The Dreaded Letter

I knew it was bound to happen soon – the dreaded letter in the mail.  The one from the city.  I knew it was coming.  I just had a feeling.  We sold that truck last week which left a trailer full of junk in full view of everyone.  Before, it was somewhat hidden but ever since the truck has been gone, I would pull in the driveway and wonder if I would get a chance to clean it up before someone complained.  Nope, I didn’t.  Someone called and I got the letter today.

The list in the letter is somewhat extensive because they don’t stop at the trailer full of junk and I’m quite frustrated now.  The top item was branches. I have ridiculous amounts of branches around my yard and it’s very hard to get rid of them in my city.  The next was the junk.  One of the kids would take stuff to the metal yard to make a little money which is what was all in the trailer, but they never took it and now I have this list of things that I need to take care of.  I put a lot of it in front of the house today and a guy picked most of it right away like I figured someone would.  People drive around here all the time looking for metal.

Last summer, we put up one of those 3 foot high pools that you can buy at Target or Walmart.  Not a real big pool – I think it’s like 3 feet high and 12 feet across.  Anyways, they said we need to have a permit for it.  I’ve never heard of anyone getting a permit for one those before, ever.  We have 10 days to get the permit.

The truck was listed as one of the things to get removed but I’m not sure if they came before I sold the broken one that I got rid of just a couple days ago, or if they are referring to the one that we’ve been trying to get registered for the last few months that just won’t pass the emission test.

The truck and the branches are both huge stressors – they say that we can’t burn branches and we can’t throw them away.  We can take them to the city dump but we have to pay to get in and they have to be all cut up into small pieces and can’t be too wide or long or anything else.  It takes hours to cut up the branches from a small bush which is why I still have so many.  There’s just not enough hours in the day to do that!

I’ve already put hundreds of dollars into my truck to get it fixed.  The people at the test station say that it should be driven around for a hundred miles and then retested again.  I was trying to drive it around but was stopped by the police who told me that the test people would never say that and it can’t be on the street and they would impound it if they stopped me again.  I’m more than willing to take care of this stuff but why do they have to make it nearly impossible???

Last thing in the letter, but not least, the trim on my house needs to be painted.  I did it a few years ago and was planning on doing it again this summer because it just started peeling in the fall.  Now, I have sixty days to get it done.  It hasn’t even been warm enough here for me to paint yet and in the next sixty days, I have the busiest schedule ever.  I have my daughter’s bridal shower, her wedding, two trips, a lot of work at work, a horse camp, horseless horse meetings, horse board meetings, I need to find a vehicle or get the truck to pass the emission test, all among a myriad of other things.  I can’t believe I have to deal with all this now too.

We’ll be outside working on it all weekend and hopefully we can get enough done. I’m worried that we’re just not going to have time to finish it all.