Threw out about three and a half yards of construction trash yesterday. Threw out my right elbow too. Well, not so much threw it out as overextended it while hurling a forty pound sack of cement board and plastic tile fragments into an industrial-sized dumpster.
There’s a lovely dark bruise developing on either side of the elbow joint. It’s the nice painful bruise you get from a sprain, and it’s kind of interesting to see it bubbling up from the inside out. I got it on Saturday, either when I was loading up the truck with the waste from the bathroom, or when I was unloading it at the Recycle Center.
Almost all the crap that I’ve torn down over the last few weeks was sitting in heavy duty contractor garbage bags in the garage. After making sure that my Fiancee’s truck would handle the load, it took me about an hour to load it all up. Unloading was a lot faster. We just pulled up to the booth, chatted with the lady inside, and paid about $40. She directed us to Bin #2, where a little forklift was zipping around packing things down.
Watching the forklift operator was the best part of the trip. He was moving around as if the machine was a four-wheeled extension of his legs and the two-pronged lift was nothing but a pair of chopsticks in his hand. He would roll forward and back, rocking the lift and pointing the forks down into the bin. It made the whole thing hop up and down, breaking up big chunks of debris into little fragments and packing them down with the wheels. Once he was done with Bin #2, he rolled over to Bin #3 where he deftly wielded the forks, disassembling a sleeper sofa into base components. In a matter of two or three minutes, he’d sorted the mattress, springs and frame into separate bins. It was amazingly impressive. My fiancee asked him where he’d learned to drive. He said he’d been playing around with these things since he was six years old, and that the forklift was the best part of the job.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about the sort of things I did back when I was six. LEGOs figure prominently in my memories, and I know I was a ferociously precocious reader. Things are rather vague I’m afraid. Some of my fuzzy memory I blame on a nasty case of heatstroke I had, but mostly it’s just that I never did anything as interesting as forklift driving.