Neighborhood Clean Up Day

Spokane has 27 Neighborhood Associations throughout the city. We live in the Emerson Garfield Neighborhood. I was chairman of Emerson-Garfield last year. My reign ended last month. Now I am the secretary and the only reason fer that is eyam the goodest speller we gots. Not gud with gramer, but speeling eye can doo.

One of the things the Neighborhood Council does is distribute Free Dump Passes to the residents. We are given a budget from the city. In the past, the dump passes are worth about $25.00. So, if I take my free pass into the Waste to Energy Plant and dump my crap load of stuff and the bill comes to $10.00, they take my pass and subtract $10.00 from the Emerson-Gafield budget. The remaining $15.00 stays in our budget to be used later.

A lot of the time, we have money left over that just rolls back to the city if we don't use it.

The guy who took over the dump pass committee is Karl. He decided he wanted to change over to a Neighborhood Clean Up Day where the city would bring large dumpsters to a central location and residents of the neighborhood could bring their crap loads of stuff there.

Yesterday was that day. And a very successful dump day it was. Below are a couple of pictures of the line o'folks waiting to dump.

All in all, we were very pleased with the turn out. We filled nine of those dumpsters. I think they hold 30 square yards of waste.

It went from nine to one. I got there early with my first load because I was going to help work the site, directing traffic and helping to unload. But I had also volunteered to haul garbage for people who didn't have a way to transport it.

Susan and I ended up picking up some stuff from a very nice older lady who lived outside the border of our neighborhood. I didn't realize it until I looked a the map this morning. Anyway, no biggy.

The interesting thing was that at first, I went to the wrong address and was driving down this very bumpy alley. I could have spent the whole day collecting crap from the backyards of houses in that alley. There was one place I really should have gotten a picture of...but the person living there was peering out a window as we drove by and they probably would have shot us.

I ended up taking two loads of stuff just from our yard. The first load involved the tree that fell a couple weeks ago. My goal was to get all the debris in one load which ended up making it comically high.

I didn't worry about securing it because the dump location was only three blocks away. I think I could have gone higher but I ran out of debris...& that's okay!

I have to go out now and mow since the mower has been at the tune up shop for two weeks. I'm going to be stopping often to dump grass because it is so tall. After that, I am going to attempt to re-organize the garage. Actually, that makes it sound like it was at one time organized, and that is not the case.