Hazardous Waits

Saturday, June 9^th, is a day I’ve spent months waiting for.  No, it’s not a holiday, birthday, or anniversary (although my sister’s wedding anniversary was a few days ago and, like I do every single year, I completely forgot it). 

It’s Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day here in Lake County.  Yes, on this most special of days, we all get to pile up our cars with our old household cleaners, paints, thinners, and almost anything else that might set our City of Willowick trash bins on fire. We then drive out to the Lake County Fairgrounds where we get to blow it all up.

Well, okay, that’s not true…they just take it out of our cars and do something important with it while we drive away.  (Blowing it up would have been cooler, though, so I just thought I’d throw that in there.)

Now, you might be thinking, “How pathetic are you, Brenda, that you’re looking forward to something this incredibly mundane?” Or you might be thinking that I have a special fondness for chemicals (in which case, I’m not sure I’d know how to take that!)

Truth is, I hate chemistry.  Hated it, hate it, will always and forever hate it.

No, I’m not talking about some Match.com relationship chemistry silliness – I mean actual chemistry, like the kind we all had to suffer through in high school where you had to partner with some dweeb in the science lab who couldn’t even manage to turn on the Bunsen burner.  Well, I was that dweeb.  I didn’t like fire, I didn’t like stinky stuff in test tubes that could explode if I mixed it with other stinky stuff, and I sure didn’t like my 11^th grade chemistry teacher, Mr. Hewitt.  He was a sweet old man with glasses who always called on me when he knew I wasn’t paying attention (which wasn’t hard, because that was about 100% of the time). I preferred to spend my time in science class staring out the window or writing fan fiction about my friends (I think the story I wrote about my pal Wendy and Paul McCartney was the most impressive thing I ever created in 7^th period). I spent an entire school year thanking these same friends for always shoving their text books in front of me, frantically pointing at the paragraph Mr. H. expected me to read aloud when he’d say, “Brenda, can you read the next section?” and I’d look up not knowing where in the hell I even was.  I had one brainiac friend who even used to scribble the answers to equations in the margins so I could rattle them off and fool everybody into thinking I actually gave a damn.

I would like to point out that I didn’t suck at chemistry because I was stupid; rather, my suckiness was one part boredom, one part terror.  Not only was I convinced I would one day fall asleep in the middle of an experiment, I was equally certain I would die during that sleep, expiring in a fiery blaze that would decimate Eastlake North High.

Having established that I bombed at chemistry in high school (no pun intended), I did my best to avoid it throughout my entire adult life. I would grudgingly wear lipstick when somebody would point out my deviant behavior with a kind, “Geez, Meskunas, why don’t you ever wear make-up?” (I never knew quite how to take that, but whichever way I picked, it wasn’t good).  But I’m sorry - slathering my face with the flesh-colored paint that came in the Clinique bottle repulsed me. As for house stuff … well, that was easy. I spent most of my gypsy years living in apartments, so having a gas grill was a big no-no anyway (and propane was scary – were I to ever buy a grill, I was positive the first tank would explode in my car on the way home).  As for household chemicals, I owned a bottle of Palmolive, a bottle of Tide, a bottle of Windex and a can of Comet.  That’s it.  Heck, I never even painted a room because that involved … well, paint.  Cans of it.  Paint is flammable. It could spontaneously explode within the can and somehow kill me. 

(No wonder people died young in the 1800s when they were unwashed, uneducated and relying on open flames. I’m convinced I probably caused the Great Chicago Fire in a past life when I was wearing a long skirt and couldn’t figure out how to turn on a gas light).

Anyway … when I moved into the house, I discovered  - to my great horror, I’m sure you can imagine – that Dad (who left this earth in 2010) loved to buy anything flammable, use half the container and then store the rest on a shelf in the garage, under the kitchen sink, in the bathroom or in the hallway closet. (I should add that I also found a couple bottles of Canadian whiskey stashed behind his bed.  Liquor is also flammable but, for some reason, I didn’t find it scary and disposed of it with no trouble at all.)

So here’s the current inventory list:

Garage: Two bottles of ancient WD-40, an unmarked coffee can with something dark and smelly caked at the bottom, a gas can with an inch of gas, two paint cans (one full), a bottle of turpentine and a tube of caked white crap that I think used to be caulk (or something that was used to wrap mummies during the reign of the last pharaoh, not sure).

Bathroom closet, bottom shelf: one bottle of Fantastik, a bottle of Spic-and-Span (circa 1975), a bag of old make-up (okay, that was my contribution to the chaos), toilet bowl cleaner,a bottle of Lysol, two cans of Comet, a scary looking toilet bowl plunger, a box of fossilized Brillo pads, a yellow liquid resembling pee in a mystery spray-bottle and no fewer than four bottles of Drano (someday, when I share my family plumbing horror stories with you, you’ll understand why this wasn’t nearly enough).

Hallway closet: Four vacuum cleaner bags for vacuum cleaners we no longer have, two bottles of Lysol, a box of rock solid oil paints from paint-by-numbers my mother started but never finished, a bag full of yarn, two cans of Pledge, a can of RAID, a bottle of black shoe polish and a silver spray can with a label missing … so I have no clue what the hell is in there. 

Beneath the kitchen sink: Yet another box of fossilized Brillo pads (I think these were from the Pleistocene epoch), two bottles and three spray-cans of yet more Lysol, a bottle of Windex, a jar of grease, a jar of fat, a jar of greasy fat,  a moldy potato (please don’t ask), a soiled, tattered dish towel and some scary, crawly looking dead thing that could have once been a spider, a centipede or an old fake eyelash belonging to my sister back in 1969.

This Saturday (after I hug my cat and finish my will), I will drive to Painesville with my treasures and take as much care driving over train tracks as my ancestors did driving rickety wagons packed with nitro-glycerin. And maybe, on my way home, I’ll stop at the store and purchase some lemon juice, baking soda and vinegar; there are plenty of recipes on the Internet for making non-toxic cleaners using ingredients I remotely understand.  It’s difficult enough for me to find the motivation to scrub things …  sticking my hands into poison that will someday sit on a shelf and contaminate my world is not reason enough for me to get off the couch and turn off “Hell’s Kitchen.”

If you live in Lake County, you can drive your goodies out to the Lake County Fairgrounds, Route 20, Painesville Township on Saturday, June 9. 2012, from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m (rain or shine). For more information, see www.lakecountyohio.gov and click on "Solid Waste District."