Today was an adventure at home and while this has absolutely nothing to do with our travels, the best I can do is to state that, because we were gone for so long, nature practiced reclaiming our land. When we got home from our mid-summer adventure our previously empty desert environment had become almost overgrown with tumbleweeds.

If you don’t know, because I didn’t, tumbleweeds are actually a very invasive species. I always thought they were just part of desert living, but apparently that’s not entirely true. Check out Wikipedia’s take on them.

At any rate we had a few ideas on how to reclaim our property as these invasive ouchie plants even planted themselves on our driveway and where we keep our truck and trailer.

Another miniature hot air balloon festival

Weekend days often start with a mini hot air balloon festival

One of the reasons we bought the house that we bought was simply because of the views. Every day we look out and see the desert rather than our neighbors. Well, if we look in the right direction. There is a huge swath of desert out our back porch making us feel like we’re alone here to a great extent.

What that also means is that many days start out with a miniature version of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Now that event hosts many hundreds of balloons but, quite frequently, there are 20-30 hot air balloons within view at the start of the day, particularly on weekends. That was true as this day started.

Many’s the time that the balloons start or end their journey very close to our home and some fly low enough that we can chat with the pilots and passengers. We dig it.

Someone’s got your goat

Back to the tumbleweeds, our initial thought was to hire one of the local farmers who bring goats to your property that just eat everything in sight, even the tumbleweeds. In fact they love ‘em.

But another thing we like about this property is that it’s just a piece of the New Mexico desert so we don’t have a fence and the goat folks don’t want their goats wandering around. We also have coyotes so I would imagine a goat could go from being the eaters to the eaten.

Sure. The goat farmers would come but they’d have to build a temporary fence which would be thousands of dollars. Nope.

I do my best thinking sometime in the middle of the night and I had the idea that I would buy a rototiller and rototill right under these invasive prickly bushes. That proved to be reasonably effective except that the rototiller catches these stupid things which wrap themselves around the tines and it. Is. No. Fun to try to cut them out.

Did I mention that they’re ouchie?

On the subject of that rototiller, some of you may know that I’m a big fan of Ryobi’s 18 volt tools so I thought I’d try the 18 volt variant of this because I have so many of those batteries. But my expectations were pretty low. I mean, only 18 volts.

Boy was I wrong. This thing just tears into the ground. Rocks, hard dirt, roots. It doesn’t care and really doesn’t slow down. So, once again, I’m impressed with yet another Ryobi product.

Of course it came with another battery and charger so there’s that.

Anyhow my solution was to work with Peggy to sort of hold back the tumbleweed and then rototill under it. This was a success and the blasted tumbleweeds come out very, very quickly.

Waiting in line at the dump with others who had the same idea

Off to the dump

These big round bushes are mostly air, kind of like the worst cotton candy ever, and it didn’t take us long to fill our truck to overflowing. So we put a tarp over the tumbleweeds and mashed them down by simply stepping on them. Next stop, the dump.

By the way the whole point of this story is the dump. Talk about a long way to get to your destination.

Anyhow, we packed the truck up to the top of the bed. Since we were headed to the dump, we figured we’d add all the recycling that’s been piling up. We also had a bag of regular, good old-fashioned trash. The dump, right?

Off we went to the dump where we waited in line with others who had the same idea. Peggy, being a researcher, found that if the truck were only loaded to the top of the bed it only costs $6 for the green waste, 75¢ for the trash and the recycling was free. Nifty.

Once we got up to the window the dump employee looked at our truck and, despite my description of what we brought along with us, he said $6. Fine with me.

The next stop was where you and your fellow locals back your vehicle up and dump the stuff you brought.

To me this was fascinating. It was like a big concrete river bed where a dude in a front loader would shove what you brought into a bigger hole. I asked him if there was a special place for trash, recycling and green waste and he just said to dump it all in one pile.

We did and he smooshed it with the tractor and shoved it down the edge of the “riverbed.”

While we were there we saw others with all sorts of things, including a manual typewriter which the big front loader smashed with ease. I was both sad and fascinated.

What a bummer

Here we’ve been so diligent with our recycling even buying a separate garbage can to keep it until it can be recycled properly. Apparently that doesn’t matter.

Perhaps some desk jockey has a different vision for our recycling but the reality is, it just got dumped with all the other trash. At least where I was.

This ties in with another of my kvetches about life. If we pay some fee to drink things out of a container that is recyclable why isn’t there a place to get my money back and properly recycle the container? I’m not going to go off on a tangent here in writing but I’m going off on one in my mind.

A job opportunity

While I was there at the dump watching pickups back up and disgorge themselves of their loads of stuff, I had an idea. It’s not going to go anywhere, but I think it’s a good idea.

What if the dump allowed someone to watch all the stuff get thrown away and they were allowed to just take what they thought they could sell? Perhaps this could be a charity, a lottery or just someone with an eye for what sells on eBay.

They could take what they wanted and then sell or fix or do whatever to it. If they couldn’t sell it they could just bring it back and put it in the dump. It’s not like it wasn’t there already.

When I was a kid one of our neighbors was a trash collector and was one of the guys that hung on to the back of a trash truck and manually dumped the cans in the truck. He actually made a great side living off this exact thing.

This could keep a stuff out of the landfill and also provide an income for people. I’m sure some dorks can think of why this would be bad, but I can’t.

What I did learn was that I really like going to the dump and seeing all the stuff and then seeing all the stuff get smashed by the big tractor. But we all know I’m weird.