New Playlist!

So I was screwing around a bit tonight and ended up adding a playlist to this blog, since Tara and I have been joking about it for a while. All the songs are related to the task at hand, namely cleaning up this hoarded property; they in fact do tend to get stuck in my head as we are tending to said task. Now one may, if one is very astute, be able to figure out who my favorite band is at present, though to be fair they do often seem to have quite uncannily appropriate lyrics.

Anyway it's set so that you have to turn it on, since auto-play playlists are the Devil's work; for right now it's a bar at the bottom of the page. I was hoping to find one that would just go on the sidebar, but this one was the most straightforward. I will probably futz with it some more and hopefully find one that goes where I want that I can figure out.

Suggestions are welcome, though if the song's past about 1998 or so I probably won't have heard of it. Just so's you know.

Yet Another Iron Run

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

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

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

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

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

Tara also spied this:

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

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

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

Which we will find, and get rid of.

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.

Ironically This Post Is Not Directly About Iron

So there was a small pile of my father's stuff we took back from the nursing home; and there, right on the top, was this (I've blurred out both his name and the name of our town):

That's right, the man who turned his acre and a half yard into a junkyard full of rusting cars, rotting lumber, leaking engines, fifty-five gallon drums of parts cleaner, buckets of broken glass, containers of waste oil and dirty gasoline and miscellaneous toxic substances (such as that ancient bottle of muriatic acid Tara and I had to deal with) was on the local Conservation Commission for more than twenty years. And when he retired from that, the town gave him a fucking plaque.

I have two questions. One, what were the town officials thinking when they gave this to him? They had to note the mind-blowing irony of the situation, right? And two, if they genuinely didn't, what the fuck were they smoking? I mean I know this is a small town, but reality is still reality, isn't it? They were otherwise after him to clean up the yard, so it's not like they didn't know. I mean, not like anyone driving past the house wouldn't know.

For my father's part I'm sure he saw no irony in it at all. I'm also quite sure that the reason he was on the Conservation Commission in the first place was not actually out of concern for the environment, but because he was a busybody who wanted to know what other people in town were doing on their property, as the Conservation Commission oversees things like permits and the regulations around wetlands and the like.

He was also on the Soil Board, for that matter, which is very much concerned with the quality of the soil, you know, like whether it might be contaminated with dirty oil, or brake fluid, or gasoline, or transmission fluid, or parts cleaner...

Dead

So. He's dead, my father. He died the last day of June. He was ninety years old, and had been in a nursing home since 2006, after a stroke put him there.

I was not surprised. He'd been fading for a long time, and he was very old. Even before the stroke he'd had some dementia.

In the end it was an infection. Friday he was moved from the nursing home to the hospital, and by Sunday morning he was dead.

I am not sad. There is nothing for me to mourn. While I may still be in the process of mourning the father I never had, and while songs in particular about good fathers have been known to make me cry (Nanobots I'm looking at you) there's nothing there for the person my father was. He was simply too much of an asshole to me, to us, for me to mourn.

A year or two ago my therapist at the time asked me to come up with a good memory of my father. I think she thought I was being too negative about all this (she has since been fired, because you don't pull that attitude with a victim of abuse, sorry). I racked my brains and genuinely couldn't find one. I could remember him being nice to the cats, or pleasant to other people, but none of it directly involved me.

Not too long ago, a few months maybe, I did remember one. When we had that big blizzard in 1978, when I was in second grade, my father built us a sled trail. It went down a hill, up another smaller one, around a banked corner and ended by the stone wall in back. I don't remember asking him to do it. It is a good memory. I don't know now why he did it. We benefited from it, sure, but I have a really hard time believing he wasn't doing it primarily for himself, in some kind of vicarious way.

At any rate, that one memory is not enough.

I am relieved, which is not surprising; even if he had been loved by me, the death of someone so old who had been more or less a vegetable his last few years would have been a relief, because I'd know they were finally free of it. But he wasn't loved by me. I am not ashamed to admit it, though it makes me a little sad that it is true. Because everyone should have a father they love. Everyone should have a decent father. Everyone, every child is entitled to one.

A day or two after his death I realized that the sudden feeling of lightness, the feeling of my shoulders being down where they should be, was a feeling of freedom.

I think it was honestly the first time in my life I'd ever truly felt that way.

I think that says it all.

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?

The Big Five Oh

Yes, that's right—it's the long-awaited iron run number fifty. Yes, that's five-zero, as in fifty times we have brought a load of iron from this yard to be scrapped.

I'm afraid this is going to be rather anti-climactic.

First of all, it wasn't we this time. We had talked about doing a run a couple days after the show; to that end Tara came by earlyish Wednesday. But I think she really only pulled out a couple more things; for the most part she just took the trailer full of stuff she had filled up for the show and drove it straight to the junkyard. Behold:


She didn't even bother getting me, as I wasn't ready and my putting on some shoes was too much hassle when she could just drive off. So she went without me. I didn't even know she'd done an iron run until she came back and handed me some cash. How's that for a milestone?

Gosh. I'm all broke up to miss that.

And yes, Numero Fifty or no, there's still plenty more, especially given that Tara now knows that old doors and hoods and such are not worth saving. That can just all go, which is good.

So it was a pretty light load, as doors and hoods and such are bulky but mostly hollow, as well as awkward, and only came to four hundred and twenty pounds worth. Still, that brings the total up to 41,400 pounds of iron taken out of here, or 20.7 tons. And again, there's still more. I have no idea how many iron runs it will actually take to clean this place out. I really don't. I sort of can't fathom it. Any guesses? Should we start taking bets?

That Local Show

Okay, here are a couple new posts because I've been remiss. First thing is that a couple Sundays ago now we went off to that (very) local Volkswagen show at the (really rather pitiful) racetrack a couple towns over; and even though the show itself is more about new tricked-out Volkswagens (or V-Dubs, as they are bafflingly called, because why?) and less about old air-cooled stuff, we still go, as it's just so gosh-darned local and it doesn't take forever to get there in the old Bus.

We got there stupidly early (well, stupidly early for us, about nine-ish in the morning), and the guy there guided us to our spot on the tarmac, which was a little tricky to navigate given the trailer; but with a little help Tara managed, and we settled in to set up.

Now last year April saw fit to go all April on us, what with her customary showers; this year though it was nice and sunny.

Or at least it certainly looked like a nice sunny day. But then there was this thing called wind.

So we spent most of the morning criminally underdressed huddling in the lee side of the bus wrapped in the old crappy comforters Tara had brought for padding when she packed the Bus. It was not fun for a while there, let me tell you, but we lived. (We generally do.)

By the afternoon it had warmed up a bit as the sun got around to the lee side, which was much nicer, though I stayed inside the Bus as best I could, since I know what happens when Mr. Sun meets my High Goth Vampiric skin tone. I went home sunburnt anyway, which was annoying, because it hurts and it ruins my Goth cred, though I suppose the suffering involved might bump it back up. Maybe it was a wash?

Anyway, here's the spread:

Pictures by Tara.  And incidentally, taking photos so that the horizon is on the diagonal isn't artsy, Sister; it just gives me vertigo and means more work in Photoshop for me.  So stop it.

The trailer was full of larger bulkier stuff; as it was so local it was worth dragging the thing there. Tara set up some of the pieces in a three-dimensional trompe-l'oeil fashion, but I'm pretty sure she wasn't fooling anyone:


Though I suppose that set-up might have more structural integrity than a real old Bug these days.

We had set up right across from the racetrack concession stand; and for some reason the overly-cheerful dude working it opted to blast the local country music station. Yes, we have one of those in Massachusetts. Just the one, thank the Gods; but really, people, Massachusetts. This is supposed to be a safe haven from that kind of crap.

So I persuaded Tara to put a CD in. Yes, the Bus has a CD player. No, I don't really know why, as given the noise the Bus makes just puttering along it's nearly impossible to hear anything while driving; but as we were parked with the engine off it was worth a shot. She first put in some Rush, good GOD; but after a bit of whining re: What the FUCK are these atrocious lyrics Holy Mother of the Canadian Gods she was prevailed upon to put in some genuine Massachusetts music, namely Mink Car by They Might Be Giants, which liner artwork, by the bye, features an exploded model car remarkably like that Bug just above. So we listened to that for a bit, so as to not be done in by the nasty country music. It did help, I thought.

Anyway. God DAMN but I hate country music.

So we sat there in the wind, and then the sun, and watched the people, mostly young dudes in skinny jeans, which, despite the purported skinniness, still don't seem to be able to stay up (no wonder the Doctor wears suspenders). And I wondered about fashion, and we got in a discussion about what the Hel is this crap? What is the point of skinny jeans if they're still all baggy about the ass? It's like they're cut to hug the legs really well but towards they waist they're just this cone shape that's far too big, like two funnels sewn together. They must be aggravating as Hel to wear as they never stay up, and they're not much to look at either let me tell you, from this heterosexual girl's point of view. And you know I've had an apparel design course, and so I know they are cut that way on purpose, i.e., they are purposefully cut to not really fit anyone. It was just kind of gross. Seriously give me a nice pair of bell bottoms on a cute guy and we can talk. Which reminds me of the damned nineties. Sure, bell bottoms were in then, but only for girls. All the boys were still wearing those giant baggy jeans and man may I just register my disappointment for a moment here? What is wrong with this world?*

Okay. Better now. A little.

We had a couple people come up to us and ask us if we were interested in buying any old Volkswagen parts. They even told us they were trying to get rid of them and figured we of course would want them. We told them what for, without swearing even, and that oh ho no the reason we have so many is not because we are a business but because our father was a hoarder who kept a pretty much literally unbelievable amount of junk and we're really just trying to clean up the damned yard. I may have even thrown in the bit about how I hate old Volkswagens and how this is not something I am doing for the love of it O no precious. They didn't seem to get it. They usually don't, but that is not my problem.

Anyway. So the thing was over in the early afternoon or so (these car shows that start early—in the morning!—just baffle me) and we packed it all up and got ready to go.

But when Tara turned the key nothing happened. It wouldn't even turn over.

That's right. About an hour's worth of running the CD player was enough to kill the battery. (I feel quite comfortable blaming Rush. And by extension, Canada.)

Now, it's not nearly as embarrassing to have something like that happen in an old Bus as it would be in some kind of newer car. Everyone knows those things are cranky bastards sometimes, or, if not cranky, more or less on their last legs. So the people around us smiled indulgently and knowingly and ran off to find some jumper cables. It may also have been a bit of a damsel-in-distress thing. Tara certainly knows how to bat her eyelashes, shall we say. But they managed to get the thing running soon enough, and off we went on our merry way.

So. Given that it was a show for the new Volkswagens, we didn't sell as much as at the other shows, but that's all right as we were expecting that. It's just that given the location, we can't really turn it down. We did make enough to go out for Chinese afterwards (where we sat a booth over from an old high school gym teacher, whom we very studiously ignored as neither of us were interested in talking to the dude) and still have a bit left over.

But we learned something at this show. No one seemed interested in the fenders and doors. Someone may have bought a bumper if I remember correctly, but the big bulky stuff in the trailer for the most part? No takers. And we have plenty of that stuff still, stuff that Tara had been saving thinking it was in decent enough condition to sell. But as it turns out, most people restoring their old Volkswagens already have that stuff. Which brings me to the next post...


*Oh right, patriarchy. Yep.

Warning: Rant

So I was surfing about reading a bit about hoarders after posting that last article, and came across something. It's this idea:

That hoarders appear to love their stuff more than their children.

I see this one a lot these days; sure, it's good that hoarding is getting attention as a thing, finally. That extends to the various hoarding TV shows out there, which I have not actually myself seen, as I just know they will send my brain to a bad place. I still have the occasional dream, you know, where my father is back here, sitting in the living room (the same room I now have my home office in, i.e. where I work) with the TV on very loudly and I know that nothing, nothing will move him. They are horrible. It feels like being crammed back into this tiny little box, this tiny little box that was my life before my father had his stroke and went into a nursing home.

I don't like to think about what it was like then. I avoid the TV shows, like I said; I have also avoided reading Randy Frost's book on hoarding, though I am very tempted to get it and do a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of it (or, rather, a chapter-by-chapter excoriation of the author and his conclusions. Dr. Frost is not very well-liked in children of hoarder circles). That I have gotten enough distance from living under my father's hoarding that I can barely remember what it was like sometimes is, I think, a very very good thing.

So as I said I'm glad that hoarding is finally getting attention first as a thing that exists in this world and secondly as something serious, some form of mental illness. That's all good.

But it's only a start. Because right now the common wisdom on hoarders is Oh no those poor people suffering from such a debilitating mental illness!!! Well, that, and a bit of voyeurism, too—plenty of people are still happy to laugh at hoarders because they're crazy, right?

Fair enough, I'm not a psychologist. The only formal 'training' I've had in the subject was a couple of classes in high school and college, which I'm pretty sure don't actually count, especially since the college course was on Freud. (Incidentally, the most succinct description of old Sigismund I've ever heard is 'dickhead', since that is all he ever thought about.)

But that doesn't mean I don't have valuable experience with hoarders, or, more specifically, decades of experiences with one hoarder in particular, my father. And from what I have heard hanging around on a children of hoarders support group, my father was bizarrely enough both very extreme and very typical. And yes, there are support groups for children of hoarders. Because it's abuse.

And that is what the current narrative on hoarding is lacking. That for the family the behavior of the hoarder is abusive. Children living within a hoard are being abused. By definition. Look up the definition of hoarding, and then the definition of child neglect. They overlap quite neatly, really. One factor in qualifying as a hoarder is that basic needs cannot be met because of the accumulated stuff—i.e. the fridge is broken or full of rotting food and can't be used, the kitchen can't be used for preparing and/or eating food, the bathtub is full of books, &c., and then that's before we even get to the common hoarder behaviors of letting the plumbing break and then never fixing it. That wouldn't seem to strictly speaking be part of the hoarder thing—after all it's not about saving things per se—but it is frighteningly common behavior for hoarders to never fix things once they break. And all that, the broken plumbing, the bathtub that isn't accessible, the fridge that can't be used, is also one definition of child neglect. So let me repeat: if someone meets the definition of a hoarder, and there are children in that hoarded environment, those children are de facto being abused. Period.

And of course it's barely, really, about the hoarding itself. The need to save things is just the outward symptom. Underneath it are almost always issues of control. Well, that, and a sort of narcissism that means that since the hoarder doesn't see things as a problem no one else possibly could. And that's part of what's wrong with that 'common wisdom' narrative; that hoarders are suffering from the hoarding.

As far as I can tell, they almost never are.

I do think from what I have seen that there are a variety of causes that lead a person to be a hoarder. Sometimes, yes, something happens and a person just spirals into something and they no longer care about their environment. But that's a little different, I think. I'm not sure I'd quite call that hoarding, though the end result may look the same. But for the most part, from what I've seen with both my own father and the countless accounts of other hoarding parents on that support group, hoarders are like sociopaths. It's simply, in most cases, a fundamental brokenness in the brain. It can't be fixed. I'm not even sure it can be mitigated, any more than pedophilia can be. Yes, that's harsh. It is also, as far as I have ever been able to see, true.

And as far as I can tell, hoarders like the hoarding, and they like the hoard. To them it's a good thing, a worthy thing, a righteous thing even, like in my father's case. It makes them feel good.

It's like an addiction in a lot of ways, though I don't personally see it as an actual addiction. It's destructive behavior that brings them some kind of comfort or control. And there's a narcissism there, a selfishness there, that means they don't see or don't care that their behavior harms others.

So that brings me back to that first statement, that common wisdom one:

Hoarders appear to love their things more than their children.

It is said, I think, with good intentions; however I call bullshit on it. And bullshit of a particularly nasty kind. Because not only is it flat-out not true, it snidely puts the onus on the children to be more understanding while pretending to offer said children sympathy.

I mean it sounds nice, right? It sounds sympathetic—Oh you poor children to grow up with a parent who seems to care about the stuff more than you. That must have been so hard.

But it's right there in that word appear. Because the implication is that But of course your hoarder parent loved you. True, it doesn't look it. But if you, the child, could get over your [of course unreasonable] anger and really look at your parent with compassion you would of course see that your parent did love you. Of course they did. That's what parents do.

I really, really, hate this crap.

Without even going into the crap assumptions that all parents are good which given the statistics on child abuse is kind of an obvious no it still doesn't work. Love isn't complicated. It can complicate situations, sure, but the idea itself isn't complicated. I've found that if you have to do any kind of linguistic or emotional gymnastics to define something as love then it isn't.

But anyway love isn't measured in words; it is measured in actions. If a hoarder can't get rid of the junk for the sake of his or her family, then yes, that hoarder loves the junk more than the family. If someone cannot change their behavior when they know said behavior is harming their family, then yes, they love the behavior more than the family. And it's not like hoarders don't know their families are suffering. Trust me, families and children complain. A lot. Hoarders are not ignorant of the effect their hoarding has. In fact I'd say in a lot of cases that's the whole point. Because it really does come down to control. And for a lot of hoarders out there, making their families miserable is the very best type of control they could ever have.

Won't You Take Me To Junkytown

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

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

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

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

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

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

By which I mean she complained the entire time.

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


Aren't they just gorgeous?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Inspired

I was doing something work-related on the Mac today, moving things around and cleaning up the virtual desktop in preparation for something else, and this is what I saw when I attempted to empty the trash:

For some weird, glitchy, and sublimely inspired reason my Mac decided to use the picture of the trailer full of junk from the other day instead of the usual Trash icon, which I've never seen it do. And there it was, asking me to permanently throw away all this accumulated junk with the click of a mouse.

O! If only it were that simple.

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.

You're not my father! That's impossible!

Growing up in the 80's recession, we had lots of hand-me-down toys,  toys from the dump, but rarely ever any current must-have toys such as Star Wars action figures. 

I'm sure we would have loved Star Wars figures,  with us being pretty much that perfect age (I was 6 when the first movie came out).     I don't think we were disallowed toys like this on matter of principle but I guess collecting Star Wars figures could get expensive, as I seem to recall them being like $3 each back when they were new.   (I do recall having a C3PO but that was it)

Of course, some years later I guess our hoarder dad saw these trays at the dump and thought they made ideal screw-sorting out trays!  Add to that the insult that 70's/80's Star Wars figures are much sought after these days, so stumbling across these empty cubbies with their tantalizing labels of what's not inside of them.. well it's like finding the empty box to something really cool missing from your childhood and inside is a bunch of dirt and rust, not that toy you wished was inside.

Makes we want to clean out these trays and spend $800 on ebay finding all the guys that go in these trays, just to recapture that lost bit of denied childhood.

"Obi-wan told me enough..  He told me you killed my father!

No.. I am your father!

NoooOOOoooOOOO! "

Yikes.. Imagine if Vader was a hoarder on top of being Dark Lord of the Sith.

-Tara

Eventful

Well this past Sunday we did another VW swap meet; we were worried that it maybe wouldn't be all that big, as it was a 'first annual' affair; but when we got there we were pleasantly surprised (as were the people who set it up, who were walking around with dazed smiles muttering that they couldn't believe how many people actually showed up); however, getting there, well, that was another matter entirely.

Given that it was more than a hundred miles away, and was slated to begin at nine a.m., which seriously what the hell people, we got a very early start, leaving at seven. Trust me, that's early for us, yikes. I would like to sing the praises now, if I may, of the dark-chocolate spiked Coffee Coolatta.

We took the Bus, of course, fully laden with the usual assortment of old parts and such; and it was okay for a while there, even though it was obviously pretty heavily packed. But within the last thirty or so miles it was clear that the thing was not happy at all.

It was skipping somewhat and backfiring a little pretty much constantly, and had very little power going up the hills; we were on the highway, too, probably not the best of decisions, and entering hilly territory to the north as it was. Finally Tara pulled in to one of the giant state-run liquor stores (open on Sunday!) to have a look, but didn't see anything obviously screwy. So we kept going, since if you're going to break down in your weird old car it's not a bad idea to do it at a weird old car show.

We did make it, though Tara was sweating a bit; me, I've got AAA and know I'm not going to die, though it's never much fun to deal with a panicky Tara. We pulled into the grassy field into a likely spot for vending, and Tara immediately got out and said HELP.

Well, it didn't take long to find someone who knew what was most likely going on; Tara is a decent mechanic, yes, but old VWs aren't actually her specialty. Within a few minutes a lovely man named Paul had his head under the back lid and was in the process of gapping the points with some jerry-rigged tool.

A jerry-rigged tool which worked like a charm; Tara took it for a spin after he'd finished, and declared it pretty much a new engine when she returned. Paul got his pick of old parts in thanks.

Another guy there (I don't remember his name I'm afraid) then actually gave us a new set of points, saying we should always have a set handy.

Now, maybe it was just a damsel-in-distress sort of thing, but I'll tell you my faith in humanity got a bit of a polish on Sunday. They were complete strangers, and immediately took care of us and made sure we were okay. Which is really very nice, and I am grateful.

We then set up, and though there weren't really all that many people there compared to the big show we do, still, people started buying stuff, their eyes getting all big when they saw all the milk crates of stuff.

Here's the spread:

(Pictures by Tara.)

And no, that's not our dog. Her name (according to her collar anyway) was Samantha, and she was an old thing that decided to adopt us, flopping down at my feet while I was sitting there minding my own business. I'm not sure of her motivations; we had no food, and I'm frankly not a dog person myself (you may have guessed by now I am in fact very much a cat person); maybe it was the combined total of the scents of fourteen cats between Tara and me that attracted her, I don't know. But she was mellow, and good-natured, though she kept trying to get in the Bus and go home with us. Here's a better picture of her:

It was a lovely autumn day, sunny and not too cool; and all told we did all right. Having started early it also ended early, which was fine by us as we liked the idea of getting home in daylight. So after a time we packed it all up again, and no, though we sold some stuff, again, the amount of stuff we had didn't look to have gone down even a little bit.

We were driving along a stretch of I think route sixteen, going south in such a way that the late afternoon sun was exactly in our eyes, when the acceleration suddenly stuck ON.

Within seconds Tara 1) pulled the gas pedal up (didn't help) 2) stood on the brake and clutch both while the engine revved ridiculously high 3) turned the engine off altogether and coasted into a parking lot and 4) jumped out of the car freaking out and swearing, directing her ire at one 'Mr. Sun' which now I know she'd just had a bit of a scare (me too) but was funny as hell. Like it was the sun's fault, and like he's a Mister.

When she got done swearing she went to have a look at the engine to see if she could see what was going on.

She could. It was in fact pretty obvious: the spring on the carburetor had broken.

Now. Lucky lucky us. If you are going to break down in a weird old car, it is really exceptionally helpful to have said weird old car packed full of the proper weird old car parts.

Within a minute she'd found a matching carburetor and robbed the spring off of that one; we set off again and everything was fine, and we got home without further mishap, which was fine by me, and I'm quite sure fine by Tara too.

I think that's it for the car show season, unless I am much mistaken; Tara now has this plan to clear out a section of the yard over by the shop before the first snowfall. New England weather being what it is, we'll see how that goes. But that is next.

VW Show

Well, I never said I wasn't a procrastinator. Almost two weeks ago now we hied off to the annual old Volkswagen show up by the City. The weather wasn't bad or anything; though it was cloudy and a little chilly, it was definitely preferable to last year's ninety-degree-plus temperatures. Though mornings and me are probably always going to be incompatible.

Oh, speaking of incompatible: the new Blogger interface and my old Mac browser definitely fall under that heading, alas. I've had to figure out a workaround, but I've managed, though it involves, shudder, a goddamned PC. Oh Blogger. I'm beginning to hate you. Though not enough to switch to Wordpress.

Anyhoo. There we were again at the VW show with the ratty old Bus; and, once again, as soon as we started pulling stuff out of the Bus the insane hordes, I mean, old Volkswagen enthusiasts, swarmed over and started throwing money at us. The very first thing, actually, out of the Bus was a great big interior panel from I think another Bus, and as Tara was pulling it out and grumbling about how awkward the damned thing was to haul from show to show someone made an offer. It didn't even touch the ground.

I did most of the schlepping, as Tara had broken her foot. Now, if I were a cannier sort I'd probably have called Tara first and asked her How much is my silence worth to ya? but I'll tell you how she did it anyway for free, because that's what big sisters are for. She broke it go-go dancing on a table in a swim-up bar in eight-inch heels. In Jamaica. Sounds unbelievable, doesn't it? Well, it's up to you to judge whether I could make that up or not.

Anyway the VW show was considerably less exciting, even with Tara on a bit of Vicodin, which if I'm remembering correctly was what Greg House was addicted to.

So all these people came over and chatted about Volkswagens while I gritted my teeth and tried to be polite; I guess I faked it pretty well as they didn't stop buying things. Here's the spread. I swear, even though we sell stuff, and even though at the end of every show we toss a couple of boxes because we've consolidated the rest of the stuff, it never looks like any less:

So they bought a bit of stuff and we did pretty well, though not as well as that one crazy year. And we have another show, though it's a little one, on Sunday, so we'll see how that one goes. We also got plenty of requests for other stuff that we have but didn't bring with us, and sold I think a bumper or two in the week following; so it's all right. But it's a bit tiring. I'm kind of done with this Volkswagen stuff, honestly.

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.