“Written out of overall frustration and framed with humor in order to keep the writer marginally sane after eight weeks of no work lock-down and being surrounded by idiots as far as the eye can see.”
h/t resigned to my fate
“Donations in the Time of Coronavirus”
(by a boomer second cousin, twice removed –forcibly–of Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
In the early days of Lockdown, it occurred to me that this was the ideal time to clean out the garage. “Absolutely ideal” (h/t Danny Kaye, “White Christmas”)
I kept hearing second-hand reports from neighbors (on “Next Door”, but not actually next door, which might explain a lot) who had spent their spare time cleaning their houses from top to bottom and carting everything off to…somewhere else. The actual geographical details of that “somewhere else” were rather vague, if not entirely missing, for reasons which I was soon to discover.
I had several bags of stuff I hadn’t yet taken to the local Salvation Army, so I thought I’d go there and get rid of them, which would give me an entirely empty car available to fill up with things from the garage which I would finally be saying sayonara to, after more years than I care to enumerate here. And it would give me something to do, too! Well, there was no work any more, plus endless heavy-handed suggestions to stay home–what the heck is there to do? I filled a little time searching for and finally dredging up the painter’s masks I’d bought for my emergency supplies the last time the “prepper fit” hit. (To be replaced later by far more fetching masks, made by a friend from some material I had on hand in a big bag–in the garage–who at least had sewing skills to give her something to do with all her time. And anyway, I was getting tired of looking like someone in search of some flat surface, any flat surface, needing to be primed, while complete strangers looked resentfully at me, wondering how in the world I managed to get some WORK.)
So off I go to the Salvation Army, hoping I’d get there before the truck filled up and the back was pulled down and locked. Which always meant returning home dispiritedly, with the things I hoped I would never set eyes on again (it’s happened before. Not a pretty sight.) But, oh no! What do I see in front of my very eyes as I turn the corner? The entire Salvation Army parking lot is locked and chained up, the store is closed, no donations truck anywhere to be seen! TOO LATE!
I drive to another thrift store–same story. TOO LATE! I head to another one–also closed. TOO LATE! It slowly dawns upon me that I, like the Flying Dutchman, am stuck in the worst kind of limbo: bags of donations with nowhere to take them. Coronavirus claims another victim.
As I drive home in semi-shock, I finally come up with the brilliant idea that, like after all my yearly yard sales, I’ll just put everything in boxes on the sidewalk! Things will disappear in no time at all, I tell myself–two days max! Cars always stopped by after the sales, and people loaded up their trunks with unsold stuff (up to and including trash and yard clippings which happened to be next to the yard sale leftovers).
I remind myself that people are walking all over the neighborhood every hour of the day now, because they have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do–they’ll be duking it out over my stuff! No sweat.The 8 o’clock Howlers will come out to do their thing, see the boxes, and race off with treasures. I’ll be stuff-free soon! Totally brilliant.
I arrive back home. I find some Useful Boxes–sturdy enough to hold things without collapsing or blowing away, but not good enough to save for possible future use, or they’re just plain too nice to get rid of (you can see where the garage problem originates). I empty the bags of stuff into the Useful Boxes, set them out on the sidewalk, and get a large black marker to write “FREE” on the first box. I go back into the house.
Several hours later, it starts to rain. I race outside to bring in the few remaining things–only to find that nothing has been taken. Nothing at all? A bit disappointed, I put the Useful Boxes on the front porch where they sit, in the way, for two more days while it rains off and on.
The next sunny day, I put the Useful Boxes out early in the morning, and peek through the window blinds from time to time. People do walk by, but they cross to the other side of the street. Are they avoiding walking next to my boxes? Nah, I tell myself, don’t be silly. But this goes on for a couple of days. What the heck is this? I wonder. This is what people do to ME when I’m going for a walk and I don’t have my mask on….OMG! It hits me–I realize that no one will EVER take ANYTHING from the Useful Boxes, they won’t even go near them, because they think that all of it is covered with coronavirus cooties.
What am I going to do? I am constitutionally unable to throw things away that someone else might possibly be able to use (more evidence of where the garage problem originates) so I can’t simply take the Useful Boxes to the trash can and tip out the contents. I just CAN’T. There must be some solution to this problem…but while I’m trying to come up with one, I shove the Useful Boxes, with all their contents (wait for it) ….Into.The.Garage.
QED, I now have no incentive to clean out the junk in the garage as there is no place to take it.
In fact, there is more in there now than there used to be.
And no one will take anything I leave out in boxes, because everyone is afraid that coronavirus is ALL OVER EVERYTHING.
I realize that I am doomed.
Some Caronavirus jokes from around the internet:
Before Corona Virus I used to cough to cover a fart, now I fart to cover a cough.
If I get quarantined for two weeks with my wife and I die, I can assure you it was not the virus that killed me.
Definition of Irony – When the Year Of The Rat starts with a plague.
The science community has figured out that the spread of Coronavirus is based solely on two things.
1. How dense the population is.
2. How dense the population is.
How come the liquor stores don’t have empty shelves? Don’t people understand that they will be quarantined with their spouses and kids?
Don’t worry, the Corona Virus won’t last long… It was made in China.
Thinking a mask is going to stop Covid-19 is the same as thinking that your underpants will protect everyone from a fart.
C,
This is a timely thread. We were visited today by a sis and bro in law.
They live in apartment and told me JUST today they are out of IDEAS on ‘what to do’. Meaning they even went through the junk drawers!
I told them, ‘I did that many WEEKS ago’ and now we are onto other things now, garage, sheetrock, painting, etc, etc! :>)
Just like the house list you (and sistas) have, things have to be DONE regardless of a flu.
Like Re- Build the chicken coup!
Ghost
In additon to serving on fire trucks, I worked on fire trucks for a time too, and one time we had this one truck that needed batteries. As you might guess for a large, 1960’s diesel emergency vehicle that also used them for auxilary scene lighting and other emergency power applications, this meant a pair of very large, heavy, redundant batteries. We went to the local NAPA and, mirable dictu, they actually could and did get batteries that would fit (it’s amazing what a municipal credit card can do), and trucked them to our firehouse in which the truck lie in wait.
This house was situated on a somewhat busy mixed light industrial street, nicely landscaped, with a driveway that curved into the back, obviously large enough for non-articulated trucks to manoever into the bays from, but somewhat sheilded from the gas station next door by a thin strip of grass with a tree in it, and further trees behind mostly blocking the view of the light industrial there.
ANyway, we horsed the giant D-cells out of the side saddles on the truck, jockied the new ones into it and the vehicle was good to go, but now we had a new problem.
Lead was in a bad odor at the time for some doubtlessly Democrat reason, and therefore the battery folks not only didn’t charge us the usual sort of core charge, they had explicity told us they would not accept the batteries back. So we had these two metal clad piles of toxicity lying around the house, being all corrosive and looking bad, and no new home for them, as calling around produced no foster home for them. We had hauled one of them outside into the curved driveway behind in preparation for a removal, but didn’t do the second one on this negative news, and the business day ended so nothing further could be done on the battery front, and so we left it that day.
On our return the following day, the battery was gone. Some brazen, and apparently rather large, theif had come behind a municipal building that could be occupied at any time and took this atomic doorstop to themselves for God knows what reason. It was out of range of the door camera so we never saw the Sasquatch that did it, but this inspired an idea.
I wonder if he’d like to steal a SECOND one?
…So, the other one was placed behind the house as well, the LEOs winkingly finding something to do somewhere else that night, and expectatios were high for the next morning.
Sure enough, our other problem had been removed.
While this was a cautionary tale about placing things we might actually WANT behind the House, it was something of a Godsend that someone CHOSE to eliminate what otherwise might have been a toxic waste disposal problem with ginned-up Democrat outrage (when you work for a municipailty, EVERYTHING is political, and Democrats are ALWAYS waiting for something they can be outraged about), so both the waste AND the public relations problem were taken from us by some unknown agency at no cost other than two police reports that no one was really that intereted in following up on.
We kind of expected them to be returned once our unknown benefactor found out they were worthless, but they never were, and I never heard another thing about them. Sometimes God just provides.
And it’s not exaggerating to say these batteries were huge. They were easily 400 pounds each for an old-school pumper, mounted under the running boards on both sides of the pump, and were long and wide besides. Even if I met the man that took them, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop him if I WANTED to.
…although, now that I think about it, “Michelle” Obama was an unknown in God knows what gender wandering the earth at that time. I wonder if, for some strange reason, “she” was in SW Ohio and needed battery acid to continue “her” transformation, “She” is one of the few human beings who would not need assistance with such things…
After my Mom passed, I started to clean out her closets and bag up clothes to take to “rhymes with Woodgill”. Lemme tell you, she had three closets jammed packed with clothes. I took 4-5 bags over to them as I had business on that side of town and do you know what I was met with? An obese and protected class “Karen” who bitched about how many bags I brought. I reloaded the bags into the truck and took them to a women’s shelter I found and the administrator nearly cried when I told her I had several more bags of clothes, sheets and blankets for them.
This was 2019 way before the cootie-flu btw.
They won’t take the stuff because of the “free” sign. Who wants junk? But if the sign reads “$5 each, or something to that effect, the box will be empty in a few hours. At least around here it will be…thieving little bastards.
Also ask skilled nursing facilities. Some of them maintain a “no name closet”. Oftentimes people arrive at these homes with nothing but the hospital gown they’ve transferred in. Whenever one of my people passes, I can take the donated clothing, medical equipment, supplies and facility staff greets me with wide open arms. Since Medicare/Medicaid reimburses for shit, most of these places are operating on next to nothing.
Before I moved from St. Mary’s County to Calvert I called the St. Vincent de Paul store and axt em if they wanted some used clothing.
They said they’d love to have em – AFTER I had em professionally laundered, folded, and wrapped.
I stuffed em in a bag and tooken em to the trash substation.
izlamo delenda est …
Save those Amazon boxes put your trash inside, tape them up real nice like and put them on your front porch a few at a time and see what happens 😉
The struggles of homeownership….
When we moved to our house, 20 years ago, it came with a giant useless old whole house water softener system. It was job number 1 to get rid of it, including 2 poorly installed hot water heaters.
Flash forward 20 years. Water softener system is still there and 2 poorly installed water heaters began leaking. I was ready to tackle the job, I had studied for 20 years how to braze copper pipe myself. Nope, I chickened out. Called a plumber who installed us a single 75 gallon hot water heater, professional version. It’s a real nice hot water heater, man I was kicking myself wishing I had done it much sooner.
I had the plumber disconnect the piping for the water softener, it had a bypass on it. We never attempted to use it. The softener system had heavy as hell tanks, 2 for filtering water and 1 for holding the salt. Each was round, about 5 feet tall, the filters were 1 foot in diameter and the salt container was 2 feet in diameter. All of it was soaking wet inside, adding to the weight, and no way to possibly wrangle them with any sort of handles, the outsides were slippery plastic.
The tops were made up of brass and copper plumbing and valves. I figured there’s no point trashing the copper and brass, it was worth cutting off and throwing on the scrap hoard and ring the register with a few bucks at the scrap yard.
It took HOURS to cut off the copper and brass. A 20 minute job, I thought, that turned to hours. Did I mention this was all in the basement? Yea, now I had to drag these huge heavy tanks upstairs and out the door. Each was about 200+ lbs and more slippery than a greased pig.
I enlisted my wife to help. We struggled to get the huge and heavy salt tank, still filled with wet salt up the stairs and out the door. Mission complete. Our garbage company provides large plastic bins with wheels. It was empty. I tipped it on the side, tipped the salt tank on its side and slipped the salt tank into the garbage can and had my wife help lift it upright. No more room left for typical garbage, but that was little concern. A 20 year job in the making 1/3 complete!
Until garbage day I overslept thanks to the covid and missed the garbage truck, who in 20 years never showed up before 10am. The truck woke me up at 7am at the neighbors house! Damnit! A week of garbage in spare cans that I can’t put at the curb without paying a sticker fee to include them additionally to the big roller can we already pay for. Yes, I’m cheap like that. This screwed the plan for the other 2 tanks I wanted to start loading into the can for next pickup because now we had too much garbage, 2 weeks worth would pile up before that damn salt tank would be hauled away.
Flash forward 2-1/2 more months. Spare me the trouble typing out our difficulty getting the remaining 2 tanks out of the basement and missing the garbage truck TWO MORE TIMES! The last filter tank was finally hauled away this past Friday. The brass and copper still sits on the floor where I angrly placed it months ago, not even in my scrap hoard yet.
The bright side, I love my new hot water heater. Damn glad I didn’t try to install it myself and deal with disposal of the 2 old heaters. Plus reclaimed square footage where the softener system was. Ahhhh, the bright side. Now it’s time to move!
Stockholm syndrome.
@ECP: I guess I’m lucky to live near a State park with campsites. Large trash bins every where, and that’s where I dump excess garbage that I want to get rid of. Gas stations too are a great place to unload trash when your cans are full. Gotta be creative. Don’t put anything with your name on it when disposing of trash. No one has said anything to me yet and if they do I’ll say “Is it better off in the trash can or on the ground?” The back roads here are littered with old mattresses, TV’s and the like. Pigs!!
HHNN(above) is absolutely correct about taking clean, used clothing to skilled nursing facilities.
Psych Hospitals, Units are ALWAYS in need of good used clothing.
“Free” always works at the end of my driveway, never fails. Until ChineseVirus. I placed a ten feet by 4 inch plastic pipe out there for three days, nuthin. It goes in the recycle bin today, in short pieces.
Put the word “Shit” after Free and you’ll attract the attraction of every democRAT in the hood!
Excess household cleaning products from 5 household’s moving. NO ONE will accept any of it, including new stuff never opened. Damn government considers it hazardous/toxic, even prohibits charity based rebuilding companies from accepting. Can’t bare the though of throwing away, can’t possibly live long enough to use it. Refuse to pay exorbitant fees to legally dispose. Ahhhh. Craig’s List. Will try that.