Earth Day
Sunday, April 23 2006
We were blessed with the most amazing weather for
Earth Day weekend. I decided to help out by
volunteering at a proposed EPA Superfund clean up
site: our garage.
Our garage isn't actually a garage anymore. It is, in that it still has an overhead door and sits at the end of our driveway, but cars haven't been inside it for years. It was just about five years ago that we had a large storage shed built so we could empty the garage of bikes, lawnmowers, garden tools, camping gear, etc. Then we had insulation and finished drywall installed into the garage. We cleaned and painted the floor and set it up as a teen hangout space.
I make it a point to stay out of there. When two teenage boys occupy a space with their friends for an extended period of time the state of things rapidly degenerate to a point which is aggrevating to view. So I spare myself the aggrevation by not viewing it. Sometimes Tina will come to me in frustration and ask, "Have you looked out there?" And I can happily answer, "No."
Unfortunately we still store some of our stuff out there which requires me to enter it on occasion. The garage is a 20'x20' space, 400 square feet, last week the room had become impassable. Usually when the degree of entropy within the garage impedes upon my consiousness I bark at the boys and make them "clean up". This usuallys result in a superficial pass which removes the largest pieces of garbage and most of the dirty dishes. Things had gotten to a point where this was not going to be enough. I decided that the room was going to be returned to a condition which was safe for humans to occupy. I rolled up my sleeves, rounded up the two biggest boys, and got out my whip.
It only took us about three hours to get things turned around. Here are a couple pictures of "after". The "before" was actually too frightening to document. The drumset is missing, as it is over at a neighbor's house this weekend.
Technical note: these panorama shots are composites of 3 photos each. This is the first time I've tried this with our camera. It has a feature for helping you line up successive shots. Our HP printer came with a simple program for "stitching" the shots together; works pretty neatly!
Oh, and I posted an update on Stinky Mouse too... Enjoy!
Our garage isn't actually a garage anymore. It is, in that it still has an overhead door and sits at the end of our driveway, but cars haven't been inside it for years. It was just about five years ago that we had a large storage shed built so we could empty the garage of bikes, lawnmowers, garden tools, camping gear, etc. Then we had insulation and finished drywall installed into the garage. We cleaned and painted the floor and set it up as a teen hangout space.
I make it a point to stay out of there. When two teenage boys occupy a space with their friends for an extended period of time the state of things rapidly degenerate to a point which is aggrevating to view. So I spare myself the aggrevation by not viewing it. Sometimes Tina will come to me in frustration and ask, "Have you looked out there?" And I can happily answer, "No."
Unfortunately we still store some of our stuff out there which requires me to enter it on occasion. The garage is a 20'x20' space, 400 square feet, last week the room had become impassable. Usually when the degree of entropy within the garage impedes upon my consiousness I bark at the boys and make them "clean up". This usuallys result in a superficial pass which removes the largest pieces of garbage and most of the dirty dishes. Things had gotten to a point where this was not going to be enough. I decided that the room was going to be returned to a condition which was safe for humans to occupy. I rolled up my sleeves, rounded up the two biggest boys, and got out my whip.
It only took us about three hours to get things turned around. Here are a couple pictures of "after". The "before" was actually too frightening to document. The drumset is missing, as it is over at a neighbor's house this weekend.
Technical note: these panorama shots are composites of 3 photos each. This is the first time I've tried this with our camera. It has a feature for helping you line up successive shots. Our HP printer came with a simple program for "stitching" the shots together; works pretty neatly!
Oh, and I posted an update on Stinky Mouse too... Enjoy!
|