School is finally over for the spring semester and I have some “between time” until summer session starts next week.  Since this past weekend and I Tazz have:

• Got the garage resided (well, we watched)
• Refreshed the flower beds out front & planted pretty things (they haven’t been used for three years easily)
• Fixed the garage spot light (me on a ladder & electrical wire)
• Removed the 30 year old non-functioning fluorescent lights from the garage
• Put a new, efficient fluorescent fixture in the garage
• Mowed the lawn
• Pulled the weeds/creeping charlie
• Emptied and removed the scary barrel (more later on this)

Whew that’s a lot.  And there is still more to do.  I’ve noticed over the past few years that we’ve let things slide around the outside of the house and a number of things inside too.  I keep a to-do list of household repairs, etc on tadalist.com and it hasn’t changed in a long time.  School is the primary reason but I think, in general, I just gravitate towards lazy.  I’m hoping this motivation sticks with me through the summer!

The scary barrel mentioned above is actually a 50-ish gallon barrel that has been hidden behind our garage since we bought the house in 2001.  The previous owners said they had no idea what was in it so they left it.  Tazz and I were actually afraid to know what was in there until in approximately 2004, I opened it.  It took a lot of effort since it was sealed pretty heavily.  What I found was a bunch of stale water, a wrench, an oil filter, and about 8 quarts of used, degrading motor oil.  The smell was that of a sewer.  I didn’t know what to do with this and neither of our cars at the time would let me safely transport it to a hazardous waste site.  So it’s sat back there, like a nagging blemish.  Sometimes I swear it was calling to me in the night.

I finally came up with an idea on how to get rid of it.  I ended up buying two 5-gallon buckets from the hardware store and carefully emptied the stinky, migraine-inducing contents into the two buckets.  Come to find out the idiot put holes in the barrel up the side and it’s been leaking oil on the ground for years.  Anyway, I got the oil/water/wrench mixture out and have let the barrel dry out.  There is a little bit of oil left but now it can be thrown out.  Now we have two pretty buckets full of gunk.  I wonder how many years they’ll sit in the garage? 🙂