The Over Active and Silly Sides of my Brain

My bladder alarm woke me up at 7:00 AM and, for once, I welcomed it because I had to make a trip to the county’s hazardous waste drop-off station and they’re only open on Fridays from 8 to 11:00. I’m going to miss having that place within a five minute drive from home. It’s located in the same cluster of buildings and roll-off dumpsters where we can drop off cardboard, papers, cans and glass jars, electronics and hazardous waste like paints, printer ink cartridges, back yard chemicals---the list is long of things the county doesn’t want to go in the ground to pollute our water and top soil. It makes me feel good every time drop something off even though, like today, the wait is often long. One of the seven people ahead of me had the entire back end of his pickup truck loaded with paint cans and they all had to be checked because they don’t take latex paint. With latex paint you’re supposed to open the cans, let them dry out or brush the paint on cardboard or pour kitty litter in them and put them in with your normal, weekly trash. I only had a shoe box full of stuff so I helped the line move along faster for those who waited behind me. I should get a gold star for being a frequent---don’t know what right word to use here. I’m not a frequent customer because you don’t have buy anything or pay for the service and I don’t know if ‘frequent dropper-offer’ is even a term.

Ohmygod, my brain hurts from worrying about the details of my life! Where will I go to drop off empty ink cartridges or cardboard after I move to the other end of the county? Will the trash compacter at the far end of the hall be a take-it-all-and-to-hell-with-the-environment kind of thing? Will it sound as loud that compactor on the garage truck that works my street? Back when Levi was alive I worried that the compactor would smell like used kitty litter thus I picked a unit as far away from the compactor as I could go just in case Levi thought it needed his pee mail to improve the kitty puanteur. Honestly, I need a meditation app so I’d have an excuse to sit in the corner and try my best not to think about who dripped that spot of paint on the molding and why did it take me nearly 20 years of living here to find it?

After going to hazardous waste I went a half block away to drop off four boxes to Goodwill, probably the last loads of any substance and value I’ll have to give. I do plan to do another closet purging because my weight, since the Great Closet Purge of the Century back in December of 2020, stayed the same and so the slightly too small clothes I kept back then will have to go bye-bye. I know what will happen. I’ll start using the gym across the hall from my apartment and I’ll wish I had those two boxes of too-small clothes back. I'm not keeping them because, 1) I won't have the room in my new closet and 2) if I were 100% sure that my future includes buying a ticket on the Diet & Exercise Express I’d purge the four tops I have that are too big. They swim on me---an online shopping mistake that wasn’t worth sending back. I need a closet and refrigerator intervention. Food. Food insecurity, food as a cure-all for all that ails me took away my good intentions. Food as my best friend and lately my lover. (Don’t let your mind go kinky here. That ‘lover comment’ was just a throw-away phrase and I have no idea why I wrote it much less thought it. Do your best Freudian interpretation if you’re so inclined, but I will not confirm nor deny that I’ve eaten popsicles in bed.)

Am I in a silly mood today? Why yes I am---almost to the point of being slaphappy. Yes, that’s a real thing. I spent the first thirty years of my life being slaphappy and I’m hoping I’ll enter that state again for the last years of my life. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says, “Slaphappy hits a lot of the same spots as "punch-drunk": when you suffer a blow to the head, you become confused and silly for a while. The ‘dazed and confused’ sense of ‘slaphappy’ first appeared in English in 1936, and by the following year it was being used to describe those who behave with such abandon it’s as though they’ve had the common sense knocked out of them. A 1937 article in the New York Herald Tribune called Ernest Hemingway, a writer known to have had an adventurous lifestyle, ‘the slaphappy litterateur.’" It’s the “behave with such abandon...." that I’ll be going for, not the “dazed and confused” part. Ya, I want to let my free-spirit out of its cage and quit “adulting” to use a term all the cool kids are using these days to describe,  “the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks.” (I love online dictionaries.) Well, I’ve got 891 words of my 1,000 word posting goal accomplished which is close enough. See you next time. ©

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Recyling and Junk Yards Now and Then

What do you do on an afternoon in September when the clouds in the sky are whiny and can’t make up their minds if they want to move on by to dump their sorrow elsewhere? You hop on a bus down at the senior hall and head to a recycling center that covers 65 acres where we got to watch a machine shred cars. This place isn’t your standard recycling center where the neighborhood moms and dads conjugate on Saturdays to drop off their newspapers, tin cans, glass bottles and plastic trash. This place is like a modernized junk yard of olden days that, when you think about it, have been recycling long before it became cool. 

I’ve got a long history of going to junk yards. When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was to go with my dad when he’d take a load of stuff to the junk yard. Back in those days they let you pick through what other people left behind until they got smart and had one of their workers set aside any useable goods and they started selling them out of a building they put up on the property. That place is still there. In its current form it’s a popular place for people restoring old homes to find architectural savage.

Then along came my husband and his three front-end loaders and street sweeper and I was introduced to specialized heavy equipment recycling centers---bone yards. If a part broke on one of those secondhand ‘beasts’ off we went to spend an afternoon out of town at one of the three bone yards in the state where similar equipment could be found. The rule, back in those days, was customers had to disassemble whatever needed to come apart to get at the part they wanted to buy. Unless an extra set of hands was needed, I’d usually be in our pickup truck near-by with the dog, reading a book. People who own places like that were always down to earth and pretty interesting when you got to know them. One guy in particular stands out in my memory. He once charged my husband $60 for a part, then handed one of the twenties to me and said, “Have this guy take you out to dinner tonight. No reason why you should have to cook after keeping him company all afternoon.” You should have seen the look on Don’s face. “Hey, that’s my twenty!” he said. “Not anymore,” the bone yard owner said. “It’s hers now.” He was a sweet guy with a beach front “cottage” in Hawaii. When he died he had a large, marble bulldozer on his grave and, of course, Don and I had to go see it. 

And then there was the junk yard for cars out by Lake Michigan that we always had to stop at on our way to the Big Lake. Not that we needed to buy anything there, but my husband had met the owner at a gas & oil memorabilia swap meet and he had a private museum that you couldn’t get into without an invitation. Don, being a likeable storyteller, finally got the invitation. Come to find out the guy had a one piece glass gas globe that was highly sought after and that knowledge started “the dance.” It took two years but eventually Don talked the guy into to selling him the globe for $6,500. Let me tell, I about had a cow at that price and for something so fragile, having been responsible already for breaking a lesser quality globe. But that hand-painted gas globe was his pride and joy for several decades and when I sold it after he died, I got three times what Don paid for it. The man who bought it, just died and his gas globe collection is up in the air because the out-of-state daughter in charge of the estate is an idiot. I passed along the contact information for the leading appraiser in the field but she'll probably have a junk dealer haul it all away---all 300 globes.

Back on topic: The recycling place we toured today has a set of scales that all the trucks coming into the place have to drive over and it can weigh up to 200,000 pounds per vehicle and trucks never stopped coming and going the whole 2 ½ hours we were there. The place employs over 650 people and 75% of their business is shredding cars. They had mountains of mixed metal including vehicles and every conceivable thing you can name waiting to go through their giant shredder. All that stuff comes out the other side sorted and melted and ready to be sold to industries that use the aluminum, copper, brass, bronze and steel to build new stuff. We got to walk up the 75 steps to the glass tower where a person controlling the shredder works. He monitors 5-6 screens and a computer keyboard making sure everything is working as it should be. While we watched the machine in action we got to see a couple air bags go off as cars got crushed, sending up a cloud white gas. Once in a rare while, he said, if they haven’t gotten all the liquids drained out of a car properly, a fire will start but the machine puts it out quickly. “It’s pretty cool to watch,” he said. “I’m surrounded by flames.” The tour cost a whole six bucks for our transportation. Quite a bargain, don’t you think and the tour also brought back some priceless junk yard memories. ©

NOTE: The photo at the top is what the junk looks like before going through the shredder and next two photos is what the sorted and smelted metal looks like when it comes out the other side of the shredder. And the third photo shows a pile of wiring that somehow in the process of shredding mixed junk gets separated out from rest. Oh, and this place has other areas where they process paper, plastic and electronic equipment into a form that can be used in manufacturing more stuff. This place is where all the community recycling centers and pickup services bring their stuff after they've sorted and bundled it on their sites.

photos off their website

Cemetery Run: Year Six

It was a bright, sunny day in the neighborhood when I got up and I had places to go and things to do including going to the cemetery to do some “housekeeping” around my husband’s gravestone before the Memorial Day weekend kicked into high gear. But first I needed to drop off my recycling at the transfer station what’s located along the way. I’ve been on a militant mission to recycle as much one-time use plastic, glass and metal as humanly possible. My recycling “come to Jesus” moment came after I posted the video back in April of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck all the way up inside his nose. I’ve always recycled newspapers, cardboard and pop cans but I didn’t think I was generating enough kitchen and household recyclables to make a difference. Boy, was I wrong. Before, I was going to the transfer station every 8-9 weeks but now I’ll probably need to go every 2-3 weeks and I’ve reduced the trash that goes out to the street for Monday pickup so much that it looks absolutely ridiculous in a tote big enough to hold 332.5 pounds. I’ve called around looking for a trash pickup service that offers smaller containers or once a month, rather than weekly pickups but they all seem to be using the same play book.

The cemetery was a busy place. Mowers and guys with weed whackers were working on the far side of the rolling, tree studded place and Boy Scouts were making their way down the rows of stones, looking for graves to put fresh American flags on. After I parked off to the side, careful not to encroach on any gravesites, I grabbed my long-handled shovel, a jug of water, scrub brush, plastic bag and garden gloves and I was surprised to see the tombstone looked better than it usually does when I do the spring the cleanup. Usually sod is attempting to take it over and the engraving in the marble is filled up with dirt. Others like me were parked here and there and as we worked the bees were buzzing, the birds were singing and the flowers were holding their faces up to the sun. A perfect day to be anywhere but where I was.

As I dug out the sod around the stone I thought about what I wrote in my blog last year---I had looked it up the night before. “This year,” it read, “is my fifth Memorial Day since Don’s passing and I could write exactly what I wrote last year: ‘I went to the cemetery on Saturday and had a talk with Don. I told him that I think of him often and that I’m doing okay even though he took a piece of me with him when he left.’” This weekend, my sixth Memorial Day of grooming his gravestone we didn’t seem to be on speaking terms and that may be because I had a half of jug of water left and I got side-tracked cleaning up a near-by grave of a veteran of the Korean War that looked pitiful and abandoned. I almost cleaned it along with Don’s last year but decided not to because I had just read another widow’s blog who had gone ballistic when she went to the cemetery to clean her husband’s grave and found it had already been done. She suspected his first wife did it and she was going to have a showdown over it. Dead and fighting over who gets to clean up after the guy! He must have been quite the prize. Anyway, I’m thinking if Don’s Korean War vet neighbor in the cemetery has a living widow around, I could take her down in a fist fight.

On the way home from the cemetery I got caught in a road construction maze. The street I usually go home on had been closed off permanently and the traffic light that used to be at that intersection was moved 200 feet down the road, at the exit ramp coming from the expressway. It’s not like we didn’t have a month of warnings. We did, but old habits are hard to break and thank goodness I didn’t make a left onto the exit ramp. (Someone's going to do it!) Turning around in the carpool lot so I could head back in the other direction, I found the brand new by-pass road that eventually connected to the road I needed. But on that road I ran into road block and had to turn around. AGAIN! I didn’t think I’d ever find my way home and I was running out of options. I ended up going way far out of my way but all’s well that ends well because that road took me to Starbucks and my Chevy Trax is programed to turn into their driveway.

As I jotted down notes for this blog entry I was sitting in their coffee shop, using the stainless steel straw I now carry in my purse---that’s how serious I am about doing my part to reduce was goes into the landfills and oceans. It was my first “granda Teavana shaken pineapple white ice tea lemonade sweeten infusion” of the season. They don’t tell you this, but ordering drinks at Starbucks is a senility test. If you get any one of those words out of order you have to start all over again. ©