The Yorkshire Redemption

So flash back to last August. I have this huge three-sink cement laundry tub in the basement that I have HATED for years. So when my Dad and my brother and nephew are all in town, they help me reduce it to a rubble pile (think sledge-hammer-applied-to-cement project) so I can finally replace it with a nice simple laundry tub.

But okay, how do I get rid of the rubble pile? There must be at least 600 lbs or more of cement lying on my basement floor. So I call up the city, and they say "yes, put it on the curb, we will pick it up."

I doubt this. I doubt it greatly.

But okay, I took a little bit of it to the curb and piled it up (kind of a mini Stonehenge) to see if they would take it.

Of course, they didn't.

So I call the city again, and am told "oh, to be picked up, it has to be in a container."

A container?

"Yes, no more than 40 lbs per container."

Now, this is an enormous pile of fist-sized concrete shards, with stiff structural wire lacing through many of the pieces. I can't just put them in garbage bags or cardboard boxes; they aren't strong enough to hold more than a few pieces, and the wires will rip the bags/boxes to shreds. (It should go without saying that I'm too cheap to hire someone to take this stuff away.)

So, I break the thing down even further and, piece by piece, week by week, toss a little bit into a garbage bag and take it to the curb. I feel like Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins' character) in The Shawshank Redemption, who digs a tunnel in his prison cell and carts the cement from the tunnel out to the prison yard, little by little, of the course of many years.

All winter, into spring, I'm taking these cement shards out in the weekly trash, little by little. And tonight, the last of it got set out of the curb. It's all finally gone. Time to go to Zihuatanejo...