The weekend I didn't miss because my body hurts now

Bits of last weekend really stick in my mind more that Angela, I think!

Let's start with this couple of sentences: "Mike went and hired a trailer, and the neighbour helped him take lots of renovation rubbish up to the street level and dumped it in the trailer.  Then we went around to Sally and Andrew's place for the afternoon (Mike went to the tip out there) and stayed for tea." I'd better expand on that a bit. 

There was probably over a tonne of firewood and demolition rubble piled down beside our house that needed taking away.  It all had to be carried up about 4 storeys in height to the street, and taken to the tip in a trailer.  I'd put it off for the last two weekends (that were sunny and nice) but eventually settled on Saturday as the day to do it.  When, of course, it rained heavily all day.

So I trotted off to the servo to get a trailer to haul it all away in.  I bumped into Fiona, our neighbour and asked if she had anything to throw onto the pile... she didn't but instead she very kindly suggested to her partner that he come around and help me!  That was a real, total godsend.  I don't think I would have got through the day without that - the two of us were able to rapidly haul up the rubbish that was stacked, and get it to street level.  The demolition rubble went into the trailer, anything burnable went into the garage for a later trip to Lesley and Wally's house (they have a fireplace!).

Then, I changed clothes because I was soaked to the skin.  (Luckily it wasn't windy or cold, just wet.  I wore tramping clothes that are designed to work okay wet, and a light jacket on top - that was all I needed to make working okay.  But as soon as you stopped and cooled down - you noticed that all your clothes were clammy and horrible!)

But unfortunately my next job was to take down our spouting downpipes, which were rusty and manky and need replacing.  That meant working directly under the bits of spouting that are left on our house - so I had all the rain that was hitting our roof funnelled into one spot and tipping down the back of my neck!  Sigh.

Anyway, by about 3pm I had changed my clothes two more times, and the trailer was filled - with the rubbish from the bottom of the property, the wall board that Angela had ripped down in the TV room and Toby's room, the aforementioned downpipes, another couple of bags of building rubbish I collected up from around the property, about 20 bags of demolition rubbish I'd already put in the garage earlier, and three old doors and some pinex and wallboard.  Plus, I ripped the remains of a hedge out from between our garages and dug most of the soil out (so I can put gravel in instead - no more maintenance!!).  And now the trailer was full.  Really full.  Piled up past the top of the 2.5m trailer cage and with extra bits tied on the top with rope.  All wet and heavy, and oddly loaded because the original plan was to collect more stuff from my parents' new house in Epuni - that certainly didn't happen!!

So now we headed off to Sally and Andrew's house to see if they had rubbish, and then to go to the transfer station near their house.  The car drove extremely badly with all this weight, especially since it was stacked so that the front wheels were very light.  Don't forget too, it was very wet and the roads were greasy and slippery.  The trailer was definitely the one doing the driving, I was just offering it gentle suggestions about where we might go if it felt inclined to.  Any attempts to accelerate or brake more than a little just resulted in the wheels sliding.  I kept very slow and watched my following distances a lot!!

Anyways, we got to Sally and Andrew's, and rapidly decided that there was nothing for it but to head straight to the transfer station and not worry about adding to an already excessive pile.  Now, the transfer station really is great.  I've been there before but only to bring in green waste and swap it for someone else's mulched and sterilised green waste.  Always good fun, but this was my first time with plain, non-recyclable rubbish.  First up - your unloading space is under cover (yay!!).  Secondly - they have plenty of friendly staff with great machinery and they unload your trailer for you (even bigger yay!!).  This proved to be great fun.  They decided the best thing to do was unhitch the trailer and tip it into the rubbish pit.  But they underestimated how heavy it all was - and the trailer promptly shot up in the air with FOUR OF US hanging in mid-air off the towbar, and I was absolutely certain that the whole mess - the rubbish, the trailer, us, and the tip workers - were all going to end up down in the pit.  But the trailer stopped just in time, the digger operator cleared off the rubbish from the back of the trailer and lightened it, and everything worked out fine.  The workers all took it in their stride, laughing and joking about it.  I think this sort of thing goes on all the time at the transfer station!!

And that was my day nearly done - but not all done.  While Angela and Toby had a cup of tea/hot chocolate at Sally's, I raced back to do the second mission - get the burnable rubbish, aka useful firewood, around to Lesley and Wally's house.  Fortunately this was pretty uneventful, since the wood was already stacked in the garage, and I could very quickly fire it into the trailer, run it around to their house (which is pretty close) and biff it over their fence.  Easy!  Then I dropped the trailer back at the servo and made it back to Sally and Andrew's by 6:30pm, just as dinner was ready.  Whew!  I'd certainly built up an appetite for it!