Friday, June 25, 2010

Over a barrel

Between what the previous owners left us and what magically managed to appear on our property over the winter, we've had quite a bit of garbage to deal with ever since the big melt began a few weeks ago. Most of the little stuff has been taken care of, although I suspect we'll be cleaning up cigarette butts from here until doomsday. I can't say I'm happy about that, but on the bright side at least they didn't smoke inside the house.

With the little stuff gone, we've moved onto the bigger stuff. It might not be an official basement, but the under side of our house managed to acquire destroyed hockey gear, bits of a porch, assorted paint and chemicals of dubious stability, and the shattered remains of a table saw of some kind that must have weighed about 50 pounds.

Fortunately, there was a bulk garbage pick-up this week so we dutifully dragged it all out to the curb to be picked up. Which they did. Well, all except one thing.


Sometime between when we did our last inspection of the house to a couple of days after we had moved in, this fuel barrel magically appeared behind our house. It annoyed me all winter, even the parts of it when I couldn't see the barrel because it was buried under snow. It was just sitting there, like a ticking time bomb. I've heard more horror stories about home fuel spills in Iqaluit than I'm comfortable with. I'm not too worried about the fuel tank we have on the side of our house because it was only installed last summer. So it's good. However, as you can tell, this bastard has a bit of rust on it. Plus, when we finally got around to taking a closer look at it, it was originally filled in 2002, so it's been kicking around awhile.

The good news is that it sounds like it's mostly empty. We were able to wrangle it from the back of the house and put it out front in the hopes the nice men from the city would take it away for us.

Obviously, not so much.

So now I have to figure out what to do with the bloody thing. I just want it gone. Even mostly empty, it feels like a bad thing waiting to happen. Plan A is to put a bunch of garbage bags in the back of the Tracker, take it out to the dump and hope they take it. Plan B is to take it to Uqsuq, the energy folks around here, and give it to them. Someone told me there might even be a refund for the stupid thing.

So that might be something for us to do this weekend, or possibly after I get back from Ottawa. Does anyone have any other suggestions? And by suggestions, I mean actually useful ones. I mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter last week and got YouTube links on how to take a fuel drum and convert it into A. a musical instrument and B. a barbecue. So those bases are covered, thanks.

Last Five
1. Playboy mommy - Tori Amos*
2. Come back - Josh Rouse
3. Broken toy - Keane
4. Do you want to - Franz Ferdinand
5. The end of medicine - The New Pornographers

3 comments:

Aida said...

dont know about a refund, but apparently there is a "new" dump, read irresponsible dumping near Wyneberg? its where they have all the cars that are compressed to be shipped out? there must be like 20 used oil barrels out there today. so dump there? i dont think the regular dumping site will take it, but try? i find the waste collectors are a bit finicky these days. like how they wont take garbage in a small kitchen bag b/c its not in a big black garbage bag.

Matthew & Michele said...

You may try the City garage. They may have a waste fuel burnner. If they do there shouldn't be any problem with them taking the fuel. Free heat to them.

Anonymous said...

Yeesh! And I thought WE had some annoying crap to clean up from the previous owners when we moved in.

On a totally unrelated note, a quick query...The entire time I lived in Nunavut, I read frequent news items about how chronically under-staffed the GN is yet they seem to advertise very few GN positions on the government website. I was wondering if hiring enough public employees to staff all the departments is such a challenge then why do there seem to be so few job ads? Are most of them just advertised internally or is there some employment website they make use of that I just haven't run across yet?