Lilacs

Evey time I use the gate that goes from my back yard to the front, next to the garage, I walk by a couple of the ugliest, dirtiest pallets you'd ever want to see.  They have been leaning against the side of my house for the last few weeks, ever since I finished destroying my already broken and severely abused back unloading the sod that filled them when it was delivered almost to where it was needed.

Forklifts are way too big - they don't go through the average gate.  Why is that?  Poor pallet design is my guess.  They make the things much bigger than they need to be, so the forklifts need to be too big.  And, I'm guessing that has something to do with the standard width of the lanes on all our roads and the cost of labor.  I know, sounds pretty crazy, but think about it for a while.

These days semi trailers are allowed by our good ol' Dept. of Transportation to be 102 inches wide so they can comfortably fit in a lane on the highway.  That means a smart guy can build walls and a roof on top of the thing and wind up with an interior width of 96 inches.  Most pallets are 48X40 inches, and that means it's real easy to load a truck with a forklift or pallet jack by alternating the 40 inch side and 48 inch side. 

This arrangement of pallets is 88 inches in width, which leaves a gap of two inches between each of the pallets and between them and the walls of the trailer, a total of six inches of gap.  A gap this size allows a good fork lift driver to go flat out fast while he's loading the trailer, and still makes use of most of the available space.

If you followed all that, you now know why forklifts don't fit through my gate, and it's not my fault at all.  Why is it I'm the guy who gets to chew through a whole bottle of Ibuprofen every time I need anything at all in my back yard?  If I make my gate bigger, it'll sag.  I'm tellin' ya, the whole world's screwed up,  and this is just one example of that fact.  Lord knows a guy can't win these days.

I know how to fix it, but it'll take a ton of paint to remark all the lanes in the country, and then, of course, we'll have to redesign all the cars, trucks, forklifts and pallets to fit my gate.  No politician will ever agree with my solution - it'll create too many jobs, and the smaller vehicles will be more economical to drive.  Can't have that these days...guess I'll just have to keep carrying stuff around from the front driveway, where it gets delivered, to the back, where it's needed. 

Anyway, besides having to unload those suckers all by myself, I also had to pay a ten dollar "Pallet Deposit" on a bunch of boards that had seen their best days sometime during disco's reign.  Them and John Travolta.  Well, two pallets at ten dollars apiece can not be taken lightly, so instead of toting them over to my neighbor's fire pit where, after a hard life, they could be given a decent funeral, I leaned them against my garage.  And, I had to look at them each time I passed that way.

It was a pleasant 74 degrees today, so Carolyn and I sat out on our deck for awhile.  It's nice to do that every now and again, so we can often be found out there in the mornings.  It's warmed considerably the last several weeks and plants are starting to show their appreciation of the springlike weather.  They're starting to bloom in a major way.

There was a slight breeze from the East this morning, normally it is from the West.  These two things, blooming and breezing, occurring simultaneously, made Carolyn comment on the lilac bushes in our neighbors yard.  "I love the smell of those lilac bushes this time of year",  she said.  " It reminds me of our first place.  You remember, the one with all the flowerbeds?"

I remembered.  And, what's more, I remembered the pallets that needed to be returned.  And I remembered seeing about a billion lilacs at the nursery where the pallets lived.

"How would you like to have a couple of lilacs again?  We can take the pallets back and pick up a couple of bushes." I asked her.

So we went.  And now, after I dug some holes, she can smell OUR lilacs, which are in full bloom, anytime she ventures, with my help, into our backyard. 

How's that thing about two birds and stones go?