First day of work of the new year. Woo.

Cool, rainy (40-ish)

It was a pretty iconic day back at work. Like millions of Oregonians, I woke up in the dark, listened to the drenching rain outside, and thought, “Awesome. There goes vacation.” And that was pretty much the day, in a nutshell: It poured all day, I did boring stuff, and I found a few dead things. I spent some time daydreaming about geocaching and playing Marc’s Sims game on the PSP. I sorted screws and washers in the Stink Shack, a building you could have mistaken for a walk-in freezer, only smellier.

It is, of course, good to be back. There’s excitement in driving down the road into camp, ready to see the changes. There’s something nice about walking into Slanty with laundry in hand, smelling campfire and rodent piss. And there’s even something good about organizing the warehouse so it won’t look so terrible.

The warehouse is a wreck. First off, it’s got hideous molding yellow siding on the outside, and the only natural light inside comes from atrociously dirty skylights, which, in addition to providing almost no light, leak. And then everywhere—every surface of this probably 2000-square-foot building—is covered in junk. Today I tackled some shelves, on which I found bricks, old electrical transformers, a too-heavy meat slicer, hazard signs, taillights for a truck we no longer have, hubcaps, screws, caulk, rock salt, hardened cement, ancient handwashing liquid, several tools I didn’t recognize, and a dead bat (pictured below).


It’s very satisfying to clean a corner of a building, don’t get me wrong. But when you don’t know what to chuck and what Carlo will miss, it’s tough going. I am positive we will never use most of the things I find, clean up, and re-shelve; if we really want, oh, say, an electrical transformer, we’ll go buy something that hasn’t been chewed on, and is a little more modern than 1930. But Carlo thinks (sometimes rightly) that these things are cool, and therefore they must stay.

If we were running a museum, that would be awesome. But what happens is that we keep stuff, and stuff accumulates, and then rats start to live in it, and then they get into the good stuff too, and then everything is trashed, and you can’t even find the stuff you use. For someone who loves order, this is a bit of a problem.

Tomorrow I want to start and patrol the burn pile. Yeah.