Miz Susan and I were excited to find the Citywide Community Cleanup flyer laying in the entryway of the house a few weeks back. We're too cheap to buy a mailbox so we rely on a mail slot in the front door. This allows the carrier to jam our bills and junk mail through the slot and onto the floor of the entry way. I wonder occasionally if we're in violation of U.S. statute by not having a mailbox even though we're pretty sure that our cheapness defense is airtight. I remember reading years ago that a residential mailbox is actually the property of the feds. Which leads me to further wonder if our house, mailboxless as it is, is transformed by the slot in the door into one gigantic mailbox. And is therefore the property of the federal government. The whole damn thing. But...I digress. There's a surprise, right?
I've done a few of the neighborhood/community cleanup events in the past. Though, as anyone who's had a peek into our garage or basement already suspects, not in the recent past. The last one I remember took place down at the Ford Plant when that place was still on the tax rolls. I'd clearly forgotten that this event constitutes real work and is far more effective at gobbling up half of a weekend than at cleaning up the community. But we were psyched up at the thought of getting some of the accumulated junk out of the house and even started a mental checklist or two of things we could get rid. But what we mostly did was to let the flyer lay on the library table inside the front door and forget about it.
Until I found the damn thing again, probably while looking for something else that I'd left laying on the library table and forgotten about. And found it just a day or two before the big event rather than, sensibly, a day or two afterwards. "Aw, that's too bad. But we'll get on that next year." Nope, found it in plenty of time to do some housecleaning last Saturday. Hmph.
On Friday night, Susan was busy firming up her mental checklist of stuff that we (meaning me) should wrangle into the back of or onto the top of the truck and then deliver it all to the collection site at the north end of the State Fairground. She told me that I'd be getting rid of a defunct dehumidifier which had shorted out during the beastly hot and sticky summer of 2013 and flipped off a bunch of circuit breakers for the wiring in the basement. We also agreed that I could scrounge thru the garage for computer components and haul the queen-sized box spring out for disposal. That box spring had defied all of our efforts to coax it up the steep and narrow staircase to our 3rd floor, former-attic bedroom.
The real prize in the cleanup was the horrible, god-awful heavy Kenmore air conditioner. This beast had been blocking out any hope of natural light penetrating the window at the landing of the staircase between our first and second floors. My brother-in-law Dan and I had double-teamed it into that window shortly after we'd moved in during the summer of '06, another beastly hot and sticky one. I've known all along that it was probably inefficient as hell, cost an arm and a leg to run and was most likely shaking the interior framing of the west side of the house to pieces with it's sad old banging and clattering motor. But that machine had served us well over the years. I don't think we had it on more than two or three times this past summer but, in hotter seasons, it kept the main floor of the house almost comfortable. I won't miss the darn thing but I'll tip my hat to it.
Oh yeah, one more item. A toaster oven rendered hors de combat by a few too may English muffins and bagels. This former fixture of our Saturday and Sunday mornings had been pitched out onto the little annex of our back deck where it had been getting dirtier and more disreputable looking by the week.
Everything was a breeze to load into and onto the Tahoe. Except for the Kenmore air conditioner. This example of Sears finest workmanship could have been used as a auxiliary anchor for about 3/4 of the ships in the Navy's fleet. Heavy as hell? Yes. Clumsy as hell? Yes. Almost totally lacking in any convenient handholds that didn't have sharp protruding chunks of metal as integral parts of the purported handholds? Yes. Yep, it pretty much had it all.
It took me the better part of an hour and a half to get that thing out of the window and onto the floor of the landing. What with its size and all of the precautions we'd taken to keep it from falling out of the window and crushing one of the next door neighbors' kids, it was a struggle to carefully undo all of those precautions without letting it fall out of the window and crush one of the next door neighbors' kids. What also ended up on the floor of the landing at the end of the hour and a half were piles of dirt and at least half the pine needles that had fallen off of the Martinson's towering evergreen tree over the past eight years. How could that have possibly have happened? Shouldn't more than half of those ended up on the ground somewhere else? Some days, it seems as if those all fall onto our front porch. Annoying as that might be, it makes shopping for Miz Susan's major Christmas presents pretty easy since she wears out a broom every year keeping the front porch pine-needle-free. I am running out of inventive ways to disguise what her present is with just wrapping paper and ribbon.
I moved the air conditioner down the steps, carefully and one at a time. But not so carefully that it didn't land on each step with a resounding thump while leaving a new pile of even more pine needles with each thump. It was as if the stupid thing had an infinite supply of pine needles, perhaps being piped in via a wormhole from some parallel universe. From the foot of the stairs, I picked it up and staggered out onto the front porch with it. How in hell was I going to get it down the stairs without dropping it on one or both of my feet or somehow stumbling with it in such a way as to rip the living daylights out of my left knee again? I had my doubts but I picked it up again and tottered down the steps.
It was touch and go and there were times when it felt as if all of the weight (considerable between me and the AC) was on my quavering left leg. I know! Let's not do anything quite that stupid again anytime soon. OK?
From that point, it was easy enough to manhandle the brute onto my trusty aluminum Hamline Bookstore two-wheeler and roll it out to the back of the Tahoe. Susan said that I looked like a coal miner coming out of the hole after a shift. I insisted that she take a picture but it was so disreputable looking that she refused to put it on Facebook.
I got cleaned up and headed for the drop-off site. The entrance was off of Larpenteur up at the far end of the Fairgrounds and there were cars and trucks backed up practically out to street. The traffic moved along fairly quickly though and before too long I was being grilled by a couple of women about just what the hell I had in the truck besides the box spring lashed onto the top of the truck which they could see for themselves. I ran over the contents: the big-ass air conditioner, the shorted out dehumidifier, the three printers from the garage (yes, I'd salvaged the copy paper from the guts of the printers before I surrendered them) and the toaster oven. The two women snorted in contempt at the toaster oven and I cautioned them not to laugh at what had once been a beloved member of the household. They didn't seem impressed. I drove the itemized bill they created for me up the line to the next station where another attendant took my check for $60 ($20 for the AC, $5 each for the printers, $10 for the dehumidifier and $15 for the box spring. They threw in disposal of the toaster oven gratis). From there, I moved to the head of the line where the geography of the place was explained to me. I complained to that guy about the ridicule my toaster oven had been subjected to. He seemed sympathetic but he may have just been humoring me.
When I was done with all the dropping off of junk at the various stations, I headed south thru the Fairgrounds for the main entrance (or in my case, exit). I reveled in clipping along at 10-15 mph over the same ground I'd covered just three weeks earlier at a tenth that speed while being shoved and jostled and assaulted by a quarter of a million insane State Fairgoers. I'll guarantee that I didn't look for some defenseless pedestrian to run over from behind.
All in all, I figure that I moved 40+ cubic feet of junk off of our premises and into the capable care of the City of St. Paul. Not that you'd notice the difference. I've got a couple of boxes of my mom's books in the back of my car that I'll drop off at the Goodwill today. If I remember; I've already forgotten twice. Each of those two boxes probably take up a good two cubic feet. I'll count it all as progress.
On the way back home from the Fairgrounds, I stopped in at Micawber's bookstore for an hour and swapped lies with my friend Tom. Any attentive reader of my previous posts will remember that I recommended last spring that everyone go there and buy a book or two. Or three. That advice still holds. I left with an armful of books which I hope to read and/or give away. All in all, I figure that that armful may have been about a cubic foot's worth of books. Even dragging all of those home left me well to the plus side of the ledger in the community cleanup category. I'm kinda proud of myself.
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