Satellite Photo

Here's a satellite map of part of the yard, so you all can get a look. I'd date it to May 19-25 2010. I know it's 2010 because the brown and yellow bus is still there (the first car our Rusty took away, and one of the first things I reported here on Tetanus Burger); I can date it to that week because of the various things blooming/leafing out.

Which means that this photo dates from just before we started this blog.



There are quite a few cars there that have since left the property. The two Saabs behind the garage, for example. The bus, of course, has also gone, as has all the junk a little left and below the center; and that little enclosed area to the right of the shed is now empty, though one of the cars is still here, having been moved from where it was but not out yet.

Interesting, isn't it?

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.

To The Scrapyard

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

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

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

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

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



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

Yep. Still more out there.

Odd

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

So she started tearing it apart.

But then something else odd happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the guy left.

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

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

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









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









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

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

Lucky Thirteen

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

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

So off Caroline went, out of my yard!

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



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



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



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

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

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

The Tetanus Burger 2011 Year-In-Review

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?

One Out One In

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

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

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



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



Woo-hoo!

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



And the out-of-focus close-up:



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

Triumphant

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

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

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



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

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



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



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

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

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

We Came, We Sawzalled, We Conquered

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

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

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

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

Here's Larry:



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

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



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



It's getting there.

Rust Bus Run

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



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



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



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

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

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

Fifty. Holy crap.

Interview Up

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

Warning: there is rather a lot of honesty involved.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Quick Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kitten Addendum

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

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

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

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

Would you believe this:



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

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

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

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

Event

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

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

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

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

I way, way, way, overdressed.

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

Check out this spread:



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

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

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

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

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

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

The Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The braver of the two is in the front here:



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



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

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

Here they are together:



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Wish me luck. Again.

Spotted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except this time nothing happens. The door stays open.

I stand there and curse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wish me luck.

Ironing It Out

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

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

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

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

Why yes. And?

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

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



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

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

And here's the back view:



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

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

Ai yi. There's still more.

Bug Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never came.

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

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

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

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

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

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



And the after:



I do love me some empty space.

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

*****

As for the kittens:

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

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