The Tetanus Burger 2013 Year-In-Review

So I guess it's also (long past) time for the 2013 Tetanus Burger Year-in-Review. We didn't get as much done this year as we have in years past; but then again the yard is actually beginning to look decently clean these days, so it feels rather less urgent. Also, there have been other life-type things happening, and that is after all where one's focus ought to properly be, rather than on cleaning up someone else's goddamned mess.

So here's the usual montage of junk run photos; note again that the 'precious' inside-the-Bus shots weren't separate trips.

There is still, of course, plenty more inside various outbuildings (especially the Shop), which we still have to get to, so we'll be here a while yet. But I think this year was the year it actually started looking mostly 'normal' out in the yard. Some of the buildings do need a bit of work (my father wasn't big on finishing things, you know), so there will be that too.

Only one car left the property this year, that Saab I just wrote about. Here's the picture to refresh your memory:

Altogether it came to a little more than a ton and a half of junk iron scrapped (1.62 tons or 3240 pounds), which isn't bad.

Plenty of other things happened too, of course, mainly being that my father, the man who hoarded up the place, died at age 90. I still haven't shed a single tear, or even felt sad, and I don't expect to. He was really not a very good person, though oddly enough if you were (say) one of the Townies sitting down next to him at the coffee shop you'd probably have thought him a perfectly nice person. And in an odd way, he sort of was: I'd even almost call him 'mild' or 'gentle' in some ways. It's hard to explain. I think it comes down to intent on his part. He had no idea that what he was doing was anything other than the right and normal thing to do, and he had absolutely zero insight into his own mind. I really mean that. Absolutely none. It was just what he did, or what he was. The most I think someone who was acquainted with him might think was that he was a bit odd and was one of those old men who could talk your ear off, but who was otherwise harmless.

Well, that's the people who didn't know him, of course. Underneath the first impressions was a man who pretty much never matured past early childhood. I don't mean that facetiously, either; I mean that his view of the world and the things in it, and how he related (or didn't relate) to them was stuck at the understanding of a toddler. He could not understand that other people were not him. He simply was not capable of that kind of insight. Nor was he capable of understanding that the way he believed the world worked was not actually how it did. And that meant that in practice he was a stubborn, miserly (and miserable) bastard who didn't see his family as properly human and who considered his whims more important than the needs of his children. He didn't care that there was no hot water, so when we complained we were just whining. He wasn't cold when the house was set at 55˚ in winter, so that was that. He was the only one who had any rights; when we complained we were trying to take away those rights. Or maybe even that's giving him too much credit. I think to him we really were just these sort of noises in the background. We weren't real. I don't know if anything was real to him. If your view of the world is literally delusional then how do you define reality?

Anyway, I'll not mourn him. Though that's not out of spite (not that I wouldn't be entitled to that). It's just that there was nothing there to mourn.

Actually, I was far more broken up over the deaths of my two older cats. No, not any of the ones who were kittens and featured here on the blog a couple years ago; these were the two who didn't get talked about much here. The first one who died, Sir Isaac Mewton, had a tumor, one he was diagnosed with a couple days after my father's death. I never found out exactly what it was (the local ultrasound guy was on vacation at the time) but both vets I talked to, when talking about the possibilities, just shook their heads sadly, and told me even surgery probably wasn't going to help. So I opted to just let him go without interfering. He got all the treats, and he went outside every day (something he'd been obsessed with for years), and I still don't know if I made the right decision. He died at the end of August, at twelve and a half years old. He was a good, good kitty, Isaac was. Let's see if I can find a picture:

That picture was taken during a bout of pancreatitis a few years back; you can see the shavey spot on his flank where they did the ultrasound that time.

Then my Maude died; she was fifteen but still getting around fine, though she was a little creaky and maybe a bit deaf. One night I realized I hadn't seen her all day, which is not that unusual (she'll hole up on a bed and sleep all day), and so I went looking for her. By the time I was starting to wonder if I should worry I found her, stone cold dead, under the futon upstairs. I had no warning at all; I assume it was something like a heart attack in her sleep. Here's a picture of her, my Maude:

Anyway. I suppose all that (and honestly, I am still in mourning over them) is one reason the cleaning had a bit of a lull. And yes, I'm going to totally change the subject to happier things, now.

So. I figured given all the hullabaloo about the kittens a couple years back, you reader-sorts might like to know how those guys are doing. The younger ones are all fine and happy and still tearing around the house like frisky kittens. I snapped this picture the other night of almost all of them:

In the foreground is the ever-handsome Ratty, of course; behind him on the blanket is Aleister Meowley, and then laid out in a row on the floor front to back are Rory, Maurice and Danny Lyon. There is one more cat here, little Mademoiselle Zéphirine Chattonne-Gris, though Tara says she doesn't believe she actually exists. She's shy, Zeffie, and maybe not as well socialized as the others, though she will come out for me and purr and such. But she does exist, and here's the proof:

She's Rory's littermate, and Aleister's little sister. Like I said, they are all doing quite well, and I am continually surprised and honored by how good-natured they are (even shy Zeffie). They've got some good genes, this family, and they purr loudly and nearly constantly.

The mommy-cats, Spot, Splotch, and Smudge are still hanging around and begging at the door; I give them a cup of chow a day in exchange for depriving them of their uteri. That was the deal I made, and it's a good one; it keeps them around back and hopefully out of the road.

There is another cat who hangs out, a tom I named Mr. Bibb for his little white front; funny thing is once the mommy-cats (whom I call The Grrls) got fixed, the other toms all drifted away, the lure of sex being apparently stronger than the lure of food, which honestly I would not have thought. Mr. Bibb himself drifted away for a while, but then suddenly reappeared not that long ago; but when he came back he was a bit scuffed up and had lost all but four inches of his tail. I can still see the bit of bone sticking out the end. I don't know what happened, though I'd guess a coyote. So he's been hanging out lately, and I have of course renamed him Bob, because I couldn't help it.

I wonder, though. I've seen him back up to things and make the motion to spray; but I never smell anything, and trust me, tom-cat spray is a scent you can't miss. I could have sworn looking at him he was entire, as they say, but I don't know. And when I was petting him the other day I noticed that the tip of his left ear looked a bit flattened, as if it had been cut off; it was a bit rough too, so I couldn't say for sure he didn't just lose it in a fight. But maybe someone else in the neighborhood has been trapping and neutering the local strays.

Anyway, though. The cats are good, and the yard is cleaner.

A Christmas Miracle

Back in December we were also graced with a visit from old friend Rusty Jones; it had been a while since we'd seen him and frankly I was beginning to wonder, like Virginia, if he did indeed exist; but my doubts were baseless, and he proved it by taking another car away. Good old Rusty.

This one though was one of Tara's; it was an old Saab which had been sitting in the driveway for some time before being moved into the garage. Now, while that's not really fooling anyone (least of all me), it did neaten things up a bit outside. In fact, for the first time in never ever there was only one car in the driveway, and when I was out in Larry the Volvo waggon, there were then no cars there. It isn't even really a very big driveway, but my father used to fit nine cars in there back in the day, and he might even have got a couple more cross-ways out by the street (and that doesn't count the cars parked on the side of the road). It's rather strange to think that nowadays people can tell if someone's home or not, just like they can with everyone else.

This Saab had had the transmission blow years ago; I hear they are prone to that, oldish Saabs. And I'm not sure how much I should say about how she got it to her house, but let's just say Triple-A doesn't need to know when exactly that transmission blew. She didn't get any pictures of the tow (I suppose that would have been incriminating evidence) but these two should suffice as proof.

First, there it is in my garage:

And then there it is in her garage:

So that's all right then.

Tara also back in December shuffled some other cars around, such that the last two old (complete-ish) Bugs got put in the garage, ostensibly because she wanted to take them home to restore; I of course have my doubts but then I'm a cynical old curmudgeon who hates the damned things. Which, again, didn't do anything for the total number of cars here but did make the yard look better.

Here's the dark red Bug, partway towards the garage:

I don't remember now why it got hung up in that spot for a bit, maybe the ground was too squishy to move it properly or something, but some time later, Christmas afternoon in fact, Tara moved it the rest of the way to the garage by towing it with the Bus. Except there was a problem.

I wasn't there, so I didn't see it. (Nor did I hear it). But in the process of dragging it up the hill by the studio into the driveway she parked the Bus on the hill, and then put it in gear, which is what you do when you don't want a standard transmission car to roll. You know, since the 'emergency brake', if it even exists in an old Volkswagen, is pretty much completely useless.

It's not even that big a hill, it really isn't. We're not talking Filbert Street here, just a bit of an incline. But instead of keeping the Bus stationary like it's supposed to, the thing up and rolled right down the hill. Yes, it had to turn the transmission to do it. I guess that wasn't a big deal, though I'd never heard of such a thing. And then, of course, it crashed right into the corner of the studio.

The studio was just fine; it takes more than some wandering Bus to damage that old overbuilt thing. But the Bus, well:

Tara was rather sheepishly upset by it, though honestly I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference. Perhaps the irony is that it was the one spot on it that did not already have a dent (or hole) in it. At any rate luckily the windshield was undamaged. That's something, I guess.

So with the Saab gone we are now at ten cars left, most of which are inside at this point. Just one more and we'll be into the single digits, which is an idea that has been frankly inconceivable for most of my life. I should very much like to see it; but even better will be the day when there is only one car here, the car that we are actually using.

Another Tipping Point

I don't know if you readers remember, but Tara has made it a goal to clear out the area by the shop before the first snowfall. Now, it snowed yesterday but didn't stick past overnight, so we'll assume the clock is still running.

As part of that plan, lately she's been attacking the bit right against the north boundary of the property, up against a tumbled-down old stone wall. There were some bits of cars there; I think I counted them as half cars in the total number in the yard, I'm not sure now.

At any rate, this is what Tara managed to come-a-long up onto the trailer a few days ago:

(Pictures by Tara.)

I honestly can't identify that. I think it's a chunk of Citroën DS, but it might be a piece of a Saab Sonett. Well, whatever it was, it was a damned heavy rusty hunk of rusty rust.

Tara had thrown some other peeled-off jagged bits into the Bus; with that and some generators off we went to the scrapyard. Lovely, isn't it?

Though the Bus wasn't too pleased about the heavy load, still we made it there without incident. Now that doesn't seem worth mentioning, does it? Oh, but it is. And right about now you'd be correct to be getting a faint sense of foreboding.

But anyway first we went to the precious metals warehouse-thing where they took the generators off our hands; it was a different guy there this time, though, one I didn't recognize. He gave us our receipt and then we drove around back.

Where we emptied the bus just fine; but then there was the matter of getting the huge hunk of former European car off the trailer.

Tara of course couldn't budge it on her own; she'd used the come-a-long to get it there in the first place (and then left it there because it was holding the thing on the trailer) but that obviously wouldn't work the other way. So we asked the guy in the Claw.

But alas! The Claw actually was not up to the task; it tried to grab on but couldn't get a good grip (or the guy operating it wasn't that good at it; he gave up pretty easily, I thought). So he tried the magnet instead.

Maybe he was new there, maybe it was just too odd a shape, I don't know. But he had a hard time picking it up with the magnet too; eventually he sort of half picked it up and then slid it off the end.

Yes, well. The trailer was still attached to the trailer hitch. Or it had been.

Granted, the hitch was sort of a homemade jury-rigged thing; I was always worried about how it attached to the Bus proper (I have no idea what there is left of the Bus under there) but apparently I should have been worrying about the construction of the trailer hitch itself.

Because with that much weight on the back end of it, the weld came apart.

As for the trailer itself the guy managed to mangle the fenders on it and pull the plywood up. I mean fair enough, it wasn't the sturdiest trailer on the planet, but still. The guy looked like he felt kind of bad, but not bad enough to actually do anything about it.

When we got to the front and told the guy there, he couldn't help us either. Tara was sure there must have been somebody there with a welder; but no. They just kind of shrugged. No, I'm not personally pleased with that. They broke it, they should fix it.

But at the time there wasn't much to do about it. The main concern was how would we get the trailer home, so the whole thing could get fixed?

Well, the bar serving as bumper that was actually part of the hitch was still there; and Tara managed to chain the thing up without a ball. And so we went home, somewhat less than legally, with frequent stops to check that the thing wasn't coming off. We made it, just fine, though we were plenty nervous. Tara got this picture later:

Yeeaaaaah, don't know about that. I mean it got home with us, but that was probably pure luck.

Tara has some ideas about fixing it, and making it much stronger this time; she also said, and I suppose she is right, that it broke sort of at a good time. I'm not sure it was the best time myself--that would probably have been at home, with nothing on it--but at least it wasn't on the way there. Because that could have been very bad indeed.

But anyway that area over by the north wall is slowly getting cleaned up. I looked around at all the photos I'd taken that were supposed to serve as 'befores', but none quite matched up. I had to make do with this:

It's pretty close. And here's the after, or the middle, since there are still things over there that need to go:

The posts will have to come out; and you can see that we still haven't figured out how to get rid of that stack of concrete blocks. Nobody seems to want the damned things.

So then. We managed to get rid of some assorted 'precious' metals (including everyone's favorite, irony aluminum) and another 1300 pounds of #1 iron. And so that tips us over past the 40,000 mark to 40,100 pounds, or 20.05 tons removed on our forty-seventh trip to the place. Twenty tons. All of it removed one piece at a time.

Thanks, Dad.

Tetanus Burger Combo Platter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

two

three

up it went in the claw and off the trailer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh Huh

There has been a bit of an unofficial hiatus here at Tetanus Burger; let's blame the hotter-than-usual summer. Trust me, hauling hunks of rusty rust in the heat and humidity is no fun. So there's that; there is also, however, the little matter of Larry the Volvo station waggon's clutch.

You may remember that sometime last year the clutch plates gave out and had to be replaced with brand new ones, which Tara did; however, it wasn't as if we suddenly stopped abusing poor Larry and his life became all ice cream and daisies. To be specific, I'm thinking of the time somebody whose name rhymes with Sara hauled out one very reluctant VW Bug. Understandable, when you think about it, that Bug's reluctance; it was headed for the gallows, after all. But Larry didn't do too well either; if I'm remembering correctly there were clouds of black smoke involved.

And as far as the Bus goes, well, Tara put the camper kit back in and didn't really want to start throwing horrible hideous rusty things in there and mess it up. (She can get house proud sometimes, our Tara.)

So she came up with a solution, though it took a while to figure out. That solution was a trailer.

And lo and behold it's rather easier to shove heavy iron things onto something that can actually tip so the floor is at ground level; and yesterday Tara managed to get a really heavy engine on the thing (another Triumph one, I think) without my even knowing she'd done it till afterwards. And with a couple of other bits (a Bug front axle, I think) and some rusty jagged things Sawzalled off a Saab, we were ready to go today.

Sidenote: two things one does not want to hear together are the sound of a Sawzall abruptly stopping and the words Ow ow ow ow ow! Now, okay, if something truly ghastly had taken place I imagine we'd be talking inchoate screaming and a lot of gushing blood, and probably some post-traumatic stress disorder therapy for the both of us sometime down the line. Luckily (though I suppose Tara was still none too happy about it) she'd just banged her finger.

Here are the required photos of the load, this time both the trailer and the smaller bits in the back of the bus, on, of course, a protective tarp:





Sorry that second one's so blurry.

So off we went to the junkyard, though it was slow going because it's an old VW Bus, and on the way Tara told me about some old videotape she'd found and popped in which had some 80s television somewhere in there, including a bit of Alive From Off-Center and some pop videos. Then she started talking about a song she heard on it, but I didn't remember it until she started humming the synth riff. It was this atrocious thing:

You're welcome. I lived through the 80s and hated pretty much every thing that was coming out then, retreating for my own sanity into Led Zeppelin and Cream and the Beatles; you know, things that had some kind of integrity and melody and stuff. Of course I know now there was some decent stuff back then, like say XTC, but damned if I knew about it at the time. O it was a sad, sad, time to be in high school.

So with that song in our heads, which, incidentally, is so annoyingly catchy that no amount of concentrating on something decent like D world destruction/ O-ver an overture/ N do I need/ apostrophe T need this torture? can drive out oh my god WHY we got ourselves to the scrapyard and all that usual stuff, though it was a little tricky unloading it since I had only been able to find three gloves. I'm pretty sure most of them got left in Larry, who is at Tara's waiting to be fixed.

So then we got to add 780 pounds, not a real big load but good enough, to our total of iron hauled away. It was our forty-fifth trip to the scrapyard, and got us up to an even 38,000 pounds, or 19 tons of iron taken away from the property. Well, that we have receipts for.

There is another Bug waiting to go; Tara moved it out while I was away for a week, but it's been held up because the local people were waiting for a part for their ramp truck. So either that is next, or it will be another scrap run, now that the trailer has passed its test.

Because, guess what, there's still more.

Oh and again, You're welcome.

Tipping Point

So today was the day of days, O wonder and splendour! Today we passed the half-way mark in the number of cars removed from the yard. Today we got rid of car number fourteen. Rusty be praised.

Well, okay, that's only counting since the beginning of this blog, which we started in June 2010. If we go by the number of cars here in the yard at its worst, we've gotten rid of sixty-six cars, or a good 84.6%, which is pretty damned impressive if you ask me.

Today's sacrifice to the Gods of clean yards was the old brown Saab over by my (poor neglected) vegetable garden. It was, in fact, the old junker under which a certain batch of kittens hid once upon a time; but such sentimental concerns did not save its rusty self from the scrapyard. Mind you, to a hoarder, that would have been a perfectly valid reason to keep it, forever. And you know I'm not kidding.

It was a little tricky to tell just how rusty it was, as the thing had been painted rust-brown to begin with; but I'm pretty sure it was, like almost all the other cars in the yard (including the fiberglass ones), the inevitable rusty hunk of rusty rust.

But it went, and that patch of grass can get started on growing in again. Here's the before:



And the after, yay!



And there it is up on the ramp truck. The guy taking it away, José, gave it the usual dubious look. It is a little surprising he found something solid enough in the front to hook the chain to. But he did, and away it went.



So like I said, that makes fourteen down, with twelve left to go in our Mr. Rusty Jones's countdown. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that means the single digits are in sight. And that is good news!

One Out One In

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.

Reclaiming

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

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.