Dump Runs and Big Machinery

5/9/2014

When I met Jeff, oh so many years ago, he owned a 1952 Willys Jeep and we loved it.  When we tooled around town in the jeep, we felt a lot like the Beverly Hillbillies!  The little house that we first bought had bamboo growing in the back yard.  We're not talking about the cute stuff in a pot, this bamboo was so thick that we thought we had a fence on one side of the yard - we were wrong!

Jeff and his friends spent many hours digging out the bamboo, which is very hard, because the roots on a bamboo plant go everywhere.  For a time the bamboo actually managed to get between the cracks of the fireplace (this is no joke).  I can tell you from our experience that we would never plant bamboo in the yard.  We do have a small plant that sits in a pot and is controllable.  

Our almost weekly dump runs while digging out bamboo, was done in the Jeep and I loved it.  To be fair, dumps don't smell very good, actually they just stink.  But I never missed a trip, I learned to live with the odor mostly because I loved watching the big machines (bull dozers maybe) push trash around.  It looked like so much fun.

We spent all of yesterday cutting down branches from our Leyland Cypress trees and Jeff has made several runs to the local distribution station (they don't call them dumps here).  I went with him last night on his last run for the day and I was reminded again of happy memories of dump runs in the Jeep, and watching truly manly machines at work.

One of my secret desires is to drive some big earth moving equipment.  This will never happen of course, but what a surge of power I would get just pushing stuff around.  It would be so much fun!

Jeff is cutting up the last of the branches now and will make his last trip to the distribution center. He has worked so hard cutting down branches and then cutting them up in smaller pieces to fit easily in the truck.  He is tired and sore.  The good news is that we will likely not have to trim the trees again for many years, because all the low branches are now gone and we took off any branches that were hanging down, because the first snow/ice storm and we'll lose them anyway.

Have a wonderful Friday.  It was a bit gloomy earlier, but the sun is popping up now.

P