Kind of a complicated first half of the morning. Sunday I hauled a bunch of junk from Landlady’s barn to J’s Dumpster. Yesterday evening I got a phone call from J: “Dude, tell me you didn’t just dump a bunch of nails and screws in my Dumpster, because they’re gonna pave the road when the garbage guy’s through with them.”
Well, no, I didn’t dump a bunch of nails and screws in his Dumpster. I placed them in there very carefully, ensconced in a couple of high-walled containers. High-walled but not capped, and thus I broke one of J’s more important rules. And on reflection, it’s probably a pretty good rule. J had already discovered the container with the bulk of the fasteners and dealt with them in a manner worthy of a particularly anal CDC operative, but I did have to admit there were more where they came from.
Fortunately I knew right where in the Dumpster they were (I didn’t just dump them) and promised to come out in the morning to more properly deal with them. In the meantime, there was still time to take care of this big sheet of material – I think it was once part of a billboard or something – that needed to be cut up before I could fit it in the Jeep trailer. So the boys and I went to Ian’s and got the Sawzall, hitched up the trailer, drove to Landlady’s, cut up the billboard, hauled it to J’s, dealt with the fasteners in the Dumpster and prepared to unload the trailer on the existing pile of flat stuff when I noted with delight that J had added a whole bunch of lumber to the pile. Looked like cut-up pallet wood, mostly. Also some tag ends of 2-by lumber.
Uncle Joel Does Not Throw Pallet Wood and Scrap Lumber Away. My morning just became more strenuous than planned, as we left with more material than we’d arrived with.
Backed the trailer up to Ian’s Cave, current location of Landlady’s chop saw.
Most of the pieces I picked up from J’s required a single chop to become two perfect stovelengths. And there weren’t even any screws to deal with. So chop we did.
Ended up with two full wheelbarrows worth of prime stovewood that I hadn’t expected when I woke up this morning. That’s about a week’s normal winter wood, or three really cold days. Roughly. It’s a small cabin, I rarely heat it to shirtsleeve temps, and though it does get cold here it’s not Wyoming.
I don’t normally worry about firewood in late July, when I’m spending effort trying to keep cool. But free firewood is not to be despised. Now I’ve got three tiers up to the roof of my little woodshed, which ain’t a bad head start on the wood-gathering season.
I still need to cut and stack this stuff I got from D&L’s last week. Maybe I’ll get ambitious and knock that out this week. Then I’ll have a huge head start on October, which is when I normally start thinking about cutting firewood. There’s already a new stack of pallets that need to be cut up. The ‘gathering’ phase of this autumn’s work is pretty much complete.
Joel, could I get you to parse this for me? “Dude, tell me you didn’t just dump a bunch of nails and screws in my Dumpster, because they’re gonna pave the road when the garbage guy’s through with them.”
When the garbage guy’s through with the nails? The nails are being used to pave the road? The road is being paved after the garbage guy is through? I’s confuzzed.
Yes, sorry. That could have been made more clear. J’s concern, and apparently history bears this out, is that a container of screws and bolts and old bent nails will be placed into the Dumpster. The garbage truck will swallow the container, dump it, and then prove rather less than hermetic in its ability to retain them all. Screws and bolts and old bent nails will be scattered all along the roads from J’s Dumpster to the county dump, and generations to come will curse my name.