Saturday, February 11, 2012

Lucky Thirteen

You know, our Rusty Jones is so determined, so tireless, so ruthless in his quest to rid this yard of rusty cars, that he won't even let a little thing like February in New England stop him. Now, granted, this has been an uncommonly mild winter so far, but still. Nothing much usually happens here in February.

So last week Rusty came and took away the old blue Saab 99, the one whose paint is officially called Caroline Blue, and so therefore the car has been called after it Caroline. I mean duh. This was another one that Tara hauled off to her own yard, and, while I disapprove I suppose in general, still, she's legally an adult and it's neither my business nor, and this is important, is it my problem.

So off Caroline went, out of my yard!

Here she is ready to go, up in the driveway, after being pulled up there with Tara's new Bug:



Here's a before picture from last summer, of where she was on the north side of the shed:



And the after, though it's not quite the same view. You can see we've also cleaned up around the area in general since:



And that, my friends, puts us as thirteen cars out of here and thirteen cars left, since we started this blog, anyway. If we count from the mid-nineties, well, I don't know but it's whatever seventy-eight minus thirteen is, more or less. My count, incidentally, may be a little off, as there are some, well, half cars here that I'm not sure how to tally. But for now I'm going to say we're at an even split, with fifty percent of the (recent) goal met. And that's pretty damned good!

On the kitten front (the lingering business that is taking so much of my time believe it or not), now it's just Zéphirine the shy kitten in the dining room. And with her brothers out of there, it was only a couple days before she decided she was lonely and came out begging for me to pet her. So she has, astonishingly, turned a corner, and in fact will now climb into my lap and demand to be pet. She's still pretty shy, though, and needs more work, but putting her back out as feral is thankfully no longer an option. She also has a home lined up, a friend of my mother's who knows cats and knows she's a shy one, which is good because I'm not sure she'll ever be up to the level of being able to handle a shelter situation, with all the other animals and the noise and smells and such. That friend won't be able to take her until the middle of March, which actually works out fine since that will give me time to get her solidly tame.

So there's a light at the end of that tunnel, finally, and yay!

7 comments:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Good news on both the car AND kitten front!

Anonymous said...

not sure if I ever asked this before or not: When you two were little, were you allowed to run around outside barefoot, given all the crap and crud in the yard? Were the piles and cars that bad say 20 years ago?

Will you take a metal detector over the yard once all the cars are gone?

My mind just marvels over all you have removed!!

Keep up the great work, and keep blogging....

a reader from the midwest who fights the pack rat gene from her mom's side of the family!!

Tara said...

There were parts of the yard where no cars ever were, so I suppose we could have walked around barefoot, but we were also the sort of kids that didn't do that anyway.

As an adult I barely ever go around barefoot, and that's due more to a barefoot-phobia more than anything.

For the other parts of the yard it was really tetanus suicide to attempt such a thing, and we were either discouraged from doing that or something happened and we learned really fast that it was a stupid idea.

That said, as we clean out more areas, there is always nasty rusty shards of god knows what in the ground, as well as glass, poison ivy and just uneven ground in general

Beverly Diehl said...

Love this, love that the cars are going away, hooray! You must have a big blog-party when the car count drops below double-digits.

Qoqom said...

Interesting story...

Suella said...

Further progress on both fronts. Well done. This is so commendable, and inspirational for me as well.

I still have things that I collected and was going to paint, create, or deal with pre-CFS but they are little by little being re-homed, or re-used.

Thanks for setting an impressive example for me. And thanks for all you do for your kittens and cats.

adam.giguere said...

Wow, this place has really been cleaned up, I remember going by there on the bus in the 90s and the yard was full of old Volkswagens and other junk