Clean up weekend

Saturday's neighborhood cleanup was kinda nuts, but not as nuts as it could have been.

Recap: Baltimore does a clean up day once a year just after taxes are due. The idea being that people are using their refunds for new stuff and will dump their old stuff in an alley. Each neighborhood gets one dumpster for anybody to throw things in. The Westport neighborhood is full of trashinto from people dumping. We wanted to get a lot of the trash out. Yummy contacted the people who run the incinerator up the street and they offered up two more dumpsters, personnel, and heavy machinery to do cleanup.

The crew from the incinerator got out here around 8:00. A small front loader started excavating the yard up the alley and loading all the trash in a much bigger front loader that took the junk off to burn. The yard was behind an empty house and is a popular dump site. Before they came, the yard had 2-3 evictions worth of crap in it. Then they moved on to two other yards in another alley. At some point their smaller loader went along in the gutter on the main drag through the neighborhood and scooped up all the litter. We saw them shoveling out some of the worse gutters, too.

The city, on the other hand, completely failed to show up. The dumpster they were supposed to bring never appeared. And it was needed. The first dumpster in our area filled right up. I was creeping around on top looking for holes that we could fill with our bags of garbage.

We'd been collecting bags. A yard across the alley had a lot of litter that we'd bagged. Took about 4 bags to clear. A couple more came from sweeping the alley a couple of weeks ago. On the work day we raked litter from both sides of a neighboring street, cleaned out some storm drains, under the stairs from a doctor's office, drug in some dumped chairs from under the tracks, and did another yard in our alley as well as a bit from few other yards. By then we were over garbage pickup. Five hours was our limit. Then we tossed some old furniture from our place in the dumpster across the highway.

Sunday we went and scoped out next weekend's project. A park in one of the less needy neighborhoods. We'll be leading a project to clear limbs and underbrush to keep drug users from hanging out in a group of trees. Chainsaws, poison ivy, thorns... good times.

We also got a clothesline in our yard, replaced the back fence with a trellis that we painted blue, ran the hops from my old place up the back of this house, repointed part of the demoed room, and did more demolition of the bathroom. I only stopped from doing more repointing because mortar was getting in a cut and was really starting to hurt. I really hope it's not representative of how much I can hope to repoint in a weekend or I'm in for a couple months of this.