Friday 23 October 2015

Country living – the dump.

Country living has a lot going for it – the solitude, the beauty of raw nature, fishing off the dock, and the dump.

Not all dumps are treasure troves like this one: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/atari-games-from-landfill-sold-for-more-than-100-000-us-1.3209532

Sometimes they are small town entertainment like the one where we used to go to shoot the rats and feed the bears.bear_02But, more recently, with the renew, reuse, recycle mantra in full swing they have become something more.

One of Jeff Foxworthy’s clues to the fact you might be a redneck is “If you come home from the dump with more than you left with.” Well, by that definition, your honour, I have to plead guilty, but with an explanation.

Faced with an instant lawn weed field after a major storm transformed our beautiful forest into so much kindling wood by a so-called macro-burst 3 years ago, I needed to find a way to tame it somehow. A scythe did the job for a while but I was keeping my eyes open for some machinery to make the job a bit easier.

Then one day I saw an old mower on the metal recycling heap at the dump. I went and checked it out. It didn’t run but it turned over okay and the compression seemed decent. The housing was cracked and a couple of wheels were broken but otherwise I thought it might do the job. So home it came with me.

The missus just rolled her eyes (a pretty common occurrence around here on dump day), but I cleaned it up, put in fresh gas, and it fired up on the 3rd pull. I replaced the broken wheels with 2 spare wheels I had in stock (found earlier, also at the dump) and I now have a working lawn mower to keep the weed field at bay. IMG_20150830_172802136Doesn’t get much better than free. Thanks Bill Mulvihill, whoever you are!