Journal of a Sabbatical

September 1, 1998

this just in
the biker chick is selling the unit next door!

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

An old bamboo rake just won't cut it in the cigarette butt removal department so I headed up north to the Rockingham Mall in search of a cheap metal rake. I ended up with a $2.99 rake and $1.29 pair of garden gloves, a Ralph Lauren flat sheet in a weird purple, a bath rug, a jug of Gonzo pet stain remover, a shower curtain, a shower curtain liner, Inside Photoshop 4, and Dynamic HTML (Developing Interactive Cross-Browser Web Applications). The rake works great. I scratched and dug and scratched and dug and came up with more cigarette butts than I realized were there. I'm not nearly done yet but it felt damn good to root around in the weeds and make a dent in the filth.

I hacked away at the vines too, until my allergies started acting up again. As long as I keep my gate closed and nobody looks over the fence, my yard looks presentable from the parking lot. Well, except for the "wild" maple tree. I may have to have an arborist come and remove it if the garden ladies insist we can't have trees anywhere but where they designate. I couldn't cut it down with pruning sheers and I really don't want to anyway. But that's the only growing thing in my yard that can be seen from the parking lot.

As for the abandoned broken rowing machine in the yard, I tried to disassemble it with a power screw driver/drill today and realized that all the key parts are held together with Allen bolts and I don't have any huge Allen wrench bits for the power screw driver/drill. Oops. There has to be a way to get rid of this thing without paying someone to haul it away. There has to. Meanwhile, the major life lesson I have learned from this is never buy a cheap rowing machine or exercise bike or any other large indoor exercise gadget because when it breaks there is no way to get rid of it. I could join a health club for what I'll have to pay to get this darn thing hauled away.

Just before I left to shop for the rake, the biker chick and her pit bull showed up in the parking lot. I stopped to chat with them on my way to the dumpster. She's selling the unit next to mine. My first question: "You mean they're not buying it?" I told her about the cigarette butts - as if she couldn't see the little pile of them I'd collected for disposal - and she said she'd asked them not to smoke inside the unit. She thought only the Dad smoked, so she was surprised when I told her one of the kids does too and he has no concept of ash trays. According to the biker chick, the unit is very dirty and when she replaced the garbage disposal in the sink, she found it full of cigarette butts. I wanted to laugh, but I winced. The realtor who's going to list the place showed up as I was leaving and I told her not to look in my yard :-)

Later on I worked on the cigarette butts some more, but with a much less heavy heart . My resentment started to lift. I didn't even mind that the Beans of Egypt Maine kept me awake last night until 3:00 AM moving furniture and having loud conversations on the back steps while they smoked.

The humidity dried and the temperature is dropping. The weather is getting to be almost bearable, and the Beans of Egypt Maine aren't buying the unit! What a fabulous day!

In the late afternoon I saw a cloud the exact shape of Hokkaido drift by.