Oof

I have been remiss, it's true, so let's start this with a Ratty pic as a bit of an apology (or misdirection):

Well, a picture of Ratty's nose, I should say.

I suppose there hasn't really been anything to report recently. We haven't done much with the cleaning up the yard project, well, except for various yard work of the clearing-brush-and-picking-up-sticks variety, which as far as I'm concerned is perfectly normal stuff and not really worth reporting because it isn't hoard-related.

And while the inside of some buildings are still pretty full and will need to be gone through and cleaned up, the outside spaces are mostly good. There are some stubborn spots that we've been procrastinating about, it's true, like the back side of the shed and the junk around the big rock by the shop. We've lost a bit of steam I guess, but you know, this whole hoard thing is really very tiring. There have been other things to do, like acquire poison ivy while weeding the garden or yell Why is no one kissing Jane??? at the TV while bingeing on Mentalist reruns.

There was an iron run waaaay back in (goodness!) September, hang on let me scare up those pictures that've been sitting on my desktop since forever:

Unfortunately I seem to have lost the receipts for that trip, but it was pretty much average, with some precious metals thrown in (shown in the bottom picture). Maybe there was a bit of aluminum in there? Who can even tell anymore? Not me.

We also haven't done any Volkswagen shows, mainly because the super local one in the early spring had both the date and the location swapped so it was both quite a bit further away and on a weekend we had a conflict. For some reason there don't seem to be any other local ones until the one in October, which is kind of a shame because I for one could use the cash.

So, today's iron run wasn't anything spectacular (they rarely are, to be honest); Tara did manage to scare up some stuff from the inside of the shop in her brief foray in there. Hopefully that means that's next on the list. Though personally I'd like to see the garage cleaned out so I can convert it into a wood shop. There's lots of natural light in there, though there may not be electricity out there. I have it in my head that there was, once (after all my father used it as a working garage, well, until he filled it up and built himself the shop) but it was removed, I've no idea why. Right now the lights in there are run off extension cords.

The Bus went and did not quit on us, which I suppose sounds pretty unspectacular but believe me that should not be taken for granted; when we got to the scrapyard it was rather busy and we had to wait for a very large truck to get out of the way.

Today's load was rather on the light side, which is fine, but we were rather disappointed to find it netted us very little cash, because apparently the price of iron is quite low right now, barely enough for our usual stop at the burger joint. Oh well. The stuff is gone, and that's a good thing.

So today's total was 480 pounds; I don't know what the September load was (since I've misplaced the receipts) but I'm going to guess it was about the same, so I'll say another 480 pounds. So those together gets us to 46,440 pounds of iron removed from the property (that's 23.22 tons), and the sixty-first trip to the scrapyard.

Oof.

Iron Run and Bonus Run

Recently we went on (yet) another iron run; this time with some stuff pulled from the attic of the garage, which we've barely gotten to otherwise, probably because though it's quite full (it really does have goat paths) it's contained and hidden and sort of isn't bothering anyone, unlike the stuff in the yard, which is a definite demoralizing eyesore. And part of what is in there is the old cottage bedroom set that I moved in there when I converted one of the attic bedrooms into my studio room; but that's fine—that's what attics are for, after all. But behind that is of course plenty of hoard.

The weird thing about my father's hoarding is that oftentimes when we peel away the layers we'll find big empty spaces. That sounds kind of contrary to what usually goes on with hoarding, where every cubic inch is filled with stuff. But I think in my father's case, what he'd do is pile something big and flat against things, maybe 'temporarily', then pile more stuff up against that, leaving empty spaces behind the big flat thing, since it has to lean a bit. He did this especially in the upstairs garage, which has some vertical joists; also there isn't really a floor in the eaves, since he never got around to that. So only a few things got put up in eaves proper, since they were difficult to get to; everything else was put in the middle and the eaves are this (mostly) big empty space. It is odd, I know, that a hoarder wouldn't just fill it all up; but hoarders aren't exactly organized, or logical.

So Tara was up in there and pulled some stuff out, including some random pipes that were so long we weren't sure how they got in there in the first place (they went out through the window, at any rate) and this old box spring, which unlike modern box springs which are all box and no springs was all springs and no box. You can see it in the trailer, here:

I believe Tara cut the thing in half with her trusty Sawzall. I guess it didn't fit in the trailer otherwise. That, or she needed to work some anger out, who knows.

Speaking of the garage attic, one day not too long ago I noticed that Smudge the feral mommy-cat hadn't showed up at the chow bowl for a couple of days. That wouldn't be that unusual for say Spot, who has been known to wander off for months at a time, but Smudge (who is the mother of Danny, Ratty, and Momo) is the most gregarious of the three, such that I have actually been able to pet her while she's eating (she also purrs like a freight train, which quality she has passed down to her three sons). So I was a little worried.

After a couple of days of not seeing her I was definitely getting a bit anxious, so I walked around the yard calling her—our street, though rural, also has fairly heavy traffic, as it's the only road accessing an island and so every car that goes up the street also comes down the street eventually, and I've buried plenty of stray cats who've been hit. Also we have coyotes. But poking around I saw no sign of her.

Then I thought of the garage. Sometimes when Tara comes by she'll open the door and leave it open; also my mother goes in there once in a while. And Smudge is, like I said, gregarious and unafraid (for a feral cat). She is also, of course, a cat, and we've all heard about their curiosity.

So I poked my head in the garage and called her. Not that they come when called, being feral, but if she was in there I wanted her to know I was there. And not that I was expecting her to come to me, period; in fact I was pretty sure if I was standing in the door she'd go hide. But I stood there and listened, anyway.

And there it was, a little meow, coming from what sounded like right above me. So I went upstairs.

Just in time to see a fluffy tail dart across the goat path and hide in a pile of furniture. Okay.

So I went to get some food to try to lure her out; but first I figured I'd feed her mother and sister, who were right there in the breezeway. And as I noisily poured the chow into their dish down the stairs came Smudge, who meowed delightedly at her family, then dove face first into the chow. I guess she was pretty hungry.

Anyway, mystery solved, with a nice happy ending. Silly cat.

So, the other half of this recent iron run was mostly a tangle of wires from somewhere in the shop, I think, though who knows; it could have come from the garage attic, as there were car parts there too. It was a decent pile though, see:

So all it all it was our usual iron run, the fifty-eighth of its kind, which, yikes. Except now we (well, I) run into a problem—somewhere along the line the receipts got lost. They usually end up in the glove compartment of the bus for the trip home, and then I grab them so that I can update the total here; but they've gone missing. And given how many of these things we've done, and how they honestly are all sort of blurring together, I don't really have a clear idea what I did with it. I could have put it in my pocket, but if I did I never took it out and checking my pockets I haven't found it (not even in a crumpled-up wad that's been through the wash). So I don't know. It was a pretty average run on the smallish side, so I'm going to guess and call it five hundred pounds of iron.

However: in looking for the recent receipts on a whim I looked in Larry the Volvo Station Waggon's glove compartment, just in case well I don't know in case what as I can't see I would have been in that car immediately following an iron run, but hey I looked. And I did find some receipts--from 2009. That's before the blog was started, but what went that day five years ago certainly counts towards the total, so I'll add it in here too. I also know that I haven't added it in the past as all those receipts are in here in the desk drawer. So, waaaaaay back on the sixth of July, 2009, we got rid of 980 pounds of iron, and a decent amount of precious stuff, too, including (if I'm reading the thing correctly) 126 pounds of sheet aluminum. Don't ask me exactly what that was, because there is no way I will remember. There were also apparently more than 200 pounds of electric motors that went that day, so that's good. Maybe someday when this is all cleaned up I'll add up just how much of each 'precious' metal went. I know we've gotten rid of plenty of other electric motors, for example. Did we once have a quarter of a ton of the things?

So then, adding all of that up, we are at our (accounted for) fifty-ninth trip to the scrapyard, and we've gotten rid of 45,480 pounds, or 22.74 tons of scrap iron.

Yep. And there's still more.

How Many More Times

And I am still catching up.

A couple weeks ago now, on the last day of winter, we did (yet) another iron run; and even though it wasn't all that long ago I swear maybe my brain has just used up all the available space for these things because I don't really remember what went down now. There were no Bus-related disasters, at least, which is good, and which you'd think might make it memorable as it's just so unusual; basically though we just got there and unloaded the stuff and were good to go.

This one mainly consisted of a hunk of old car, an old lawnmower that Tara had had for a while but which was originally one of our father's (I guess she gave up trying to fix the thing) and these two old fireplace-pipe-thingies from the 70s, probably dating back to the oil crisis, which would have affected the home heating oil situation (not that my father particularly believed in heating the home). They were supposed to be some kind of passive way to heat the room better with a fireplace; the thing sat in the fireplace and the fire was built inside it. In theory, cool air went in the bottom, was heated, and then came out the top, creating some kind of air current because heat rises. Yeah. In theory. Tara had taken one to try in her own fireplace, and even went so far as to hook up a fan to the thing at the bottom; but no, in practice they are pretty much useless. Oh the 70s. Can't say I miss 'em.

Here's a picture of the load from two views; you can see the two tubing-fireplace-thingies. In addition to being useless, they were damned ugly. Which does accord with the general ambiance of the seventies,* so there's that.

We also managed to scare up a few more generators, as shown here:

Which sounds kind of whoop-de-do, I know, but they fetch a decently high price given their size. I guess they're mostly copper inside.

So then, once again this load was on the light-but-bulky side and so only came to 660 pounds; but that brings our totals now up to 44,000 pounds or an even 22 tons of iron removed since whenever we started keeping track like six years ago now. And remember, there was quite a bit more before that; we used to just haul stuff to the dump and I distinctly remember cleaning up a huge pile of I-beams and pipes at one point. It was our 57th trip to the scrapyard, and just yesterday we were out there digging up more as we cleaned out a spot by the shop. But that's yet another post to catch up on, so you'll have to wait for that.

*With the exception of Jimmy Page, of course, who was damned pretty at the time.

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.

Catching Up Is Hard To Do

Well, okay, we've got a bit of catching-up to do. Blame the long New England winter (which I won't make the mistake of declaring over just yet) for inspiring a case of the mehs, or blame Life and the usual attendant Stuff, or one might, if one is really quite astute, perhaps blame ordinary laziness. I won't say which one, but I'll bet you can guess.

Now it's not like we haven't done stuff; we just haven't blogged about it. Fair enough, it does all sort of blur together, all these iron runs, and we may have lost a bit of the thread here. Also Tara closed on her own house recently, so she's been occupied with taking some (hopefully non-structural) attic walls down and painting the thing purple (I am, as you might guess, incredibly jealous of the color).

So: last we knew, our heroines had plans to get that area over by the shop cleared by the end of the year. Well, that didn't happen. Okay. We can come back to that.

We did, however, get another iron run in in early December. It really was the usual stuff, a trailerload of junk with some precious metals gathered up inside the Bus. I don't honestly remember the day, now, but that's probably because it was blessedly uneventful. For once.

So here is the usual trailer shot, with some old VW doors. And yes, there are still more doors kicking around, especially in the shed:

And the usual shot of the 'precious' load in the Bus, this time with lots of wires. I don't really know where it all came from, exactly. Sometimes I wonder where any of this stuff comes from. Okay, the obvious answer is my father but really I swear the way the stuff apparently multiplies it's enough to make me wonder if the ancients weren't on to something with their ideas about spontaneous generation:

So that was that day's worth of junk taken away. Given that the stuff in the trailer was mostly light but bulky doors and such, it only came to 420 pounds that day according to the receipt, though there were 39 pounds of insulated copper wires, so that was pretty good.

Which brings our totals up to 45,340 pounds, or 21.67 tons of iron removed from the property (that we have receipts for) and our 56th trip to the scrapyard. And I know I usually say There's more of course but in this case, yeah, there's another scrap run from a couple weeks ago, which I'll get to in another post, so that total I just gave is already obsolete. But it'll do for now.

Iron Run of the Mill

So we've got a bit of catching up to do; two iron runs and a show, with another show scheduled for this coming weekend.

Last week's iron run was the usual, with the trailer full of #1 iron and the precious bits in the Bus proper, pulled out of both the shed and the shop. Tara had been saving some of the parts here (whatever those dumbbell-looking things with the wiggly bits on the end are) thinking that someone who was into restoring old VWs might buy them, but as we do more and more shows she's coming to realize no one really wants certain things, and so is letting them go. Me, of course, I've been saying all along it's just crap but does she listen to me?

Anyway here's the trailer:

Somewhere in there was this garage door mechanism thing (at least I think that's what it was), which would have been vaguely approaching interesting in a sort of steampunk/torture chamber sort of way, except of course it wasn't brass, which would have made it much flashier:

So it went, with all the other junk. Tara didn't get a picture of the precious stuff inside the Bus, but I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like by now. It was the usual starters and old wiring and everyone's favorite, 'irony aluminum', whatever that is.

It was pretty much your run of the mill iron run, there and back again and not very exciting, which is, you know, kind of nice. Because the show we did on Sunday, why oh yes that had some 'interesting times' as that old (supposed) Chinese curse goes, but you'll have to wait till Tara emails me the pictures she took to hear that story. Oh, those were some fun times.

So while you wait for that (with bated breath I'm sure), here are the totals from last Wednesday's iron run. It was an even thousand pounds of #1 in the trailer, and about twenty pounds of precious bits. Which brings the total up to 43,480 pounds of iron removed from the property since we've been keeping track (and, again, there was plenty more before that we don't have receipts for), which is 21.74 tons, and our fifty-third trip. And as evidenced by the fact that we also did an iron run this afternoon, well yeah, there is still more.

Yup.

A Quickie

So while I was in the tub today (because we all know that is how phones work) Tara calls. My mother, bless her heart, actually got the message correct, so when I could I called her back; she wanted to do an iron run today, having poked around in the garage and dug out some stuff, mostly more starters. Well, I had to run to the bank to straighten something out, and then I had to take the cat to the vet (the cat being Rory, who has an infected ear but nothing major), so I didn't think there was going to be time.

But the bank turned out not taking that long, and so when she came by we decided to try after all.

There were a couple old Volkswagen transmissions in this load, as well as a pile of starters and an old aluminum wheel which fetched a bit more than I would have thought; and off we hied, again, and I mean again again again, to the scrapyard. Here's the trailer with the transmissions:

And the starters/alternators in the Bus:

It was a bit of a squeeze, time-wise, but we made it. Tara even went around back to drop off the #1 iron whilst I dealt with the starters at the precious metal building/warehouse/shed. So I regret to say I don't know if today was a smelly day back there in that part of the scrap yard. I really hope it wasn't.

Looking around the garage now I can see that Tara pulled some things out, but it doesn't really look like much has gone. Though the garage had been gotten up to cleaner than it had been, i.e. its former hoarded state, still there's a lot of stuff tucked under and on top of things, stuff that we didn't know what to do with at the time, probably. But now we know, or know a bit better.

So, the totals: the iron part came to 540 pounds; there was a good 224 pounds of automobile starters and another 60 of alternators, with another thirty or so of aluminum and irony aluminum, including that wheel. So that brings our total to 42,480 pounds of iron removed that we've got records for, or 21.24 tons. And it was our fifty-second trip to that place. And like I said, I couldn't really tell that much had been taken out of the garage. So we'll be going back, won't we.

Yup.

Yet Another Iron Run

So off we hied yesterday on yet another iron run; we'd meant to do it Friday, but it poured, and Monday we clean forgot (I guess that was a hell of a weekend, well, at least for Tara). So Tuesday we gathered up the usual various bits, and drove off to the junk man's.

We had some 'precious' metals with us this time, including about ten old Volkswagen starters, which are ridiculously heavy for things that small; I know we sorted some out once upon a time, but Tara seems to keep finding more of them here and there. There was also included in this haul Larry the Volvo station waggon's old radiator, the one my mother managed to smash in that accident she was in a while back (she's fine, but Larry needed a bit of work). So Tara loaded up the trailer with the big bits (as usual) and put the little things like the starters inside (also as usual):

This time when we got there, we not only separated out the precious stuff but did the iron itself twice, as the junkyard powers that be give different prices for light iron vs. heavy iron, not that I frankly understand what the difference is as it's all iron and all gets melted down in the end. And funny enough when it's been a mix in the past they always seem to pick the light iron price for all of it, which is of course the lower one. Funny that. Now I'm not saying they're cheats at that junkyard (though I was not very impressed with their reaction when they broke Tara's trailer, which was basically to shrug and tell us we were shit outta luck), but I will say the older guy there has the look of one of the goblin bankers at Gringott's: beady eyes full of a miserly suspicion, spectacles worn low on the nose, and a permanent scowl.

Driving around back the whole place has of course changed drastically; this time there was a giant pile of cubes that had once been cars I think, stacked up like bricks. It took a bit to figure out which pile was which, but we managed.

Over by the light iron pile the Mark Twain guy in The Claw (he has since cut his mullet, but kept the mustache) was loading what looked like old air conditioners into a smaller bucket loader. As he placed them there I noticed a cloud of something misty coming out of them, something I'm guessing was freon. So much for that ozone layer.

Tara also spied this:

Yes, that looks like it met a very not-safe end.

Anyway, after various trips to and fro in various parts of the scrapyard, we got it all unloaded, though the smell over by the heavy iron (which was right by that Borg-looking scary pile of once-transmissions) was really very nasty; I don't know what it was but I swear it's as if iron, oil, and that sort of greasy dirt you find in garages could actually rot, like they were organic. I know that's not possible, but there is a stench to it that can only be described as somehow both putrid meat and metallic. I found myself really hoping that kind of stink isn't the kind that sticks to your clothing. As far as I can tell, it didn't, but I don't know what would happen if you were say that Mark Twain guy out working in it all day. If I were him I'd be spending a fortune on Febreeze.

All told the iron came to 540 pounds, with a whole bunch of 'precious' stuff as well; that brings us up to 41,940 pounds of iron removed from the property since we've been keeping track (with of course a whole bunch more before that), or 20.97 tons. And it was our fifty-first trip to the scrapyard, which just makes me sigh in a rather tired way. Because even though we're closing in on getting the yard clean, there's still more junk stashed away in the various outbuildings. I know there must be more starters out there in the shop. So yeah, there is still more.

Which we will find, and get rid of.

Won't You Take Me To Junkytown

So there we were once again, with yet another load of rusty hunks of rusty rust to go to the scrapyard. Or there Tara was, anyway, out by the shed loading up the trailer. She was out there earlier than I had expected, and had it all loaded up by the time I got things in gear. So when I got out there we were all set to go, more or less, which I've got to say was handy for me.

Not really for Tara, though. You see, it was raining last Friday. When I had asked her earlier if she still wanted to do a run that day she'd said it wasn't bad enough to cancel things, as it was only spitting out there.

Yes, well. She was still out there long enough that she got good and wet, especially her sneakers.

Now rain in April is hardly a surprise; however rain in April in New England generally means it's not exactly warm out there. And we all know about the 'heat' in an old VW bus.

So Tara was freezing the entire time, and the lukecool air spilling out onto her wet sneakers via both the proper heating vents and the naturally occurring holes in the shell of the Bus itself really didn't help.

But she carried on with that stiff upper lip that betrays our (once upon a time) British heritage.

By which I mean she complained the entire time.

But we managed to get there and unload the thing; she'd even dug up some more old generators to include as 'precious' metals. Here they are, stacked up inside the Bus:


Aren't they just gorgeous?

And then there was of course the trailer, loaded with more doors from old VWs. As we do more shows, we (well Tara, because she's the one that keeps track of this stuff in her head—me, I can't seem to keep it straight, because as we all know I just don't care) are finding that there are just some things that people will never buy. Things that might have looked okay that we now know are useless to save because they'll just sit there forever. And unlike our hoarder father, we understand that something sitting there forever is the opposite of useful. So out they went, to get crushed and then melted down and made into something practical like cat food cans or wrought iron garden ornaments or new nails or something. I will (happily) admit I do like to imagine the old VW pieces screaming in horror and pain as they are crushed, and then imagining that as they are then melted down they can feel their sense of individuality and Self slipping away in a great burning agony. Kind of like Gollum in the lava flow at Orodruin at the end of all things, but with a lot more screaming. Have I mentioned that I really hate old Volkswagens?

Oh, right, here's the trailer picture too:


It was a little tricky backing the Bus and trailer into a spot by their giant pile of hunks of iron that didn't involve setting us down smack in the middle of a rusty irony oily puddle, but Tara managed. The stuff was also small enough this time that we didn't need the 'help' of the (trailer-destroying) giant magnet thingy, which was lucky.

So we finished up there, and went off to the usual burger joint stop, though both the 'hot' water and the air dryer thingy in the ladies' room there were barely warm, something I noted was not going to help Tara, who was still freezing. We did stop later for a hot coffee at local empire Dunkin' Donuts, then, because we were bored or something, decided to stop at the job lot store.

This store, oh this store. Someday—someday!—the correct letters will burn out on the sign and it will read OCEAN STATE J LO. It can happen, I know it can. Tara has already seen CVS/ harmacy, which is gold I tell you. So I have faith.

For my part I poked around looking at the vampiric nail polish; but Tara, clever girl, went and bought herself 1) a towel, 2) some new socks which were dry, and 3) a funky pair of waterproof galoshes. And then she ripped off her wet socks and shoes and put on the new ones on the bench right in the front of the store. Which it's true did take the edge off her complaining. A little.

So all told it was rather a light load, given that a lot of it was old doors; so the iron part of it only came to 480 pounds, despite the trailer being quite full. There were also the bits and bobs of the 'precious' stuff including everyone's favorite irony aluminum; with that and the fact that Tara had also sold three windshields before we went (which is why she was out there earlyish to begin with) we got a bit of fun money.

And that brings the total of iron removed from the property since I've been keeping track (remember, there was lots more before that, only we weren't scrapping it properly so we don't have any receipts) to 40,980 pounds, or 20.49 tons. It was our forty-ninth trip to the scrapyard, which means the next trip will be number fifty. And if that doesn't scare you, nothing will.

Because it will happen. Easily. There is, after all, still more.

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.

Yeah Yeah More Iron

So off we went today on another, guess what, iron run. This time the bulk of the load was some rolled-up chainlink fence, which, let me tell you, is nasty stuff to attempt to muscle around, since it has pointy bits pretty much everywhere.

We had planned on also muscling an old Triumph engine into the back, but it actually proved too heavy. Tara is going to take a wrench (or perhaps a sledgehammer and Sawzall) to it and see if she can break it down into smaller pieces. And that'll make the beginning of the next iron run.

Mostly though we took a little bit from here and a little bit from there; so there aren't any dramatic befores and afters to show, I'm afraid. Here's Larry:



We also threw some 'precious' metals in there, including some old VW generators, which I'm quite sure we have many more of, somewhere behind some stuff somewhere.

When we got to the smelter where the 'precious' metals go, what was there up on top of the computer-thing but a decent size statue of the Hindu God Shiva, in that dancing-on-a-dwarf-surrounded-by-a-ring-of-fire pose. Probably bronze, that someone wanted to recycle, but the kid picked it out. He knew what it was, too, and said that a couple people had already tried to buy it, but he'd refused.

So anyway. The total weight for the iron today was on the low side, because we'd been expecting to have that engine in there as well; but the price was actually pretty good. Usually it runs about two hundred dollars a ton, but our five hundred and eighty pounds brought in seventy-five and change, which puts it at what, oh let me work that out, hang on, about two sixty a ton. Not bad. Might not be a bad idea to do some more iron runs soon. Because there is of course more.

Tara actually was wondering if we might top twenty-five tons of iron by the time we're through here. I don't know; probably. I can't imagine being through though, personally; it's such an alien concept in some ways.

So, then. That brings our totals up to 37,220 pounds, or 18.61 tons of iron removed from this poor hoarded property, and our forty-fourth trip to that scrapyard. And yes, there's oh wait I just said that. Well, you know.

Rock On Gold Rust Women

Well, now that the weather is getting warmer and things are slowly turning green here at the Best Little Hoardhouse in Massachusetts, it's time once again to start ramping up the clean-up job. So today we made, guess what, another iron run.

This time the heavy bit on the bottom was this Saab engine that took a while to muscle into the back of ever-patient Larry the Volvo station waggon; on top of that was the ancient iron dolly-cart it rode in on. That was a bit of a problem, that dolly-cart; it was mostly nothing, but the structure of it was just huge and awkward, and of course still heavy; fitting everything in there for this load required a bit of puzzle-piecing it together. But we got it all in there, eventually.

The rest of the load was made up of some truly hideous jagged bits of rusty rust pulled (and Sawzalled) off of the rotting corpse of Genviève the Citroën; good Gods look at this nasty pile of stuff:



Don't let the heavenly-looking light fool you; this stuff was a clear and present danger, and bad-tempered to boot. But we made it through, thanks to luck and a stout pair of gloves each. Well, not that the gloves necessarily matched each other; I was lucky to find a couple of right ones, though we had about eight left gloves. I don't know where they go; probably a Universe parallel to the ones socks are sent to after being devoured by the washing machine, I imagine.

Here's the backed-out view; as I said, nasty stuff, and hopefully not too much damage to the headliner.

Both pictures by Tara, by the way.

This load came to 760 pounds, with a little aluminum (and everyone's favorite, 'irony aluminum' though don't ask me what's ironic about aluminum, I'm nowhere near hipster enough) and a bit of brass thrown in; that brings our total to 36,640 pounds of iron removed from this place starting about four years ago; or in tons, 18.32; it was our forty-third trip to the scrapyard.

Tara has already talked about this Triumph engine hanging out in the downstairs breezeway, to form the start of another iron run; so that should be happening fairly soon, probably next week, as both Tara and I are busy the rest of the week. Because yes, there is still more. Somehow.

Rust In The Wind

Today it was once again time to saddle up ol' Larry the Volvo station waggon and drag the poor guy, loaded down with rusty hunks of rusty rust, to the scrapyard. Once again.

This time the main weight of it was this old Citroën engine that had been sitting smack in the middle of the lawn over by the shed; well, that and some truly scary jagged rusty bits vulture-picked off the carcass (ha! carcass) of Genviève the Citroën, as well as various bits and bobs raked up out of the dirt such as the odd shovel handle. Here's Larry's butt, as usual, for proof:



Tara for some reason has got it in her head that there aren't too many iron runs left given how much we've cleaned. She's had that idea for a while now; I'm pretty sure the psychological term is denial. And today she was all like, It just keeps coming! I just sort of shook my head and said, Yep. I think she's expecting that if we've got the place eighty-five percent cleaned by now (which is probably about right) it should start petering out, right? Yeah, well; fifteen percent of a million is still a lot.

For some time now, we have been working on the area over by the shop, where the pen used to be. And by some time I mean off and on since the fall; however, since it was only bits and pieces here and there, there hadn't really been anything to show. We've (well, okay, Tara did most of the muscle work) pulled out these absurdly huge creosote 'fence posts' (probably sections of telephone poles), which required a tripod and come-a-long, moved cars, picked up junk, gotten rid of an engine or two, taken the sections of stockade fence away, filled in holes, cut down a dead tree, burned brush, and generally tidied up. It's still not done (those old creosote fence posts are a bit of a puzzle; I'm not sure they'll burn, or, rather, I'm worried they'll burn rather too well), but here are some befores and afters.

The before is from last summer, maybe:



And the after, taken today:



And here's one looking towards the shed:



That bit of something in the middlish there is half of the back axle section of Genviève. (Yes, I'm sure there's a proper name for that part of a car, but, happily I've blotted it from memory.) It's half because Tara managed to saw the thing in two, length-wise. The reason it's still there is because we ran out of room in Larry, so it will have to wait for the next iron run. Yes, there will be another. Of course.

So, then, totals: today's iron run was the forty-second trip to the scrapyard, and got rid of another 700 pounds of iron (as well as nine pounds of aluminum specially for the smelter-man); that brings the total amount of iron removed from the property since oh whenever to 35,880 pounds, or 17.94 tons, just this close to a solid eighteen tons.

Which we will of course easily top on the next iron run, probably next week. Because, of course, there is still more.

The Tetanus Burger 2011 Year-In-Review

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!

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?

The Plan

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.

Ironing It Out

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.