Oh Good

Last night I dreamed of kittens. There were eight of them in the litter, including a couple of black ones (I love black cats; they are so gorgeous), and one that was this lovely sort of solid roan shade, a color cats don't really come in. When I woke I was like oh no.

Tonight I made (well, I'm still making it) some chicken in my new crock pot what Tara got me for the recent holiday, and took the trimmings out to the feral cats. I wouldn't give the inside cats chicken fat, but I figure the feral ones are out in the freezing cold and need all the fuel they can get. So I took it out there to them, still on the cutting board.

The Grrls were out there, Spot Splotch and Smudge (who sometimes get called Splunge or Splot or Smotch when I get mixed up) as well as The Interloper.

The Interloper lives up to his/her name; The Grrls are not particularly welcoming to him/her, so while the three of them were on the floor by the chow dish waiting for me, The Interloper was up on the windowsill that I leave open so they can come and go and get a bit of shelter.

Now while The Interloper has been more friendly than usual, he/she is still not tame or anything, and so was shying away from me a bit.

But I had a cutting board full of tasty chicken scraps, and well that's one of the best cat magnets there is.

So I held out the board to intrigue him/her. Sure enough, he/she leaned forward, and his/her tail went up in delight at the smell.

And then I finally got a good look at the thing's butt, in decent light, fairly close up, and with my glasses on.

The verdict: The Interloper is very definitely male. Oh golly yes.

Wow am I relieved.

He is still pretty round in the belly though; I'm going to see what I can do about maybe getting an over-the-counter wormer into the poor thing, assuming that's possible. I imagine all of them could use some, so hopefully I can mix it in with their food somehow. Wish me luck.

Crap

Oh crap. Crap crap crap crap crap.

You may recall a certain Kitten Situation I blogged about a couple years back; in short, a feral mommy-cat showed up with her three brand-new kittens in tow, and I couldn't turn them away. Given that it was all new to me and that the local charities were overwhelmed, by the time everyone got caught up with the spaying and neutering and adopting out I ended up taking in six cats (and Tara took one herself).

After that it settled in to a routine of taking care of the indoor guys while feeding the outdoor girls (whom I've been calling The Grrrls). It was a nice stable family unit out there and though here and there a tomcat or two (as well as an opossum or two) came by for a snack it was perfectly manageable. And yes, I feed The Grrrls; it keeps them safe in the back and out of the road.

One of the occasional tomcats was a stripey number who I dubbed The Interloper. No, I don't know why; probably because he was infiltrating the nice power-of-three family unit out there of Spot, Smudge, and Splotch. It's hard to tell with a stripey, since the coat pattern isn't sex-specific (unlike tortoiseshell or even marmalade), but from the glances I was able to steal it did look to be a boy under its tail.

Yeah, well, tonight The Interloper showed up looking distinctly round about the belly; it was also distinctly friendlier, which in a feral cat is usually a sign of counting down to kittens or I suppose rabies. The funny thing is that looking under its tail tonight if I had to guess I'd still say male. Maybe it's just patterning, or shadows?

If it is female, and it is pregnant (which barring a pretty hideous case of worms I imagine it is) then I'll have to start up the trap spay release stuff again. Thing is though that if the charities are anything like they were it may take me a couple months before someone will lend me a trap again. And by then the thing will have exploded in kittens and I'll be here trapping them and socializing them and getting them their distemper shots and giving them away through the shelter again, and besides not wanting to deal with the, shall I say, duplicitous person at the local place (I mean she did help me, but far too many times what she said and what she did were two completely different things), it really is just a lot of work.

Argh!

Progress

And another post, because looking through old posts trying to find a good 'before' I could use I came across that old satellite photo of the yard, and thought it would be fun to see if there was a more recent one.

Here's the old one, taken in I think May 2010, if I'm remembering correctly; it was just before we started the blog, I know.

And here's what Google Maps is currently showing for this address:

The picture quality is definitely not as nice as the older picture (and those craggy tree-shadows are a bit confusing); still, you can get a decent idea. I would guess it was taken about the first week of May, going by the fact that the willow tree has leafed out and when I checked the neighbor's yard his flowering pears were in bloom. I'd almost say it was taken a couple days ago, except that the arbor vitaes are still there. It is hard to make out what's over there by the Shop, but it's probably the other Bugs before they were moved. So I'd guess this picture is almost exactly a year old. You can see that except for that jumble of something over by the shop it looks pretty much like a completely normal yard, devoid of hoarded cars and other junk.

And that is very, very wonderful.

Shop Progress

Remember that goal we made, the one where we wanted to get it all cleaned up over by the shop by the end of 2013? Well, it didn't exactly happen by that deadline; however, we are still plugging away at it.

A couple of weeks ago now (yes, I'm still catching up; this should be the last of it, though I've been itching to write a post just about Ratty, because Ratty has fans) Tara decided we should attack that area, or part of that area anyway. So we went after the spot where not too long ago there had been several old Volkswagens in a little fenced-off space. I guess you could say that it was the last fragment of my father's car hoard, in that area anyway. There are still other cars, but they've mostly been moved around or rearranged, even if they haven't left the property yet. Also there are a few indoors, in, say, the downstairs garage. But this bit here had some kind of weight to it in my mind; maybe just because it was old Volkswagens, or because it was visible, or because it represents the last of the outdoor junkyard car-hoard.

The two Bugs that had been there earlier, true, had not actually left the property, instead being squirreled away in the (upstairs) garage while Tara considers if they're worth restoring. Hint: they're not, though Tara may hold out some hope. She did take a good long look at them the other day, and while I'm not exactly sure what she concluded, there was a lot of head-shaking involved.

But anyway. Things (by which I mean junk cars) have been moving out of that area for a while now; we didn't really get a proper 'before' when the cars were moved into the garage, so this one from almost two years ago now will have to do:

So since that picture was taken, the light blue and dark red Bugs have been moved into the garage, and the orangey-red Bug has been cut into pieces. The only thing left of that is the chassis, which Tara for some reason thinks has decent floor pans or something; well, we'll skip my opinion of that because I'm sure you can all guess. Also since that picture was taken, that crappy picket fence has gone, and the arbor vitaes which were only planted there as a screen to hide the junk behind them have been cut down. The stumps will need to be dug out at some point, of course. So when we started the other day this is what was still there:

The tarp-covered thing is what's left of the chassis; the rest are some non-metal bits and bobs that are notoriously tricky to get rid of in this town as they aren't recyclable materials and so have to be thrown away in town bags, which means cutting things up into little pieces which is frankly a needless pain in the ass; but what you can't see is that that area has not been raked.

You'd think that wouldn't be a big deal, would you? Ah yes, but you have to understand--my father didn't just save old cars. He saved all kinds of crap. And he didn't keep things separate. He piled all the stuff together in a jumble.

And sure enough, when we started raking up the old leaves and the layers of dirt created by years and years of those old decayed leaves there was metal a-plenty, several bins full; in one place I think he must have had (yet another) gallon can of large bolts because I just kept finding them. But we persisted (despite the occasional poison ivy root) and I think we got it all. Here's the after, though it's a little deceptive because we just moved the chassis out of the way and didn't actually remove it from the property:

Here's another before, from a different angle; you can see the arbor vitaes have been cut:

And another after, from a slightly wider view:

So that's very nice, and probably the first time that patch of ground has seen daylight in decades.

But there was other progress.

The other day driving home from the supermarket I saw a cardboard sign nailed to a telephone pole that said CLEAN FILL WANTED with a telephone number. When I got home I called, and though the guy said he was really looking for dirt, he said he'd consider taking away some of that concrete rubble I've been trying to get rid of since forever. And sure enough the next day he swung by and got some.

He was out there for the better part of an hour, chucking bits of concrete into the back of his pickup truck while I did some gardening, but I swear it didn't look like all that much went. Here are some befores and afters of the pile around that poor lilac bush by the shed. Before:

And after; he only got a couple from this side, apparently.

He took a lot more from this side, though the 'after' still doesn't look all that different:

And after:

I do know and appreciate that every bit is progress, but holy crap he took a (large) pickup truck load and it barely looks like any went away at all.

He also spent some time over by that half a cord of concrete blocks over by the shop that nobody wants, but he only grabbed a couple bricks it looked like:

See? Doesn't look like much went there either.

The guy had said he'd take the blocks, too, not just the rubble, and said he'd be back sometime later; but a few days went by and I didn't see him or hear from him. I figured he wasn't really all that interested after all.

But then Tara noticed this:

I don't know when he came back. I'd been keeping sort of half an eye out for the guy but must have missed him. But there they were, or rather, there they weren't, and wow am I glad to be rid of those damned things. And even if that guy--bless him--doesn't end up coming back for the rest, I now understand there are people who'll happily take them away for me.

So, little by little it is coming along.

Also, with all that stuff we (literally) dug up, it'll be time for a metal run soon, probably later this week.

Yes, there is still more. But of course!

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.

Goal

Okay, so: goal time.

The yard is actually pretty close to being completely clean now. That isn't to say that the outbuildings aren't still pretty heavily hoarded, so we'll be working on those for a while longer yet, but the yard itself is I think within reach of being totally cleaned up by the time winter sets in.

So what's left?

As far as cars go, there is a whole Bug over by the shop, next to a half Bug that Tara has already started demolishing. There is also a Bug in the garage which Tara intends to take to her place but has sort of dropped the ball on. There is a silver Saab that Tara wants to fix up that could maybe be switched out for the Bug in the garage, though really that ought to just go to her place too. Then there are a couple of half-pieces of cars, as well as that white Citroën that is half-in and half-out of the downstairs garage. The rest of the cars still on the property are indoors, either in the shop or in the downstairs garage, like a Karmann-Ghia that lives in the shop that could be sold (once we can get to it) and a couple of MGs (I think) in the downstairs garage, one of which a certain mommy-cat had her kittens in.

And no, this is not about how much we can stuff indoors and hide away; the goal is still to get those spaces clean, too, so that's not going to happen.

As far as pure junk goes, there are a couple of piles still of miscellaneous things outside. Mostly they are brittle pointy plastic things that can't be recycled and are too bulky to throw in regular trash bags and so present a bit of a problem. Tara mentioned maybe renting a dumpster, so that might work, and maybe they'll even take the concrete blocks, which would be really nice, because those are a real pain in the ass to get rid of around here as nobody wants them.

Then there are the miscellaneous bits of wood, like more fence posts and some broken-down bits of hideous picket fence that can go (or get burned); there are a couple of downed trees, too, but that's more general non-hoard tidying that ought to happen, you know, the type of 'mess' normal people have to deal with.

And finally then we'd finish some things off, like putting some garage doors on the downstairs garage and finishing off the back of the shop which just needs a trimboard or two and a coat of the new paint color. The shed, too, can get painted, though I'm not going to worry about doors on that right now; let's just get the stuff inside and tidy for now.

I think this is all quite doable. I was surprised, in fact, walking around today, by just how close we already are to having the yard entirely clean. A few years ago I would never have imagined it. And again, that's not what's inside the buildings; that will still need to be sorted and tossed. But having the yard clean would be a real accomplishment.

Treasure

So Tara was over today, after getting Larry back on the road (our eighty-six year old mother had had a minor car accident in him; she was fine, he wasn't), and as we were hanging around in the back yard chatting about gardening she saw a bit of metal sitting on the ground.

That's nothing extraordinary around these parts, of course. I'd seen it myself, and thought Oh I should pick that up but I always had my hands full or something at the time. It wasn't very big, anyway, just a random pipe connector thing, the kind that looks like a piece of elbow macaroni.

But Tara's twitchier (or less lazy) than I am, and so she went to pick it up.

Turns out it was attached to a length of pipe; and next to it, buried in the ground, was a hunk of metal.

And another. And another. And another.

By the time she was finished rooting around this is what we had:

That was all buried, mind you. On the surface it had looked perfectly clean, with the grass growing over it normally, but for that one elbow connector thing.

Yeah. This is why we laughed when some dood not too long ago offered to cut some firewood for us in exchange for taking a metal detector to the yard. First of all that's a weird request because he was assuming he'd keep anything valuable (it's an old house, so who knows), but second, really? That thing would be going off constantly and be worse than useless.

Well, I guess that's the beginning of the next scrap run, isn't it?

Girls Why Not Take Out The Trash

It's always fun to hear a horrible noise coming from outside, and then realize that it is coming from your own yard. Which is just what happened the other day; and going into my studio room on the other side of the house I could see that it was Tara out there with her trusty Sawzall, chopping up another old rusty hunk of rusty rust.

This one was especially gratifying for me because it was one of the few old Bugs that are left here.

Now, you may be wondering something, something, incidentally, that I myself wonder. Why not just call the rusty hunk removers and have them haul it away? Why go through all the trouble of cutting the thing up?

Tara would say it's because she has plans to restore one of the Bugs. I think this is pure foolishness, myself, but so long as she's not doing it here in my yard I suppose I don't care. And this Bug, for some reason, has decent floor pans (well, 'decent' by old rusty Bug standards). That is what she said and I am not making it up.

And while this, I will admit, does rather annoy me as I'd just as soon see all the damned things pushed off a cliff into a river of lava (à la the One Ring; really, it's the only way to be sure), still, if she's doing the work she can go to town on it. So long as the thing goes away.

So. Tara chopped away at the thing bit by rusty bit. Here's the before, in all its rusty hunk glory [sic]:

I know. I'm not seeing anything worth anything there, either. Tara says it's because I've gone too far the other way into crazy anti-hoarder OMG I must purge!!!! territory; I kind of don't think so. In fact I suspect I'm still far too reluctant to throw things away. After all I'm letting her get away with the But I want to saaaave it schtick right now, aren't I?

And here's what she left of it:

To be fair, there is another Bug out there that has been waiting to be hauled away, but the tow people can't ever seem to get back to Tara about it, so it hasn't moved. I don't think the local ramp truck companies have blacklisted us, or at least I really hope not; these may not look like much with all the rust, but given that they are older cars there is still a higher proportion of metal in them, since a lot of cars these days have a good deal of plastic on them. I don't know what's up with that, but I'd like to get that other one out of my yard sometime soon. Especially given that it's the old light blue Bug, one I used to drive, and so I have an especial hatred of the thing. Oh and now I've got this song in my head:


Yeah. That's about right, alas.

So Tara loaded all the bits and pieces up into the revamped and hopefully sturdily repaired trailer; and off we went to the scrapyard.

Here's the trailer:

That's pretty satisfying to see, especially as even in bits and pieces it's quite recognizable as an old Bug.

As all the pieces were on the light but bulky side no Claw was used and the trailer survived the trip; on the down side though it wasn't a very heavy load at all. In fact it only came to 400 pounds, I think the lightest one so far. Still, that brings up the total, which is now 40,500 pounds of iron removed from the property, or 20.25 tons. And it was our forty-eighth trip to the scrapyard. Two more and we'll hit fifty, which is pretty much literally crazy. And there will be more beyond that, I'm sure.

You know I was worried that figuring it this way would be double-dipping, as the bits of the cars are being counted towards the total iron removed while the car itself will count for Rusty's total when it leaves; but they really are different units. True, I haven't usually been adding the weight of the iron of the cars to the iron removed total, but this is an imperfect science, I suppose. The main thing is that this stuff goes.

And that's a success all-around, I think.

The Tetanus Burger 2012 Year-In-Review

Hey kids, it's that time again! Time for our annual round-up of what-all went away in the year freshly passed.

This year it's true we didn't get as much done as in years past; I think there are several reasons for that. One, it's just hard work and we're tired of it; two, we do actually have lives outside of cleaning up after our hoarder father; and three, I suspect that we've been doing jobs more or less in order of easy to difficult, meaning the things that are left are getting to be the problematic thorny sorts of things, or the ones that have been put off because X has to happen before Y can before Z, for example you can't really clean out something deep inside until you clean out the outside leading to it, that sort of thing. I mean maybe. On the whole it's all pretty problematic. Don't think, however, it's because we're running out of stuff to junk. Oh ho no.

Oh, also Larry, our redoubtable Volvo station waggon and our hitherto primary means of haulin', was out of commission for a time and a solution (i.e. a trailer) had to be figured out. That didn't help, I'm sure. Still, we did a fair amount of iron runs. Witness the below:

Given the trailer some of those were double loads, with both the trailer and the Bus filled up. All told it came to 5560 pounds of iron removed, or 2.78 tons, which is a little more than half last year's total.

As for cars leaving as per our Rusty's countdown, we only managed to get three out of here. We did, however, pass the half-way mark given the number that was here at the beginning of this blog and are down to eleven left, some of which are indoors and so not visible.

Good riddance, and Rusty say GOODBYE!

We also did several VW shows, which helped both get rid of stuff and put some cash in our pockets; I suppose I should mention that Tara has been quietly selling stuff on the side through ads on some VW fora, especially seats, which is good as they are kind of a pain to get rid of. (Basically they can go to the scrapyard with the iron, but you have to get them down to the metal; otherwise no one will take them.) So that's good too.

I wonder how long it will take to be done with this. It is such an odd idea, to someone who's lived here all my life (more or less); in some ways I simply cannot imagine this yard being clean. And while the goal is specific--to get the yard clean--I'm not sure I know what that means, or at least I don't know exactly the scope of the project, not really. We have just been cleaning whatever is there in front of us. There isn't really a set plan. Which can be fine; I mean obviously it's working. But I don't know what the real goal is, or how to really go about doing it, like with steps or markers for how far we've come and how far we have to go. I've been managing it a little, like with Rusty's countdown on the side, but that kind of goal-making is something that I think I was simply never taught, if not actively discouraged from learning. Because to a hoarder a clean yard or a clean house is an unthinkable horror. And part of keeping things as they are is to make sure the other people don't, or can't think of it either.

Hoarders are some nasty pieces of work.

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.

V-Dubious

Oh my darling Rusty. How I missed you. But like they say absence just makes the heart grow fonder (actually I think the psychological term might be intermittent reinforcement.)

So today our steadfast Rusty Hunk showed up to take away another rusty hunk (of rusty rust), this time one of the old, much-loathed Volkswagen Bugs, this one being especially hated by me because I used to actually drive the damned thing. Oh, the fond memories of cruising along well under the speed limit while everyone else swooshed by me since if you tried to go fifty in it the steering wheel would shudder horribly and it would feel like it was about to break apart like the Enterprise at Warp Eleven (She canna take any more Capt'n!!!)

Oh did I say fond? Actually I meant that other four-letter word that begins with an F.

Here's the damned thing, after we dragged it out from behind the shop. It took quite a bit of abusing Larry the Volvo station waggon to get it there to where the ramp truck could reach it, but that was as good as it was going to get. You can probably make out the skid/drag/burn marks in the background (the latter made by Larry as he repeatedly spun out, as he has just an atrocious lack of traction):

(Pictures taken today by Tara.)

It was yellow, once upon a time, though it's hard to tell now what with all the greeny Xanthoparmelia lichens on it. Yes, it's been sitting there that long.

As we were dragging it out I was the one chosen to sit in it and attempt to steer. For some reason though I wasn't thinking, though I should have known; for as I placed my foot upon the floor, lo! the rust parted and it went right through to the ground beneath.

When José came by with the ramp truck today he gave it the usual look, but seemed resigned to taking it. Here he is doing I'm not quite sure what, probably trying to find something solid to attach a chain to:



And here it is going away, hurrah!



When we got to the junkyard though the big scale was broken so they had to guess; they said something like a ton. If we'd gotten rid of it last week we might have made a bit more, as the price of iron crashed this week, so we didn't make anywhere near as much as usual. But that's okay. The thing is out of my yard, and one just can't put a price on the psychological benefits.

Here's a before, from last summer or autumn I think:



And today's after:



And so we are now at fifteen junk cars out of here, with eleven to go. Two more and we'll be in the single digits, which, really, I don't think I could have even imagined a few years ago. But it looks like it's happening.

That's nothing short of a miracle.

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.

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!