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dirty weekend
2004-05-03

had a down in the dirt kind of weekend. along with my puppy sitting duties on saturday i also took part in an earth day activity in my neighbourhood. penthouse women #1 (a woman that lives my building on the top floor which she calls the penthouse) and i placed new mulch on the trees lining one of the streets our building is facing. it didn�t take very long, but it made such a difference to the look of the street. it didn�t hurt that we collected all the rubbish strewn across the street. items found included about a million cigarette butts (more about this later), drug paraphernalia, many many empty liquor bottles, family photos and leftovers from peoples emergency car maintenance. i kept the 2 photos i found and will eventually scan them in and post them to found magazine.

sunday found me with even more dirt under my finger nails. penthouse woman #1 and penthouse woman #2 (the neighbour) wanted help repotting a very tightly root bound ficus tree, that should have been repotted 2 years ago. but first we had to trim the little bastard, why they needed my help for that simple and relatively quick task, i don�t know. i would have been more brutal with the pruning if it was my tree, but penthouse woman #2, the owner of the tree, was whimpering that i was hurting her tree. of course later when she came home and saw the end result she was ecstatic at how much better it looked and how much extra light it let into the place. yeah well trimming about 2 foot off the top of the tree will do that.

the next step was to get the root bound tree out of it�s �i�m a size 16 trying to fit into a size 8� pot. there were the 2 of us, me hold the pot and penthouse woman #1 pulling the tree. it was like a game of tug and war. the tree did not budge. i got the tray at the bottom of the pot off, roots had grown out of the drain holes and entwined themselves around. trimming those did little to budge the bloody tree from the pot. we needed tools. so out came the screwdriver and the spatula. we poked and prodded and tried to wedge the tree free from the pot, nothing worked. penthouse woman #1 called for reinforcements. the guy living below her came up and while penthouse woman #1 and i held the pot he tried pulling the tree out. nothing. i got the screwdriver and poked into the drain holes. finally we were able to get the bloody tree out. it then took another 20 minutes to teased apart the roots and repot the stupid thing. i still think it needed an even larger pot than the one we repotted it into. i can see us playing tug of war with this ficus again next year. i did get dinner for my effort and i am happy to say the tree didn�t die overnight.

smokers and their butts. i am a smoker, so this isn�t a non smoker going on about the disgusting habit of smoking and how all smokers are evil. all smokers who drop their butts in the street are evil. no matter where i am, and i very rarely smoke walking down a street (has be known to happen though when i stumble home from the pub drunk), i always keep the butt with me until i come upon a rubbish bin. when i use to catch the bus to work, there would be 3 bins within the vicinity of the bus stop, and yet people would just put out their cigarettes and leave them there. it use to, and still does annoy the shit out of me. i must have picked up over 500 cigarette butts on saturday, and there isn�t even a bus stop along that street.

ignorant people irk me.

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