am remembering this correctly) dropping the transmission out and decoupling the shift something or other and sawing off some bolts and breaking an allen wrench and getting her hair caught in the creeper wheel and getting covered head to toe in grease, as well as (you can imagine) a lot of swearing, especially at the Haynes manual which was not exactly laid out in a straightforward manner, now was it.

But she got it done, though you should have seen her last night after she'd finished, her hair and face charmingly* smeared with grease; and as far as it looks, Larry is more or less back in the game.

So, go Tara!

Of course, what do you think we have planned for tomorrow?

An iron run.

Poor, poor Larry. There's always more.

*for "charmingly," you may substitute "frightfully," if you are so inclined.

Retired

2011-04-09T18:29:00.005-04:00

Well, I know I've been saying this for ages now, but I think finally this time it's the last of the tires. I mean not that I'd be all that surprised if we uncovered a couple more here and there; I mean I do know how these things go by now. Also, there are a few axle-type contraptions kicking about that still have the wheels with tires on them, and the guys at the junkyard have been known to grouse about that a bit and then take some off the total, so it may be best to remove them and get rid of them ourselves. Still, this load of tires in the back of Tara's new bug will at least do it for that area over by the shed. So yay!

So that is (again, in theory) the last dozen tires we've got. Out of how many, I don't know. Several years back we had a full gross, yes, one hundred and forty-four of the damned things set aside to be picked up. Those went (though not by the people who were supposed to get them, the bastards), but there have been many many more since. Several loads of from a dozen to something like twenty I'd guess in the back of Larry the Volvo station waggon just since we've started this blog back in June. And before that there were plenty other trips to the dump (sorry, Recycling Center) that did not include the gross of them. So if I had to guess how many tires we've gotten out of here it's something like two hundred fifty, three hundred? I might be low-balling that, too, who can even tell. Though given the way I tend to minimize things like oh I don't know achievements, it might realistically be rather higher.

At any rate the fuckers are gone, and good riddance.

Points of View

2011-04-04T00:46:00.012-04:00

When Tara came by the other day she brought a CD of old pictures of the yard that she'd scanned in; today I walked around outside, to get some pictures from the same points of view for comparison.

When I look at those old photos I am actually shocked. Which you really think I wouldn't be; after all, I lived here, and in fact was living here when most of these pictures were taken. I really should remember it.

I said in a comment a couple posts down that I've blocked it out, how much of a horror this yard was, but that's not quite it; it's that, back then, I didn't know how to see. Not, even, that I was inured to it or had simply grown used to it, though that is probably part of it, but that I was unable to see that it was wrong in the first place. Or rather, I was unable to see the degree to which it was wrong, abnormal, sick, even. Because I did know it was fucked up at the time, even if I was nowhere near being able to articulate how fucked up. Never mind why it was.

And if I'm not remembering the yard as that bad, then I'm not giving myself (and Tara) anywhere near enough credit for cleaning it up. And yes, part of that is that it has been fairly gradual; this has taken us more than a decade now. Well, I say 'us'; really in the first few years, back when our father was still here, it was Tara doing most of the work, at least as far as the cars went, since she for some reason had the patience to deal with Dad. Or maybe that's just another way of not giving myself enough (in this case, any) credit, who knows.

It is always good to pause for a moment in the middle of a project and see how far you've come. Though, really, we are well past the mid-point, I think, at least as the cars go. If there were seventy-eight here originally, and there are only ('only,' ha) twenty-one left, then we are 73% of the way through that part; and as far as the pure junk goes, I'd guess from the pictures that the percentage is about the same, if not greater. We've even made some major strides with the indoor spaces, like the garage, and though the shop is still pretty full, stuff has been moving out of there. So we're, really, I'd guess, something like three quarters done. And that's pretty damned amazing.

So let's see what it looked like then and today. Here's one looking towards the back yard, taken in September of 2001. This was yet another pile of wood, this time piled up and around a large rock. On the left there is a mound of dirt, left over from I'm not sure what, perhaps digging the foundation for the garage in the sixties. When we were kids it had been there for so long that the trees there were big enough to build a tree house in. Said trees are now long gone and the pile itself flattened and used to fill in what was ostensibly a pond my father had dug out, but was mostly an overgrown, damp marshy spot intermittently filled with runoff from the road.

And today. That haphazard pile of wood on that giant mound of charcoal will shortly be burned, just like the rest of it.

Here's the back of the garage again; this is a slightly different picture than one Tara has run before, from May 2001.

And today. Incidentally I put those walls in myself a few years back. One of my strategies upon moving here was to claim previously carred-up and junked-up spaces for new gardens. That way my father couldn't just put another car back in the same spot.

Here's one looking towards the shop, also from May 2001. I'm pretty sure Tara was standing on something, probably a bus roof, to get this. I guess it held; honestly I'm a little surprised.

And today. It's not quite taken from the same angle, but it's close. There are still several Beetles over there, the damned things.

And then one taken from a little further over to the south, and pointed at what were the pen and the pond, from late October 2002:

And today:

That's quite a lot of empty grassy ground exposed, isn't it? And still, I look at that and think What an impossible mess.

March Progress Report

2011-04-03T21:47:00.009-04:00

So let's see how we did with those March goals of cleaning up that area in the back from the downstairs garage to the shed, including that woodpile(s). No, we didn't get everything done; but still we did get quite a bit accomplished.

We did another couple of burns (I think; they're all starting to blur together) and will need to do one more, probably, for that area (though we still have stuff in other parts of the yard that will also need to be lit on fire).

Let's look at some befores and afters; I'll start with the original panorama from early March and compare it to the one I took today. That weird black presence in the middle is the shadow of a tree; it's kinda spooky, isn't it?

Then from the south:

Number Seventy-Five there, or how do you say, Numéro Soixante-Quinze is what's left of an old Citroën DS, which Tara helpfully labelled Le Général de Gaulle on the roof in spray paint. Alas, the horn does not play the first few bars of La Marseillaise, although I suppose you could just blast the intro to All You Need Is Love, I mean, not that it's got a radio. Or a horn. Or a floor.

It's all ready to go, whenever the junk guys can be arsed to call Tara back, that is.

We threw away plenty of trash, of course, and will still need to do a tire run; also we're getting towards being able to do another iron run as well. I haven't had any luck finding someone who recycles concrete, though; the place I called didn't seem to want to call me back, either.

Now, fair enough, this was going to depend on the weather, and well, March both came in and went out in a roaringly leonine manner, even passive-aggressively spilling over into April with a snowstorm on the first, no fooling. Driving by the local elementary school the other day the readerboard sign out front said:

SPRING HAS
ARRIVED!

...REALLY?

So altogether I think we did pretty well, and that damned woodpile is finally history; at any rate we're just going to continue on with this part of the yard. Momentum, you know.

I mean, assuming it's actually going to get warmer somewhere in here...

Where We Were - 1992. Nauseating in more ways than one

2011-04-01T02:20:00.008-04:00

In pawing through all the old photographs of the yard progress, there's a distinct lack of documented evidence to just how bad the yard was, at its height in the 1990s.

It was only in 2001 or so when we started to clean things thoroughly and document the evidence. This happened to coincide with the dawn of digital photography, so photos would be shot of the progress. These photos would become more plentiful as memory cards got bigger and cheaper.

But for pretty much that whole decade of the 90s there was no reason to waste precious film on pictures of junk! So very little evidence exists of how junkyardariffic this acre and a half property really was.

And- for most of the 90s Thalia and I were fresh out of high school and seemingly powerless to do anything about the junk, then later on busy at college or working and living somewhere else. Couple this with the fact that dad's business was pretty much winding down to a trickle and you get a situation where there were a grand total of 70-something cars in the yard plus lumber, junk, car parts, metal chunks, rusty rust, etc.. etc...

In 1992 I was in video school and I had built a homemade steadi-cam of sorts. I'm not sure if it was a success or not, but I tested the contraption by running out the front door and bounding across the roofs of the cars in the yard like a slower and slightly more cautious version of parkour freerunning. And here is the result, if you can stomach it.

So grab a paper bag and just let your eyes glaze over. Can you count how many cars there are in the yard? There's about 50 visible here, though there's about 6 indoors and another 20 or so not visible.

What is noticeable here is that the cars are all over the yard at this point in time, whereas in the 2000s they have at least been consolidated to one location. What are now great expanses of green and a usable driveway were just parking lots for non-running vehicles back then. And disclaimer: those last 5 seconds or so are an actual parking lot nearby, not our yard. I can't even imagine how much worse the yard would have been if the 78 cars were Cadillacs or some other land yachts. They'd take up twice as much space!

-Tara

Where We Were.. Where do we even start? - Summer 2004

2011-04-01T00:04:00.017-04:00

We've got a new problem with Tetanus Burger, and it has to do with an overabundance of things...

No, not the hoard of junk, but the hoard of photographs taken of the junk, that predate this very blog. We've taken thousands of photographs over the past 10 years of the progress we have made. If you thought there was a lot of stuff now, wait till you see what we've already carted away! It's a little recurring section called "Where We Were".

And yet like attacking the junk, it's difficult to know even where to start with posting some of the photos. So for this installment, I've picked at random the Summer of 2004.

Back then, the Red Sox were just another team of lovable losers, we thought maybe John Kerry was a shoe-in for President, and it seems we were starting to make some genuine headway on the crap in the yard. This was the first summer we were more or less given carte blanche to do what was necessary.

Back then we were uncovering piles upon piles of rotted lumber, spare oil tanks (how the hell are you supposed to get rid of those?) 55 gallon drums full of broken glass and mystery liquids (what- we won't say, all we'll say is they're gone), extra storm windows brought home from the town dump, etc. etc..

Piles of iron? I know there's always more, but there was much more in the past, back when we were just hauling it to the dump and not getting any money for it either.

Cars? Well there were a lot more of them, in any color you want as long as it's rust. Keen observers can see that a few of these cars have been offered new leases on life or have simply earned a last minute reprieve from a certain and ugly execution.

What better place to store car seats which someone presumably saved since they were "GOOD!", than outdoors year after year in the snow, rain and sun? Better call Germany and tell those Volkswagen engineers how durable their "leatherette" fabric really is after 20 years of rigorous testing!

Oh, and that rusty rectangular tank to the left of those blue and mold colored seats? Some sort of parts cleaning bin that was half full of some nasty parts-cleaning liquid.. All gone, though I don't recall how we got rid of it. I think we brought it to the dump and dumped it into their waste oil. Anyway, it's gone. When I see people freaking out over recycling a foil wrapper off a burrito or a teaspoon of oil... I can't get very worked up about it considering what we've had to deal with.

Well, that's it for this installment. In our next riveting episode, we pay our respects to some of our honored dead. Yes, they came to this property, believing they would be restored, only to be thrown into the Colosseum and pitted against the undefeated champion, "The Claw".

Who will win? Find out!!

What Is THAT?

2011-03-30T00:16:00.004-04:00

Well we've been plugging away at it all; we burned another pile of stuff last week, this time from the last part of that pile of wood. We've sorted some more tires to get out of here, hopefully this time really actually the last of the damned things, and are working to get a car taken out sometime very soon. I didn't get any pictures, though, as things are in-between and what with everything pulled out to sort it actually looks rather worse at the moment.

We spent some time tonight over in the shop. I know, that would not seem to be part of the area we picked for the March project; but given the inextricably tangled nature of the bits and stuff here, things need to be shuffled there before other things can be shuffled somewhere else, which, yes, is rather a pain, but it is part of the progress.

And in going through stuff in the shop (why yes, we filled some more bins for scrap, of course of course!) we found these mystery items:

The bigger two are like four inches in diameter for the round part (maybe seven or eight inches altogether including the spiky thing) and are made of some kind of metal. They hinge open a bit. Tara's best guess is that maybe they are some kind of spurs, for riding a horse? If so they're a particularly nasty kind for the poor horse, and I'd also think there'd be more straps, or places to attach straps.

I mean not that my father ever got anywhere near a horse, as far as I know. Though he always hated cows, or would at least rant about them on occasion. But the lack of horse experience, of course, means nothing at all about why he had them, or why he would have saved them. There is as ever no reason.

Any ideas?

The Burning Times

2011-03-15T01:25:00.011-04:00

So we've been plugging away at the burny stuff this past week; and we've managed to make another entire pile of wood disappear. Yay! And, go us! Though, really, go Tara! as she's the one who did the work.

Tara got down to the bottom of the woodpile towards the south; that just leaves one more pile of wood, which she claims might actually contain some usable stuff, though I have my doubts. And when I say the bottom, I mean down to the dirt and, of course, the ubiquitous New England rocks. Though, really, some of that wood was rotted enough it was hard to tell what was wood and what was dirt. Plywood is not normally moved with a shovel, is it?

At any rate, though, look at these glorious before and after pictures! First the panorama:

And then the view from the south:

It's getting there!

Burn Baby Burn

2011-03-06T19:55:00.006-05:00

So Tara came by today and lit some stuff on fire. I didn't get pictures of that (well, let's face it, it wasn't all that exciting—basically it was just a camp fire), but I can show you folks the space left by the stuff that has, literally, gone up in smoke:

See that pile of stuff over there on the left in the first picture? See how it is not there in the second picture? O it's gone gone gone. Remember, burning something gets rid of it forever. And yes, that's a lesson a child of a hoarder can really take to heart.

So that's another step towards the March goals. So far so good!

March Plans

2011-03-04T21:12:00.005-05:00

All right. Now maybe this is a bad idea; but I'm going to post about it anyway.

So, like I said, it's March now (I mean not like you didn't know), and the weather is showing signs of improving. And while we're still in the lion stage of things just yet, the usual rumor is that by the end of the month things will get rather lamb-like. Which I guess means gentle and soft (and perhaps itchy).

And while I know you can't count on the weather to cooperate, still, Tara has these grand plans for cleaning up the yard this month. Or rather, a specific section of the yard, the one out back that encompasses from by the downstairs garage over to the shed. In that area there are a couple (maybe three, depending on who's counting) cars, some tires, the of course requisite random junk, and a pile or three of anteaten wood.

I took some panoramas today, to document the before aspect of things. This is what it looks like by the downstairs garage (and no, the garage roof is not actually crunchy-broken in half like that):

And this is the part over by the shed:

Now, the reason I'm not sure I should post this is because I don't want to publicly lock myself into something. Like I said, weather here is going to be a major factor, not to mention that she and I do both work, albeit in freelance sorts of things with flexible schedules; also I know sometimes if I set goals and then don't meet them exactly as I wanted to I feel like a failure, even when I get pretty damned close. It's like the team that loses the World Series thinking they suck, when jeez you know they're right there at the top too, aren't they?

But Tara has this plan. Or 'plan,' I should say, as her 'plans' usually involve throwing herself at something with an enthusiasm that so bewilders the laws of physics that they momentarily suspend themselves in pure disbelief; honestly most of the time I just stand back. Well back. Cockamamie is a word that tends to come to mind around my sister.

The thing is they work. Well, so far, and knock on wood and all that, goodness. So, when she said today all the things she wanted to do this month, I was skeptical, as that's a lot to have on one plate; but if anyone can pull it off she can.

So yes, the goal for this month is to clean up all that in the pictures above, which also involves completing a stone wall, and, hopefully, renting a bobcat to move some dirt (and rocks, for the above-mentioned stone wall) around; but, like a lot of things in this place, it's not that simple, and there are all these interlocking things that will then also have to be dealt with, even though they are not strictly in this part of the yard. Like, for example, the fallen-down apple tree that is currently blocking said pile of rocks over by the shop; that will have to be hacked up first. Stuff like that. So we shall see.

I can't promise anything; but I think the impulse to record this, to document the process is outweighing my fear of pressure.

Wish us luck!

Today's Iron Run

2011-03-04T20:30:00.007-05:00

Well, the decent (-ish, I suppose, meaning, cold but sunny) weather has inspired us to start back in on the yard these last couple of days. Now, I know, March in New England isn't exactly spring; hell, April in New England hardly qualifies some years. One year not too long ago I found myself heeling a bunch of bare-root roses into my dormant veggie garden the day after St. Patrick's Day (or the day after Liberalia for all you Roman Reconstructionists out there); of course first I had to shovel eight inches of snow out of the way. Why I've even seen snow on the lilac blooms, though that was rather a long time ago. So, I know to make no assumptions.

So, besides Tara burning a bunch of junk wood and brush, we managed to gather up another load of iron for a scrap run today, most of it coming from a rusty old rusted trailer that Tara improbably hacked up with her trusty Sawzall. (Don't worry, this is Massachusetts; she has insurance.) Here's the obligatory load of junk in Larry the Volvo picture:

You know, you'd think these would get old. But they don't. Well, not for me, anyway. I suppose it's because it is solid proof of progress 'round here.

So, the total today was another 740 pounds of scrap iron; that brings the overall total up to an even 27,000 pounds (13.5 tons) of iron removed since we've been keeping track (which is coming up on three years), and marks the thirty-first trip to the scrapyard.

Tara is beginning to wonder, but since to me the place doesn't really look all that different I'm quite sure that yes, there is still more. Of course.

Wrenching

2011-02-16T20:26:00.018-05:00

So as I mentioned in the last post, Tara and I have spent the last couple of nights going through the tools in the various toolboxes in the cellar with an eye towards consolidating them down to reasonable and above all useful numbers. Well, okay, Tara did most of the work, as she's the one who actually knows what she's looking at, being a handy sort and a really quite good mechanic on the side, though these days most of that mechanical skill has been focussed on trying to figure out just why the Hel the coil on her Deux Chevaux has been consistently and stubbornly overheating for the last several years running (more like not running, alas) no matter what she does to the thing. At any rate, though, she knows about tools.

So we pulled them all out and dumped them into piles, since they were only superficially organized really, trying to figure out which were duplicates (who am I kidding? Triplicates, quadruplicates, quintuplicates, et cetera), what might reasonably be sets, what we had only a couple of, what were things we just weren't ever going to need to use (threading large pieces of pipe, fixing Ford engines), and stuff that was actually the opposite of useful, like dull rusty files that if you ever tried to use on a piece of wood would just rust and stain it all up and be sort of an anti-tool.

There were also, of course, a few oddities, though luckily nothing as bad for the Soul as our (coincidentally and frighteningly enough) Valentine's Day find of that packet of condoms that expired in March 1981; and I'm damned glad of that, let me tell you.

Though we weren't looking to sort any power tools yet, we did of course find a couple, including this cranky old Dremel-ish tool that eventually did turn, though it spat out sparks and smoke:

Tara thinks it is rehabilitatable; I have my doubts, but she's a grown woman and I can't stop her.

Then there was this thing.

Though it isn't specifically about hiding under the desk in case of nuclear war, I can only assume this thing is still a result of that sort of Cold War paranoia that was supposed to be cured by everyone making like a good Boy Scout and always Being Prepared; still, fat lot of good it would have done lost in the cellar under a pile of junk. But, seriously, look at that illustration: this is genuinely intended to be used if you find yourself lost on a desert island. Now if my father were, say, given to extreme mountain climbing, or had as a hobby those survival treks where you have to eat bugs and stuff, well, okay; but really, he just wasn't the sort to do anything even a little bit risky. He was, in fact, abnormally frightened of any kind of risk, in that OCPD way of being averse to Things He Couldn't Control. Which in a backwards twisty way means it kind of makes sense that he would keep something like this. He was definitely a Worst Case Scenario kind of guy, even though he hardly left the house.

Anyway, so on to the tools. Tara dumped them all out on the cellar floor and started sorting. Keep in mind, now, that these tools are mostly from the cellar; she did pull a few of the obvious ones out of the downstairs breezeway, since it was convenient, but this does not include what may be in the upstairs or downstairs garage or in the shop, which is where my father was last actively working on Volkswagens, and which is pretty much full to the brim with stuff right now.

How do you determine how many tools you might need? Some people might say, well, if it works, what's the harm in keeping it? Well you know that works if you have, say, two sets of pliers, or even five sets of pliers, but when you have twenty-seven pairs?

You may notice that these are also just one type of pliers. These are not our needle-nose pliers, or the kind with the wire-cutters built in, or round-nose or adjustable or whatever; this is just the pile of straight-up ordinary smallish pliers.

And then there were the files:

Most of those are metal files, I think, since they are fairly fine; still, as I said above, how many do you need? And if they're rusty? That's just going to make a mess. So Tara managed to weed those out a bit.

Behold, ex-files:

Har har.

Then there were the chisels:

Those mostly got saved, as I know they can simply be sharpened. Also, for a lot of the hand tools, I know I'm actually going to have to use them to see if I like them. Some of them I'm sure will be more comfortable to use, others less, so I don't mind at this point keeping more than I think I will ever need, so long as the lot of them are contained.

And now onto the main part of this tool-sorting job, the wrenches.

Here's the pile Tara started with:

Yes, that's several layers deep, in case you were wondering.

Now. Tara is a mechanic; however, she does it as a hobby, not as a profession, and so she's just never going to use some of the more specialized ones. She set herself a criteria of, 'Would I reach for it in the toolbox?' And if she said Hell NO then it went.

There were quite a variety of them, and quite a size range, too. There was in fact one little pocket-thingy filled with very tiny ones, ones that were just the right size for an old friend of ours:

That's Joe. He used to be in the Navy.

At the other end of the range were a set of very plain but quite large ones that had been painted matte black. They tuned up quite nicely, as you can see:

The biggest one was labelled 7/8:

Except, seven-eighths of what, exactly? Because it sure wasn't inches:

A bit of research later, Tara found out that that 7/8 marking was from a time before anything was standardized and so nuts were measured by the inside diameter, i.e. the diameter of the bolt that fit inside it. From a website called (really!) www.wrenchingnews.com:

In the United States prior to 1929 the sizes stamped on wrenches usually referred to the diameter of the bolt not the actual opening size. Thus a wrench stamped ½ U. S. would actually have a 7/8" wrench opening size as a nut for a ½" diameter U. S. Standard bolt would measure 13/16" across the flats and allowing for 1/16 clearance would require a 7/8" wrench opening. This same size wrench would also fit nuts for 5/8" hex cap screw and bolt and nuts for 9/16" S.A.E Standard Cap Screws and thus would be marked ½ U.S, 5/8 Hex Cap, and 9/16 SAE.

What a mess. So. These date to before 1929, when the wrench world got its collective head out of its collective ass and finally standardized the things in a logical manner. Now given that our father was born in 1923, unless these really quite solid and heavy wrenches were a birthday gift to a toddler (which I would think even then would have been considered A Very Bad Idea) these were probably one grandfather or other's. Although that might not necessarily be true, or even likely, since dad acquired stuff from anywhere and mostly at random.

Still, even though they are absolutely completely useless these days, we hung onto them, just in case maybe some collector somewhere might pay more than scrap value. Though even if they did belong to a grandfather, honestly that wouldn't make me keep them. I'm not one for sentimental value. Thinking that maybe they were is enough.

Then there was this weird thing:

It rather reminds me of a two-headed snake, in a freak-of-nature abomination sort of way. I have no idea if this is a real thing, or some kind of jerry-built joke.

In the end we still had several drawers worth of them, to split up later between Tara's place, the garage/wood shop, and around-the-house needs. Also I think we're going to make up a tool kit to live in Larry the Volvo station waggon, as that seems like a very good idea (though if Mom or I get stuck, we'll just call Triple A, to be honest).

And though there probably still are more tools, even in the cellar, since there are shelves that we didn't really go through all that thoroughly, at least now we have some idea of what we've actually got. And that's progress.

Lucky Thirteen Scrap Run

2011-02-16T18:28:00.009-05:00

We've spent the last couple days in the cellar consolidating the hundreds (I feel quite safe using that number in a completely non-exaggeratory way) of tools; and so by today we had enough for another iron run, if a smallish one. There is also a pile somewhere out in the yard of scrap that we put aside a couple months ago, but damned if we could find it today. It's still all a blanket of white out there. Well, the stuff's kind of whitish, anyway.

Yet another butt-end-of-Larry shot:

Those bins are really rather heavier than you'd think. Tara and I were trading verses of 'Living With A Hernia', by, who else, the incomparable Weird Al as we were hauling them around; I'm pretty sure though there were no major injuries, though perhaps I should hold off saying that till I get out of bed tomorrow.

Like I said, it was a smallish run today (and the scrapyard was rather muddy), for another 660 pounds of iron removed from the property. That brings the total up to 26,260 pounds or a superstitious 13.13 tons of iron taken out of here since March 2008, and puts us at our 30th freakin' trip to the scrapyard.

Yep, still more out there.

Scarred

2011-02-15T02:30:00.007-05:00

There are some things it is good to know about (math); there are some things that, even if you don't want to know about, still, it's a good idea to learn (taxes); there are even some things that you really wish you didn't have to know about (being diagnosed with leprosy), but it's still, ultimately, good to know; and then there's shit like this.

Tara and I could have very happily continued on with the rest of our lives without this particular bit of information. Well, okay, not like we didn't know; we are here, after all, and we've heard a thing or two around the school-yard; still, we were just innocently organizing tools in the cellar tonight when Tara suddenly let out a scream of horror and anguish. I came running and saw OMG NO:

That's right; they were squirrelled away in a toolbox in the cellar. Not the drawer of the nightstand in what was my parents' bedroom, or hidden in a sock drawer, or in a shoebox in the back of a closet, but in a toolbox in the cellar. With the, um, tools. So okay I guess that's a theme. Except I really don't want to know.

(Is it just me or does the dude on the box look like Micky Dolenz with a moustache?

You know, I don't actually know what Micky Dolenz was up to in the 70s. I can tell you what Mike Nesmith was doing (various country bands and divorcing four wives) or what Peter Tork was doing (mostly a haze of drugs), but not Micky. And I've never cared about Davy, so, y'know. It actually could be Micky. And that's all just a tangent, oh the happy happy Monkees so I don't have to think about...)

Because of course then we opened it up, because we're stupid, and saw that two of them were not there:

No no no la la la la la you can't make me.

Gah. In the cellar.

Somehow, though, it seems appropriate.

What is THAT? Bendy Wrench Edition

2011-02-11T16:33:00.008-05:00

Wow. Everyone proved so helpful on that last installment of What is THAT? that now I have a genuine question (well, not that the last odd tool wonderings weren't genuine): what are these?

Well, yes, they are some kind of wrench, okay, that's pretty obvious. They came out of one of the four drawers of wrenches in toolbox #1 in the cellar. But why are they all bendy-wiggley like that? They must be specific to something, but what? There are more of them than just the seven here, mind you (well I mean duh). Tara, who knows a thing or two about things of this nature, can't figure them out.

What are these?

What Is THAT?

2011-02-10T01:04:00.005-05:00

Well now, after the bit of cleanup in the cellar today, it's time for another edition of What Is THAT? our series of posts where we put up pictures of things we've found that we just got no clue what they might be, even though in general we (or at least Tara) are pretty good at figuring things out. As always, genuine guesses or wild speculation about the things are welcome in the comments.

We've got a couple today.

The first is this group of things. They were found on the shelves over the giant scary Industrial Revolution lathe among all the bits and dies and parts that we could identify; so we are guessing they are something to do with it, though we can't figure out how they'd be used, or where they'd even attach to the thing. Keep in mind, however, that just because they were over by the lathe doesn't mean that they go with the thing, oh ho no. It is really quite likely that that is pure misdirection. Here they are:

The biggest one is maybe a three or four inch cube, roughly. They do look somewhat machiney, but we just can't figure them out.

The other thing is probably some kind of tool. We ran across a couple of similar ones which we tossed since they looked broken to us; but at the third one we realized it was its own, weird, thing. This one, the largest, also closes in an odd way, which the first two did not, and which you can see in the action shot below. It's probably like ten inches long. It reminds me rather of a Celtic-type bird from the Lindisfarne Gospels or something.

Good luck!

Tools

2011-02-09T22:49:00.006-05:00

Okay, yeah. It's been a little slow around here, as far as the cleanup of the yard goes. But, really: February. Massachusetts.

It's not just that there's some snow out there; it's that we got a foot or so of snow, then a couple days later another several inches; then it rained and melted a bit, then I swear several inches of slush fell straight out of the sky, which then froze solid, then we got more snow on top of that, then some rain, then it melted a bit, then refroze, and oh it's a mess. All mixed in with the dirt and sand from the town snowplowed into the yard plus the various twigs and bits fallen off the trees from the wind we got the other night. It's no longer that nice winter wonderland icicle fairy sort of prettiness; this is dirty, old, stale snow, on par with the thing you find in the back of the freezer that was probably a popsicle from last summer, but maybe it's a pork chop, who knows.

Anyhow it meant that today, when Tara and I were out in the yard, wonderin', we could most of the time sorta kinda walk on top of it. Mostly. Because every few steps one foot or the other would go crashing through all the way to the bottom with the same lurching feeling you get when you go down the stairs in the dark and miscount and find yourself briefly standing on air instead of the floor you'd expected. It was enormously aggravating, and far more physical work than you'd think. I watched enviously as the local stray cat blithely padded along on top of it all. Then again I bet her little feet were pretty cold.

It's true, it looks rather better out there now; all that snow covers up quite a lot of the gruesome details, though really it's the equivalent of piling up all the mess of a room then throwing a rug over it and saying, 'Look! Clean!'

So we did what we could today, which meant that after our brief and misguided foray into the wilderness we sensibly came back inside and started sorting things in the cellar.

Now, due to recent efforts the cellar looks rather better than it has in some time; back in November I think we made a real effort to get the south end of it somewhat clean. At the time that meant throwing away obviously broken tools, but putting the possibly useful ones back into the toolboxes to sort later. Now, I know, most of those tools, dammit, are going to leave the property if I have my way (and I will, since I'm the one who lives here), but, it is true, some of them are useful. It would be good to have one or two sets of things to keep in say, the garage which I hope to set up as a wood shop eventually, or the shop, that sort of thing. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It would be kind of stupid, after all, to throw them all away and then go out and buy more, especially since, given the way things are made these days, I think a lot of older hand tools are actually of a far better quality than what you can get today.

Here's where it gets tricky, though. One of the big reasons hoarders give for never throwing anything away is that OH MY GOD I MIGHT POSSIBLY CONCEIVABLY NEED IT SOMEDAY! Even the abstract idea of throwing things away fills them with utter terror and panic; or at least that's how my father always reacted. I can't imagine what kind of soul-shattering failure it would have been for him to go buy something that he'd thrown out, knowing he'd thrown it out. Of course that would have had to follow him actually throwing something away in the first place. Or him actually having a soul, for that matter.

Anyhow. So today, in the little time we had (Tara had to be somewhere later) we went through one of the toolboxes in the cellar, one of five or six still in there.

Now, though I have aspirations of setting up (and using) a wood shop in the current garage, I'm not much of an expert on tools. Oh, I know what say a spokeshave or hand planer looks like, but I'm not sure what some of the other things down there were. To be fair, though, my father saved everything, tools for woodworking, metal working, masonry, machining, tools specific to Volkswagen or other car repair, and even tools that had been radically altered by some mad genius with access to a machine shop, which is never a good thing.

So not only is the sheer amount of the things overwhelming, even Tara can't actually identify half of them. Which has led to a sort of paralysis. A paralysis, I suspect, that is uncannily similar to the kind that goes through a hoarder's brain. And it's true, though I am not myself a hoarder, I learned, sorry, 'learned,' how to clean, and how to sort, and how to prioritize tasks by watching one; which means all too often I just have no clue myself. So a lot of what we've been doing has been just throwing the things back into the toolbox drawers to sort later.

Yeah well 'later' is now. I am also very, very aware that what we have been doing is awfully similar to churning.

Eh, what's 'churning,' precious, you ask?

Churning is what hoarders do when you can convince them to 'clean.' It is not, mind you, technically cleaning, of course, and in no way does it involve stuff actually leaving the property. They basically, I think, attempt to 'organize' their stuff, which, since they cannot actually part with it, means they go through all of it piece by piece as slowly as possible. So for example, they will go through a box of papers from twenty years ago one at a time, and throw a total of three pieces of paper away. It will take them two hours, maybe three, to go through that single box, after which they will declare themselves exhausted. In effect what it amounts to is that this pile of stuff over here on the left simply becomes this pile of stuff over here on the right.

Nothing of course actually gets done, though much effort is expended; and believe you me, that is a feature, not a bug: for if all your nagging and yelling for the hoarder to, you know, clean up their fucking junk gets that kind of result? You stop nagging and yelling, right? It's passive-aggression taken to an archetypal level; one might even call it passive-aggression deified.

So anyway, though we weren't doing it on purpose, the fact that all these tools were just sort of getting shuffled around was making me very uneasy, since I am understandably, I think, rather allergic by now to crap like that. So.

Today we took every last thing out of one toolbox. Then we sorted them into piles of things that we knew might be useful, like, say, planes, files, chisels, other woodworking tools, hinges, that sort of thing, while of course pulling out obviously broken things for another iron run hopefully by the end of the week. And even though we'd already been through those drawers more than once before, we still filled another three bins full up with scrap iron.

I think Tara didn't really see the point, it's true. And yes, the cellar is of course much better than it has been in the past, don't get me wrong; still, I actually want to see it clean, genuinely clean. Not just all the junk picked up off the floor and put on shelves, or even the junk reduced by 50%. Actually clean. And that means the unnecessary stuff goes.

Because I'm kind of done with it by now, you know?

Demand Resistance

2011-01-17T19:13:00.011-05:00

For some reason I keep coming across a concept called 'demand resistance' these days. I don't know quite why I'm seeing it everywhere lately, but I figured I'd take it as a sign or lesson from the Universe. Heaven knows you don't want to ignore those kinds of lessons; after all the Universe has ways of making you pay attention.

I suppose I should explain it first. Demand resistance is when someone asks something of you and your inner two-year old automatically screams NO!! Or, in more sciency terms: demand resistance is an unconscious chronic negative response to obligations or expectations.

I was horrified, absolutely horrified, to read about it. Because when someone asks or expects something of me, yes, it's true, my first thought is always, No, don't! It's a trap! Or something like that. At any rate it's something bad, and means that somebody wants something from me, which is never good. And then I thought, Oh no that makes me a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person!

But then an adult level of reason and common sense kicked in, and some kindness for the self, manifesting, as usual lately, in anger.

So I went and looked it up, via Google, to get the official definition and maybe some of the why of it. And lo and behold when I started typing it into Google look what it prompted me to complete:

Why look at that. Second one down. That's right; it just so happens that demand-resistance is characteristic of OCPD, or obsessive compulsive personality disorder. Further research tells me that the term comes from a book called Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out of Control, by Dr. Allan Mallinger and Jeannette DeWyze, about 'obsessive' personalities.

Gosh, guess who had obsessive compulsive personality disorder? As I've been fond of repeating round these parts, my hoarding father had OCPD in fucking spades. He was severe, and absolutely textbook, by which textbook I mean of course the DSM-IV. Oh not that he was ever officially diagnosed; that would have required him to be in some kind of therapy, and there was nothing wrong with him, oh no of course not. It was everyone else in the world who was wrong.

It's all so circular, you know? Oh I don't suppose it's much better with other personality disorders; part of the problem is that it's all perfectly good and normal to the person with the disorder. But part of OCPD, specifically, is the need for control, and the stubborn pathological insistence that one is absolutely perfectly right all the time.

Although the term 'demand resistance' seems rather inadequate when describing my father. If asked to do something, even something he said he'd do, his 'resistance' was out of all proportion. He'd start yelling pretty much first thing, and go off on how everyone (okay, usually my mom) was always nagging him, or why he couldn't do it right now, or how didn't he have any rights too in this house and it was SO UNFAIR! And then he wouldn't do it. Ever. You could, if you were insanely patient, and, as someone who attempted to practice this approach, let me tell you 'insanely' is the correct word, you could maybe, if you were lucky, if the stars aligned, if he was in an inexplicably and completely unpredictably decent mood, get him talking, a little, about what you wanted, no, usually, to be honest, what you desperately needed him to do and which he adamantly would not let anyone else do, like, say, fix the faucet so it didn't drip so he could turn the water on to it again, or, say, install the water heater that's been sitting there for years, or, fix the car so there was less possibility of it quitting so that Mom could go somewhere in it by herself and didn't have to take him along, which, let's face it, he didn't want to do either, or... well, I'm sure you get the picture. Pretty much anything and everything regarding basic household maintenance. Or, for that matter, getting him to clean up the damned yard with the several score junk cars in it. Ha. Ha, ha. Hoo boy. There was a useless conversation.

So anyway, any request, no matter how politely framed, no matter how much generous lead-up and sympathy with the Hard Job of Being Him you gave him, was refused, resisted, denied, dismissed, said to be absolutely impossible, and spoken of with pretty much contempt. So yes, I think the term 'demand-resistance' doesn't quite cover it, does it.

But anyway there I was recognizing those traits in me.

Now. There is this other idea I've heard floated about when dealing with healing and coming to terms with childhood, well, abuse: fleas.

What 'fleas' are are bad habits picked up from the abuser or dysfunctional family member(s). They are not ingrained traits of the person who has picked them up. I mean it makes sense: if you are brought up within dysfunction, you learn that that is normal. If your mother, for example, is a narcissist, you may find yourself in horror acting like a narcissist sometimes. Of course, the fact that you are horrified should clue you in; a real narcissist can't conceive of being horrified at such behavior. But the important thing to remember is that it's learned. And so it can be unlearned.

So there is probably some of that. I've simply learned that when someone asks you something, the normal and usual response is to say no. Though strictly speaking that's just mimicking my father's behavior. There were also the constant negative reasons he gave, the things he said about the people or things making demands: taxes were always too much and unfair, the probate court always takes your money so never have anything to do with them ever!!! people had taken advantage of him in the past and so no one ever could be trusted, mom was just a nagging unreasonable bitch (though he didn't use that word as swearing was one of the things that set him off, hoo boy he sure didn't like it when Tara, who has a much shorter temper than I, occasionally used the f-word). That gives the reasons, the why behind automatically refusing, which reasons of course I took into myself as simply How The World Works. It's what you're taught, you know?

But then there's this.

What he expected of us, the rules and the conditions that he subjected us to, that he demanded that we abide by, were completely unreasonable. No, not just unreasonable; sometimes harmful, even dangerous, though of course he saw it as nothing, no big deal, nothing to complain about. Stuff like keeping the thermostat low in the winter; sometimes you could see your breath in here. I can't imagine that did my health much good as a kid, and I remember I was prone to colds. Or, come to think of it, the fact that he (and mom, too) didn't think having a horrible raging head cold ever warranted staying home from school, or that there was even such stuff as medicine that could alleviate the symptoms. I remember being howlingly angry when I discovered, in my twenties, that there were such things as cold pills, that, though they couldn't actually cure colds, at least lessened the misery of the things. Or having no hot water for years, really, from the time I was about six to sometime in my thirties, I think, though I'd moved out by then if I'm remembering aright, because he couldn't get around to installing a water heater that someone gave him for free. Somehow I don't think carrying pans of boiling water up a flight of stairs and through several rooms was exactly the safest thing to be doing as a teen, now was it?

So, in other words, I grew up with someone who made unreasonable, even dangerous demands of the rest of us. And when that is the case, resisting those demands is a sign of health and self-preservation. It is a sign of sanity, to say, no, I will not do that. And because those demands are constant, and nearly to a one, flat out crazy, of course the response of NO!! becomes automatic.

That is a good thing.

And now I find that, surprisingly, I am not ashamed of that automatic response: instead, I am grateful.

Scrappity-Scrap-Scrap

2011-01-05T17:42:00.006-05:00

It's January in New England you say? It's freezing out there, you say? The ground is covered with snow? There's no heat in that Bus? Pffft, we say. We're hardy New Englanders, impervious to frigid weather, hearts full of stoic Yankee determination, maple syrup running in our veins.

Or, you know, not. It wasn't as cold as the last time we did a light iron run with the Bus, or at least it wasn't too bad while the sun was out and we were moving around; still, by the time we got back from this run of doors and various lighter stuff I couldn't feel my toes. Tara had me checking the little vent thing in the front every so often to see if there was heat; and, well, I suppose that could have been a vague feeling of warmth around it, but, really, it's just as likely it was pure Freudian wish-fulfillment.

Tara had attempted to plug some holes in the thing, using random bits of foam and, well, duct-tape; here you can see the really quite professional job she did on the front of the thing. She studied at the Red Green School of Auto Body Refinishing for a semester, you know:

And yet, the thing got more than a couple compliments, at the scrapyard, and at our usual celebratory Burger King stop afterwards. I will never understand what is wrong with some people.

Anyhow, here's the thing loaded up with stuff:

And the back view:

All told it was another 760 pounds of stuff out of here, and our twenty-ninth trip to the scrapyard; the total is now at 25,600 pounds of iron removed, or 12.8 tons. And oh yes, of course, there's still more.

Never fear.

The Tetanus Burger 2010 Year-In-Review

2010-12-30T21:21:00.009-05:00

Well that's probably a bit of a pretentious title, especially given that we only started the blog in June; still, it seemed a good idea to make a post of what-all we've got done in 2010, with pictures and everything, so that we (and you) can see right there in front of us, on 'paper' as it were, all we did. We are, I am, I think, not used to even being able to make progress; so setting it down as undeniable reality is a very useful and encouraging thing.

We'll start with the cars, with Rusty's countdown. The original idea behind all this clean-up was specifically to get the yard clean, as that is the visible part (well, visible to people who don't live here, anyway). I had originally (ha!) set the deadline for the end of the year, but, really, I kinda knew that wasn't going to happen, as we would have had to get rid of one car a week (and that's not even considering the rest of the stuff in the yard). At any rate, though, such high ideals very much did get the whole project kick-started.

So there were twenty-six cars in the yard, garage, and various outbuildings when we started all this; there are now twenty-one. Here they are put together in a lovely end-of-year montage. You'll have to imagine the suitably poignant, yet nevertheless inspiring music, perhaps 'We Are The Champions' by Queen. Although, 'Junk' by Paul McCartney is really more like it:

That's right, Saabs (and the lone Volkswagen): Rusty say GOODBYE!

And here are the pictures that really bring it on home how much progress we've made, and how much space we've cleared, gathered up in a before and after set. It's not all of it, either, as I didn't get photos of everything. Even so, it's an impressive array. Music to play in your head for this set: 'Take Out The Trash,' by They Might Be Giants.

And then there were all the iron and 'precious' metal runs. Here are all the butt-end of Larry pictures, (with and without bumper) with the occasional new Beetle and old Bus included, gathered up into one. Theme music for this montage: 'Iron Man', by Black Sabbath. Of course.

That's a lot of iron hauled. Let's see just how much, shall we?

I've found sixteen receipts for iron and precious metals, though I could only find fourteen pictures; probably I've missed one, or the iron/precious metals were doubled up in one load here and there. So in 2010, in the 'precious' metals category, we got rid of:

255 pounds of motors
178 pounds of sheet aluminum
142 pounds of batteries
124 pounds of brass
114 pounds of copper wire
42 pounds of irony aluminum
22 pounds of stainless steel
21 pounds of magnesium
19 pounds of lead
15 pounds of copper
4 pounds of iron on brass
And a catalytic converter in a pear tree

Well, okay, more like buried by leaves under a catalpa tree. Still, close enough.

And the total for the iron part of it all:

12,260 pounds, or 6.13 tons since about June of this year. Let's call that something like a ton a month removed. That's pretty freakin' impressive.

And even more impressive: $1724.32 just for the iron. When we include all the cars hauled away and what we made at that Volkswagen event in October it comes to a total of $3321 (and thirty-two cents).

Wow. It can be done.

Reclaiming

2010-12-25T13:29:00.004-05:00

Well look what I made. This, my friends, is called reclaiming.

They're from a Martha Stewart recipe, these gingersnaps. I figured if there's anyone out there who knows about making a home comfortable, and comforting, it's going to be her. I mean, ignoring the part about how she's probably been patiently constructing an evil empire and has plans to take over the world someday (though she'll probably have to fight Oprah for it) old Martha does know how to cook. They've got fresh ginger in them, rather a lot; they even have a little bit of freshly ground black pepper, for just the right amount of bite. The molasses in them turns them practically into candy, and they've got a really good crunch. And I'm no slouch myself when it comes to baking. They are neither overcooked nor undercooked; they are just right, as Baby Bear would say. So these are really quite excellent gingersnaps, I'm sure.

And this was going to be all about reclaiming something, and taking a bad old memory and triumphantly turning it inside out and making it mine; except, except.

I took one bite and just went blech. Because it turns out I just don't like gingersnaps.

Ah well. I guess that's good to know.

Crappy Holidays

2010-12-18T19:49:00.006-05:00

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now, about my father and what his miserly bastard ways meant for the holidays. Any of you from dysfunctional families will I'm quite sure recognize just how not fun the holidays can be. Especially given the prevailing attitude of how the holidays are expected to be about family and closeness and happy puppy rainbow harmony et cetera ad nauseum and all that, and isn't it all lovely and ho ho ho light a candle blah blah. Which also of course means that if yours isn't, meaning, if your family is, well, kind of fucked-up, you're also pretty much expected to shut up and swallow it so you're not harshing anyone else's happy family holiday buzz.

Yeah, well fuck that noise. Crap but I hate denial. Sunshine, truth, and openness are the way to healing, I have found over and over and over again. So.

My father was a miser; I believe I may have mentioned this a time or two. His OCPD need for control, as well as his OCPD focus on his own self meant that he had little concept that people other than himself (like his own children, say) had needs. And if he did occasionally have a little concept that they might in fact have needs (usually yelled into him by my mother), he could only assume that those needs were just like his own. This is a little tricky to navigate, you understand; because although I know that this inability was due to something he could not at all help, his personality disorder, I also know that it made things, well, hellish and impossible for the rest of us. So on the one hand there is: he couldn't help it. And on the other: it did incalculable damage to the people around him.

Perhaps I simply need to put it in a little bit of perspective. Perhaps, also, there is the sort of general opinion of hoarding as a harmless personality quirk. Hoarders are simply eccentric, right? Luckily I think that is finally changing, with the advent of TV shows like Hoarders, which, I reiterate, I have never seen, and it's just as well. I can't promise I wouldn't fire a bullet into the TV screen, Elvis-style.

But that perspective: I need to, I think, keep in mind that other personality disorders include Narcissistic Personality Disorder (though strict Freudian spelling says it ought to be 'Narcisstic', I mean, not that I'm a fan of Freud; the best description I've ever found for the man is simply 'dickhead,' as in, that was entirely what his brain was preoccupied with) and Antisocial Personality Disorder. And no one argues that these things can not be extremely harmful to the people around them, especially when one considers that Antisocial Personality Disordered people can include, say, serial killers.

Anyhow. So he was a miser. This affected plenty of things, of course, like keeping the house at a toasty 55 degrees in the winter, not wanting to spring for supplies for installing the water heater (which water heater someone actually gave him), the state of the yard, as he regularly brought stuff home from the dump (hey it was FREE!), and, and this is a big one, the food of the house.

Now, it doesn't help that my mother is, truly, the worst cook in the world; but even Mrs. Lovett would have been hard pressed to make a decent meal out of what my father thought adequate. It wasn't so much that he'd always buy the same cheap things, one green pepper, a pack of anemic-looking winter tomatoes, canned peas, a pack of chicken thighs, but that I swear they'd go food shopping and somehow come home with no food. I don't understand how this can be possible, even now.

I'm a freelance artist myself, which, alas, true to stereotype, is not exactly the most lucrative business in this society; and so I certainly know how to be frugal, and what it's like to not have the money to spend on much food in the first place. Still, though, I know how to shop for groceries, and to make the most of what I can afford. And so I've come to look rather askance at my parents' protests of But we can't afford it! from my childhood. I'm not sure I believe it, frankly. Like I've mentioned before, we were never on, say, food stamps or free lunches at school when I was a kid, and if we were that desperate that we couldn't afford heat, hot water, a decent amount of food, you know, the basics, don't you think we would have qualified? And so I suspect that simply no one could be bothered. That is damning, I know, and implicates my mother as well; but I don't see any other conclusion.

Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. But looking back on my childhood I see now that I really was an extremely thin kid; also, I recall that I had been treated for anemia several times over the years. This is undernourishment, no? Very probably.

So we didn't really have enough food. And so we certainly never had any fun food. We had ice cream once in a while, it's true; but that was because my father really loves the stuff and so in a way that was all about him. True, we did benefit from that a bit, which is good. But otherwise we only rarely had cookies, or fun stuff like that, and never candy, though my mother would always talk about how it was a bad thing to forbid children from having candy, because then when they grew up they would buy all the candy they never had and so get fat. Rank bullshit, that, by the way.

Somewhere in there, though, my father got in the habit of buying a weekly box of generic gingersnaps from the discount grocery store.

Okay. You have to understand a couple of things here. We didn't like gingersnaps, we kids; my father did. I believe part of his decision in buying them (beside the cheapness of the things) was that he figured no one would want them but him, and so he could have them all to himself. Well, he was mostly right. Truth be told, those gingersnaps were just awful. I can guess the recipe:

2 cups fine sawdust
1/2 cup molasses
Pinch ginger

Lay out a sheet of waxed paper on a cookie sheet.

Mix all ingredients together, then drop by spoonfuls on the cookie sheet. Press flat with the bottom of a greased jar; then bake in a 200˚ oven for a couple of weeks to harden up. Store indefinitely.

They were break-your-teeth horrible.

They were also the only sweet thing in the goddamned house.

So my sister and I would eat them. Not out of any kind of joy, mind you, but because they were the only vaguely treatish thing there ever was, and we were desperate for something with some sugar in it. Because we were kids, you know?

And my father would complain, of course. He would say 'the mice' had been into his cookies; I assume at the time he thought he was being funny, but, you know, it's kind of nasty. First, that's saying that those are intended for him and him alone and we kids didn't deserve anything fun; also it compared us to vermin. So fuck you, dad, as usual.

But we ate them. It was all there was.

But back to the holidays. Guess what we got for Christmas that year?

That's right. One box each of those atrocious cheap gingersnaps from my dad, all wrapped up with a bow. I wanted to scream and rage and cry, and then kill him. But I didn't. Because there was no point. He obviously thought he was so clever. I'd say smug, almost, except I don't think he was really capable of that; that would require some inkling, some acknowledgment that what he was doing was really rotten, and he just couldn't see it. But I still hated him for it.

You know what we really would have liked? A package of fucking Ring Dings.

I know. How immeasurably sad.

A Visit From Rusty

2010-12-18T16:47:00.008-05:00

Why would you look who popped in to say hi yesterday? It's good ole Rusty Jones, spreading holiday cheer. Rather like Santa Claus, I suppose, except instead of bringing things, Rusty takes things away; but given that Rusty takes away the old, the rusty, the junky, the rotting, that which needs to go, he serves much the same function of bringing joy. Ah, good old Rusty. I love him so, even though soup-strainer mustaches are not usually to my taste.

So yes, yesterday the junk guys came and removed another rusty old rusty hunk of rusty rust that may or may not have once been a car; once upon a time it had been a powder blue Saab 96, so I hear. It was so rusty that I believe a photograph of its mismatched red hood has provided the graphic for the masthead above. I suppose that means it will always live on in our hearts, right?

Uh yeah, wev, as the kids these days say.

Surprisingly enough the junk guy actually gave us $250 for it; Tara generously handed most of that over to me, the hope being I'm pretty sure that I would then go buy holiday presents, mostly for her. Hmmm. So there may have been another tiny bit of a motive in there. Still, it's all good.

I wasn't around for when they hauled the thing out of there; Tara did get photos on her phone, which she said she would email me, but it's apparently slipped her mind and I am impatient in wanting to crow about the progress around here. So I got an after shot at least from the window of my studio.

The before picture is one from the summertime, taken out the same window. Some things have been shuffled around a bit since, but it's about right:

And the after. You can see a lot more of the stuff now since the leaves are off the trees and aren't screening the actual state of things. Still, there has been progress over there. The pile of doors leaning on the corner of the shed has been moved out from behind the shed, to be taken away in another iron run in the bus on a hopefully warmish day.

Oooh! Now I get to update the sidebar, too! Very excellent. So that means we are now at five down, with twenty-one to go. A bit slower than I would have liked, perhaps, but progress is progress, and, with my father no longer here, there is at least no backsliding.

Even though it is a huge and painstaking job, it is only and always getting better.

Addendum: Ha! In an amusing little bit of unintentional reverse psychology, not long after I got this post up Tara of course emailed me the pictures she took (although, I don't know that she actually saw this post, so maybe it's merely coincidence). So here they are, and you can see the kind of 'mint' condition this vintage 'car' was in:

That second one is quite artsy, don't you think?

And here's the thing being taken away. Mr. Junk Guy looks a little dubious. I can't say I blame him, really.

It's Scraptastic!

2010-12-14T18:49:00.004-05:00

Did another iron run today, though we hadn't sorted or cleared anything out beforehand. Tara, in fact, was rather doubtful that we'd even be able to get enough together without some deeper preliminary sorting. I wasn't, because I at least know that there is always more. And sure enough there was still plenty of stuff just laying around outside and in obvious places to make a respectable iron run out of. Here's the usual Larry shot (and, yes, we were very appreciative today that he has heat, and good heat at that):

When we got around to the back of the scrapyard and the huge pile of iron (just one, incidentally, of the many huge piles of junk they have there that turn over so fast that even going there on consecutive days the place is always different) the guy there, who evaluates and then I guess radios back up to the front what people unload, and with whom we've had some minimal conversations before, asked in disbelief Is this all from that one house still? And we had to answer, Why yes, yes it is.

So we brought another nine hundred pounds even of iron to the scrapyard today; that brings the totals now to 24,840 pounds, or 12.42 tons of iron removed from the property since we've been keeping track. Yes, we hit twelve tons today.

And... well, you know what I was going to say, don't you?

Brrrrrr!

2010-12-10T18:36:00.010-05:00

Yes, we're alive, for those of you who were wondering. There's been a bit of a hiatus as far as the de-hoarding goes, for several reasons. One, all that Thanksgiving stuff (which translates into a lot of cooking for me, as my mother is The Worst Cook In The World, and, really, for the health and safety of all it's best that I do it), two, Tara's had a bunch of other commitments, and three, it got really freakin' cold here all of a sudden, and it's just no fun working in the unheated garage and shop in New England winter temperatures. I mean, not that it's technically even winter yet, but yikes; Tara said it went down to six degrees (Fahrenheit!) last night.

Which makes today's iron run nothing short of heroic (or unbelievably stupid, more like). The next batch of things, as in, the easiest to get to, since we're at a point where to continue in the garage and shop we have to shuffle some things around first, was a load of old Volkswagen doors that had been sitting out in back of the shed. But the thing about those is that though they're pretty bulky, they're also comparatively light. So putting them in Larry the Volvo station waggon wasn't going to get us very far very fast; what we needed was something larger and emptier to fill up. So, Tara's been futzing around with that old VW bus of hers, with an eye to not only fixing the grindy bearings in the back but also to see if she might get a smidgen of heat going in the thing.

Now, I know, believe you me, oh ho, I know, I just used 'old VW' and 'heat' in the same sentence. I know it because I've fucking lived it for years, as the only cars we had growing up were old Volkswagens, and, my father, of course, being not just OCPD and so never interested in fixing something more than half-assed jerry-rigged to begin with (that is, if he actually deemed it a 'necessity', and, trust me, his threshold for such was bizarre—having a working car, yes, he did consider that a necessity; having a working water heater in the house, not so much), was as far as I've ever heard, also a crappy mechanic to boot. So heat in a car was something completely unheard-of when I was a kid. I think I just sort of assumed it wasn't really possible to heat a car. Getting into a friend's mother's car, where it was actually warm inside, was a revelation. As was the fact that windshields actually have these things called defrosters, and that scraping ice off the inside of the windshield is not actually common, normal, practice.

And so of course I simply cannot in good conscience recommend an old VW to anyone. However, if that's what people love, I do try to reserve judgement, or at least not voice my disgust out loud to the freaks out there who completely irrationally and against all that is good and decent seem to like the things.

But, these people exist. And because they are irrational and I don't know, naïvely trusting or something (or because they live in southern California, dude, and heat that kinda-sorta works is plenty), they have come up with various, er, aftermarket techniques, ones that can supposedly actually get the interior of those things up to lukewarm. Though it remains to be seen if it can handle New England temperatures. (Tara's friend J, the one who rebuilds old VW engines, told us a story the last time he was here of driving back from Vermont in his bus one winter night. He said that about half-way home he started to consider lighting the passenger seat on fire. He was completely serious.)

So Tara's been messing around with the heat on the thing, putting in a couple of newish boxes, buying insulation to run around the pipe which goes from all the way in the back (where the engine is, kids), under the floor (i.e., pretty much outside) then to somewhere, I'm not quite sure where, to the frontish part of the thing. She even told me that she had some success.

So, we loaded up the thing with doors off other Volkswagens, to be crunched up and melted down for scrap. See:

There was also a giant cast-iron cement mixer in there, behind those doors, that even actually worked; but, too bad. There is simply not enough need to keep the thing. And no, potential need does not count.

We did feel kind of bad for the bus. It was being used for the gruesome task of hauling severed and rotting body parts from other, fellow, old Volkswagens. That's got to be traumatic.

But it had its revenge. While Tara proudly went on and on (for a while, anyway) about the lukewarm bit of air blowing out behind the seats towards the back of the thing (yes, that's how it works), we were coming to really feel another part of the equation: the permanent air-conditioning the thing has built in, of a type that is always on.

By which I mean stuff like this:

Yes, that's Tara's leg sticking out through a hole in the side big enough to lose a small child through; there are also plenty of other holes in say the nose of the thing, right where your legs usually are. And the faster we went, the more the outside air came in. It was not just a draft; it was a proper breeze, wind, even; we very likely would have been warmer if we'd just rolled the windows down.

IT WAS FUCKING FREEZING.

But we got there to the scrapyard, dammit, even though it took longer than usual as the thing just doesn't go all that fast, and unloaded it in back, all the while wondering (well I wondered, anyway) if we shouldn't just leave the bus too and hitchhike back; though I didn't say this out loud as Tara might be one of the above-mentioned freaks. Bless her heart, as they say in the south.

So that's another 720 pounds of iron, to make the total iron removed from this property (since we've been keeping track, anyway) 23,940 pounds, or 11.97 tons. And yes, there's still more, though, dammit next time we're taking the Volvo, because, even though that thing is astoundingly inadequate in the snow, at least the Swedes know how to do heat.

I'm So Tired

2010-11-17T21:01:00.005-05:00

My mind is on the blink and I forgot to upload this yesterday, when we did a second tire run; I think we got rid of another fifteen. There are still a few left, here and there, though I'm not sure when they are scheduled to go. Here's the usual Larry-loaded-up picture:

We're getting there.

Almost All Tired Out

2010-11-15T19:54:00.003-05:00

Did a tire run today, which, unlike the iron runs, alas, is something that costs money rather than makes money. Still, Tara found a place that charges significantly less than the dump (recycling center), so we brought seventeen tires over today. Some of them were on good or unusual rims that Tara then kept; and while I do question the need to keep them, she also took them away to store in her own garage, so hey, whatever, do as you will.

Here's Larry, all loaded up:

You will notice his back bumper is back. Tara came over one day last week and bolted the thing back on; I saw she was out in the driveway, then by the time I put some shoes on she had gone, making it look like the bumper fairy had come. Poof!

When we got back tonight we went out and looked in the yard, and there actually don't look to be too many tires left. There are probably enough for another smallish run tomorrow but after that I think that's about it. I mean, I'm sure we'll come across the odd one here and there in the future, but we just may have gotten through the quantities of them outside, finally.

Fingers crossed.

What A Load Of Scrap

2010-11-09T22:05:00.004-05:00

And today's iron run pics. We got enough out of the cellar for a smallish batch of iron and a pretty good precious metals load. Here's Larry:

So the iron today was another 760 pounds; and the other metals made up another 80+ pounds (as usual, heavy on the brass and aluminum). So the total for iron removed from the property so far (since we've been counting) is now 23,220 pounds, or 11.61 tons, taken in 26 trips.

(Say it with me):

There's still more.

More From the Cellar

2010-11-09T20:24:00.012-05:00

Tara and I spent a few hours yesterday going through drawers in the cellar, gathering stuff for yes, another iron and precious metals run, which we did today. I didn't get any befores and afters, since the fact that we were going through stuff that was out of sight anyway meant it doesn't really look any different in there, though we did get rid of the white cabinet-thing that had been by the furnace.

I don't even know how many toolboxes there are in there now. Something like six or seven? It's another example of how my father had so much stuff he then had to acquire whole other kinds of stuff to then put the first stuff in.

We are beginning to get to a point where we will be able to start sorting tools, and making up useful sets of them, then tossing the rest. Because, really, who the Hel needs that many screwdrivers or wrenches? And make no mistake, it's not like the ones in the cellar are all the tools on the property, oh ho no.

Why who's this? Where did he come from? What? Oh, you want to count the drawers full of wrenches. Well, um, okay, take it away little mister lavender vampire thing with a silly accent:

Vone, vone vonderful drawer of wrenches!

Two, two vonderful drawers of wrenches!

Three, three vonderful drawers! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!!

Four, four vonderful drawers of vonderful wrenches!!

And POOF!! He's turned into a twitchy little bat-on-a-string and is gone out the window, to the flash of lightning.

What a strange little man.

Anyhoo.

As usual we found plenty of oddities my father had saved. This one, though, made me squeal a bit, I have to admit. Holy cow, it's actually the owner's manual for Mr. Sunshine the hippie-trippy shop vac:

It's hard to believe. Well, okay, it's not hard to believe my father saved it; what's hard to believe is that we actually found it. And by the bye, not one word of explanation in the manual for the design. Pity. Then there were these:

Ah, yes, the Expo '67, which Wikipedia tells me was in Montréal. One of my dad's favorite oft-repeated recollections was about the various World's Fairs he got to. I assume that is where he picked up these things, since, luckily, he couldn't bring home whole pavilions.

I gotta admit, Soviet Union sounds so exciting. From the 100 Peoples Invite You to the Soviet Union brochure:

Do you want to see the famous Baikal, the world's deepest freshwater lake? Or to hunt bears in the thickets of the Siberian taiga?

Would I!?! Well, actually, that'd be a nyet.

We also found this hunk of iron:

A whole mall for Witches? Awesome. Except you just know Llewelyn will have it's own (crappy) bookstore in there. Still, if I can get all my bibbity bits 'n' bobs in a one-stop shopping trip, count me in!

I'll bet this thing had a story. I can just imagine the movie scene:

Captain Horatio Commonsense: No, Lewis! No one's ever gone that deep and survived!

First Lieutenant John "Hero" Lewis: Pressure be damned! I can't let Jackson die down there!

*shatter*

Now for this, Tara had her suspicions; and, sure enough, with the addition of just a single drop of water:

Holy cow. Is that why this iron stuff is never ending? That explains a lot.

Really, you would think we'd gotten close to the bottom of the iron supply in the cellar by now. But I suspect we've still got one, maybe two more batches, especially when we start consolidating the tools, and get to the shelves/cabinets over the bench. Plus there's a whole tool box in the other part of the cellar we haven't thoroughly gone through yet. I'm sure there's stuff in there, too. And oh yeah, then there's the stuff hanging from the ceiling.

Who am I kidding? It's probably at least double that.

Ah well.

What is THAT?

2010-11-09T20:08:00.005-05:00

It's time for another installment of What is THAT, the series where we post a picture that neither Tara nor I, with our decent levels of expertise can for the life of us identify, and open it up to guesses (serious or spurious) in the comments section. Here's today's contestant:

Hailing from a drawerful of junk in the cellar, our contestant is part of a very large family, all identical, all of whom also lived in that drawer. Our contestant is entirely made out of metal of some sort. Measurements: four or five inches in height, pretty much flat, and about three-sixteenths of an inch thick.

Any ideas? Keep in mind it may very well be upside-down.

I'm afraid we have no prizes, not even a case of Turtle Wax (Dad never bothered about the appearance of any car, so, that's one thing he actually didn't hoard). Sorry.

Catch-Up

2010-11-05T18:03:00.009-04:00

We got so much stuff done Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that I am frankly still playing catch-up with reporting on it here at Tetanus Burger. So, in addition to getting the south end of the cellar cleaned up on Monday, on Tuesday after the iron and metal run we went back in and starting going after the bench along the west wall too. We got a good start to sorting all the stuff there, and actually got down in large part to the bare counter top, which, holy moly, I was then actually able to wash. Like with soap. Though looking at the pictures I can see that we've still got more to do, especially in those shelves/cabinets which are missing the doors.

The before and after:

It's odd, though. When I look in the pictures I can see how much more there is still to do; but when I'm down in the cellar, down in the reality of it, it looks so much better than it was. I'd think it would be the other way around for some reason.

At any rate, even if there is still more to do (and there is, boy howdy, there is), getting that bench cleared is important for another reason: it actually makes the place functional. We now have a clear, well-lit space to sort things, like, say, tools, which are being put aside for later sorting. For example, we're throwing away the obviously broken or hopelessly rusty and useless tools of course. But there are still useful ones, too. So for now we are setting them aside (well except for all those damned hand saws; those were just an abomination unto the eyes of the Gods) so that later we can look at the forty or fifty screwdrivers and pick out a set or two, because I can see having, say, a decent set in the house, and another in the garage/woodshop.

So: functionality is also a very worthy goal.

On Wednesday we did another iron run, but we were kind of tired of it all and so were planning on taking a break from it; but stuff came up. Namely, the furnace decided to not work Monday night, as in, when I turned the thermostat up—nothing. Now I figured it probably wasn't anything major, since the fool thing is only four years old; but the next day my mother actually took the initiative and called the furnace guy, who walked her through resetting it, after which it has been working just fine. I don't know if kicking up all that dust in the cellar had anything to do with it, like, say, clogging something up, or if it's all just a coincidence. Anyhow, the furnace guy is supposed to come over to 'service' the thing to make sure it's okay.

But he also wanted to get to the tank.

The tank is in the downstairs breezeway. Remember this?

There is an oil tank in that space, believe it or not, though it is completely hidden in the picture by the stuff in front of it. So all that had to move, even though we, really, were kind of done with the cleaning stuff thing for that day.

But there wasn't anything for it. The thing, though, was that what appears to be a table over there on the right is actually an old Bolens tractor, which actually still works and may prove useful for pushing dirt around, since one of the other things my father hoarded was piles of rocks and even, get this, piles of sand the town had cleaned off the roads. So there is a bit of landscaping and smoothing that it might come in handy for, though we are not, at present, at that stage of things. Anyway, the thing that looks like a table is the old Bolens with stuff piled on top of it, and with a hunk of plywood thrown over it so that more junk could be put on that. Here's a better look at it:

Can you see the top edge of the oil tank lurking there behind all the junk? Not really? Don't worry if you can't.

But of course first the Bolens had to have a place to go. So, while there was as always quite a bit of the usual sorting of various grades of trash, there was also some additional shuffling that had to be done. For example, to move the Bolens the old Honda motorcycle had to find a new home, since it was in the way; but to do that meant Tara had to first clean out a corner full of junk, which she did quite nicely, and which involved some of the ever-cathartic smashy-smashing of crappy old cabinets. Here's the corner before and after, with the motorcycle moved into it:

And the corner the Bolens was going into had to be rearranged a bit, too (though I didn't get a picture of that).

So we sorted and rearranged (and in the process filled up some more bins with iron for another iron run), and eventually got down to the Bolens itself.

Now the problem with that was that one of the tires was blown out. Not just flat, but wouldn't hold air. And the thing was damned heavy, let me tell you. But we got it moved (again, when Tara decides something is going to happen or an immovable object will move, seriously, the Universe hups-to, yes ma'am) and finally got it over where it needed to go. Here's the before again, with the after following:

Oy. That was a lot of work. So, when we were kind of toying with the idea of doing another iron run today (Friday), we both just kind of looked at each other and said, Nah.

Alchemy

2010-11-03T22:07:00.005-04:00

So we continued today and yesterday in our quest for the philosopher's stone, by once again turning base metal into gold, or rather, iron, brass, aluminum and copper into money, into cash. So in the last two days we did three more runs to the scrapyard, two for iron (in Larry) and one of another load of the precious stuff, bundled up into Tara's (new) Beetle. Lookie:

Ask Tara about how heavy that freakin' chain was.

So, to add to our totals over there on the left: for iron, in the two loads we took another 1920 pounds of iron, making it now 22,460 pounds, or 11.23 tons. For the precious metals, which I am not counting towards the total of iron, but which certainly count for the total amount of junk leaving the property, we took away 610 pounds or so (guessing for the catalytic converter, as it was marked down as one unit and not by weight), and another 265 pounds yesterday, though yesterday's precious metal run netted almost as much cash as the earlier one, since there was so much brass in it (87 pounds). So that's another 870 pounds of stuff gone.

There's still more.

There Is No Why

2010-11-02T21:50:00.024-04:00

Buoyed by the success of last week's 'precious' metals run, Tara and I went after the south end of the cellar yesterday with gusto, since she rightly suspected that there was more than a little plumbing-related junk in there (which in this old house translates to the ever-lucrative brass and copper).

We'll jump straight in with a panorama of the before:

As you can see, that's a lot of crap. The giant greenish piece of machinery over there on the left, which looks suspiciously like it dates from the industrial revolution (wonder how many seven year old worker-children lost a limb in those non-OSHA-compliant exposed belts) is a metal lathe which actually works, though it tends to trip the circuit breaker. It will go away someday. Well, when we can figure out how to move it, that is.

So we went through it all as usual, separating the junk that is worth something from the junk that is worth nothing; and, as usual, one never can predict quite what my father saved. I know, 'everything' does come to mind as a fair prediction; but, well, that includes rather a lot.

My father was definitely a quantity over quality kind of guy. He used to rant in all seriousness about Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Now, he loved ice cream, a lot, and would in fact (repeatedly) tell us about the time when he was a kid and a couple five-gallon buckets of ice cream fell off the delivery truck, to be found by some friends of his; but the incredulous punchline of that story was that the kids gave it back. He would always shake his head at that one, for he simply could not understand someone returning free ice cream. Anyway, he would rant about it, because Ben and Jerry's was (in those days) just over two dollars for a pint, and why would you pay that when a whole half-gallon of the store brand was only a buck fifty?

Not too long ago the nursing home called, asking (as they do every now and then) if we wanted to change the orders for resuscitating my father should something go wrong. I understand this question just fine, and I understand as well that he is eighty-seven and very brain-damaged. But I also know that he would want to hang on until the very bitter end. So all this time it has been, yes, resuscitate him; it's what he would want. But the nurse (or social worker) tried to convince me otherwise. I agree, it makes sense, I told her, and it's what I would want for myself; but it's not what he would want. Then she said, Well it comes down to a quality verses quantity thing.

And I laughed and laughed, albeit a little bitterly. Poor thing just had no clue.

So here's (a rather lesser example of) that quantity thing in action. I mean, why have just one good handsaw when you can have thirteen of them rusting away in the damp cellar?

Then there is of course his obsession with storage thingies. After all, stuff is best when put inside other stuff (it's like stuff squared). So, in the cellar alone there are five of these little I-don't-know-what-you-call-them sets of drawers for little screws and washers and rivets.

There are, by the way, many more of these drawer-thingie-sets out in the shop. Including one that is legendary for falling over frontwards and spilling its contents on top of all the open boxes and drawers and trays of junk on one of the desks in the shop (which were then not cleaned up. Since there was no point). I believe it is remembered as the Great Screw-and-Washer Disaster of Aught-Three, though Tara would know better.

The things my father saved are frequently baffling. Many a time Tara pulled something out and gave it this look; and I could see her very creative and ingenious brain (she is an artist also) trying to come up with some kind of, any kind of reason or use for whatever it was. Then she'd turn to me and plaintively ask, 'But why?' I could only shake my head and say, Yoda-like, There is no why.

Like the bag of jar caps Tara found in one of the cabinets. They weren't vintage when my father put them away for safekeeping, but they sure are now:

Or like this absolutely priceless (well, actually more like a hundred and ten dollars a ton) table saw blade, which my father marked as below, and then saved.

Or this jar of something that is very much not Marshmallow Fluff. Marshmallow Filth, perhaps:

(I believe it is actually engine grease.)

Then there is the thingamabob which Tara is convinced looks like an earless Jarjar Binks (speaking of Yoda—which, incidentally, the spell-checker recognizes as a valid English word!):

Can't really argue with that, can you.

We also came across no less than three small hand-sickles and it was my turn to be baffled. Was my father planning on harvesting his own wheat? What on Earth else do you use them for? I mean, besides the inevitable commie pinko stuff:

And there's this vintage rusty bandage can now stuffed full of broken bits of rusty rust. It's from back when the official default 'flesh' color was Caucasian pinkish-tan, since as we all know everyone in those days was white, right? Or everyone who mattered, anyway.

And then there was this, a little pendant cameo of a handsome lad from the mid-70s, going by the luxuriousness of his mustache and the width of that tie. Neither I nor Tara nor our mother recognized him; and the thing with my dad is, it could equally be a treasured picture of a relative or friend, or something completely random he saved because he saved things.

We decided the unknown 70s man is in fact a friend of Rusty Jones's. A good friend, if you know what I mean (nudge nudge, wink wink). We named him Randy (of course). We've decided he can be our back-up mascot, should we need one.

So after a bit of sorting and tossing (and a far amount of WTF?ing) we were ready to get rid of some of the cabinets. The cellar floods a bit here and there, and so the wooden cabinets were rotten on the bottoms while the metals cabinets were rusted on the bottoms; and anyway if you get rid of the stuff you need to store, you no longer need the things to store the stuff in, now do you. So we got rid of the thing with all the cubbies (you can see it in the top panorama, in the right center), as well as this thing you probably can't quite see in the panorama, as it's hidden behind the grey bandsaw. It was pretty messed-up as it was, but Tara gave it her patented smashy-smashy treatment (using, incidentally, the Commie Hammer of the Proletariat, which is entirely made out of metal and so very very excellent for smashy-smashing):

(The set of flat drawers on the right is a separate thing; it was spared. For now.)

And we hauled out the smashed wood, and then swept, and then vacuumed with Mr. Sunshine; and eventually we got it all cleaned up. And I mean really quite remarkably cleaned up. As in, this morning when I woke I thought, wait, was that a dream?

Let's run that before panorama again, so you can properly compare:

And the miraculous glorious after:

Ah, let's let that soak in.

Even the cat was impressed (and we all know how difficult it is to impress a cat). This is Sir Isaac Mewton rolling around in the freshly exposed corner, off his rocker drunk with the heady reality of a clean cellar:

Or at least that end of it. That's probably about a third of it altogether. Still, that's some serious progress!

Precious Metal Run

2010-10-27T20:11:00.010-04:00

Well, if by 'precious' you mean stuff like lead, aluminum, brass, and copper. Because in addition to all the iron we've been taking to the scrapyard, we've also been putting aside stuff like small motors (which contain copper), bits of aluminum my dad saved, old scary wires (more copper), bit of brass and bronze from old pipes or fittings, and even the odd Volkswagen cylinder head made of magnesium. The scrapyard takes all these things, though they have to separate them out.

By today we had accumulated enough of this miscellaneous stuff to make up its own trip to the scrapyard. Witness:

Oh, and there's also a few old dead car batteries in there and, and this is nice, a catalytic converter from some latish car (since the Volkswagens are too old to have had them).

So off to the scrapyard we went; but when we got there instead of driving all the way round back to the post-apocalyptic piles of metal, where the giant magnet-crane was, we pulled into a building closer to the front, where we filled up a flat cart and two large plastic bin-cart things. Meanwhile, over in the back right corner of the warehouse-sized building, guys in blast-shield masks raked red hot stuff in a furnace/smelter. Seriously, this place is heavy-duty industrial. In Sim City, it'd be zoned in that dense yellow.

The kid there (yeah, he was pretty young-looking) pulled the carts over to a scale-plate set in the floor, then punched some buttons on the computery-thing there. Then he took some stuff out, and punched some more. Then took more out, punched buttons again, &c until there wasn't anything left. I don't know how he knew this stuff by looking, but we had the cylinder heads in with the aluminum, because that's what they looked like. But not only did he know they were VW cylinder heads, he knew they were magnesium too. So he knew his stuff.

When he was done the computery-thing (I couldn't see the front of it, and from the back it looked like some boxy once high-tech thing that you'd see on old Doctor Who) spat out a receipt, which he handed to us, saying that the guys up front would pay us.

Okay. Now you have to understand, this wasn't all that big a load. It wasn't as heavy I don't think (or Tara didn't think) as a regular iron run, which is about 1000 pounds at the heavy end. So we were a bit surprised, to say the least. But here, see for yourself. Oh yeah check out that tasty tasty scroll-down action—

I'd say that's not bad. Not bad at all.

Ten Ton Iron Run

2010-10-26T18:15:00.004-04:00

Another day, another iron run. This one was extra-special, though, because we topped ten tons!! I mean, counting the ones we have receipts for, anyway. Even if all the receipts are accounted for (and I suspect there are a couple missing), before we realized we could take the stuff to the scrapyard and get $$$ for it we used to just bring it by the carload to the dump. (Sorry, 'recycling center.' It's all gotten so hoity-toity around the neighborhood.) So we've really gotten rid of far more, probably something like double, maybe. And that's not counting the cars themselves.

Here's poor dear Larry, all loaded up. His muffler fell off somewhere along the way, too. He needs a bit of TLC, methinks.

So here's the grand total: we are now up to 20,540 pounds, or 10.27 tons, and a total of 23 accounted-for trips to the scrapyard for iron. We plan on a couple more this week, though, because:

There's still more.