Notes from Maine - 2023/07/30
I can’t remember a summer in Maine with more perfect weather. We’ve had tons of sunshine, warm temperatures, and enough rain to keep everything lush and green. The perfect weather is ending this week, I’m afraid. My family is coming up for August, so the weather will have to take a turn for the worse. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. I wish there was a way to inject a single February day into the middle of July. Standing out on the deck in shorts and t-shirt, it seems impossible that the world will be buried in snow in six months. I will be bundling up in layer after layer just to keep warm instead of sweating in the sun. I know it’s stupid—I love the change of seasons—but it’s still surprising to me how different the world is at different times of the year. I would appreciate the summer more if we could have a single winter day right in the middle of it. I don’t need the opposite. Having a summer day in winter would only make it harder I think.
I went to the dump three times this month. In my town, we don’t have any municipal trash pickup. Residents are expected to find a way to get their garbage and recycling to the “transfer station” on their own. For years and years, that meant a weekly trip for me. I didn’t mind. When Dad would come to stay, the “dump run” was always his favorite part of the visit. It’s not just a place to dispose of things. You can also find treasures that people have set aside to pass along. When I built go karts one year, almost all the parts came from the dump. The sink in my laundry room was a dump find. It’s not garbage. It’s a deep Blanco sink that someone left by the metal bin because it was too nice to toss. I was lucky enough to find it right when I was remodeling.
My first trip to the dump this month was to dispose of the old mattress and box spring from the camp. We had an older memory foam mattress from Dad’s house there. It felt like it was trying to suck you in to smother you while you slept. I hated it. I replaced it with a decent mattress and box spring from Dad’s house. It was originally bought for my niece, but she hated it, so it went to Dad’s guest room.
All this mattress swappery was happening while I was shifting my online reading/viewing habits. Every now and then, I cull a bunch of subscriptions on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, etc. That makes those sites feverishly suggest new subs I might like. One that popped up for me on Reddit is /r/whatisthisbug, and that quickly led to me browsing through /r/bedbugs. Of course, as soon as you start reading about bed bug infestations, you become convinced that you must have bed bugs.
It’s perfectly rational. At one point, a pilot slept on the bed in my father’s guest room. I saw a post from a pilot on Reddit who switched hotels because they found evidence of bed bugs in the hotel near the airport. Therefore, Q.E.D., when I sat down on the mattress in the camp, I must have picked up bed bugs and transported them home. Forget about the mosquitoes, horse flies, deer flies, and black flies that attack me whenever I go outside to do chores—that itchy bite on my leg was clearly from a bed bug.
On my second trip to the dump, I took a bunch of kitchen cabinets, a door, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down in the garage. This all went into the “demolition debris” pile, which costs money at our transfer station. Surprisingly, I didn’t catch any diseases or infestations from getting rid of that stuff. My third trip was metal scrap. I don’t build go karts anymore, so I finally parted with some engines and parts that would have made a very fine go kart several years ago.
The very next day after the metal trip, my neighbor texted me. He has a trailer that he was filling with metal scrap—did I have anything I needed to get rid of? My first answer was, “No, I just went, but thanks.” By the next day, I had found another truckload of metal that needed disposal. I took it to the neighbor.
I don’t know what’s better—collecting stuff, or throwing stuff away. I love them both so much. I can’t choose. Right now, I’m having a great time throwing things away, so I’m going to continue down that path for a while. Once my kitchen is completely empty, I’m going to have to start finding cabinets. My intention was to sand, paint, and reuse as many cabinets as possible, but I’ve only found one so far that wasn’t junk. Maybe I’ll get luckier with the second half, but I doubt it. Seems like everything is going to find its way to the “demolition debris” pile.
