Fairgrounds Events

Saturday, March 15, 2014

After the Run for the Law, I moved on to the Fairgrounds, which had been calling me for some time, with litter in the hedges behind the front fence.  There were two events happening on the 15^th: a music trading event, and a late afternoon wine tasting, First Crush. 

It was a good day for cleaning the front end of the Fairgrounds.  But not for cleaning the area between the fence and the neighbor’s retaining wall to the west; there’s too much big trash there, and I ran out of ODOT litter bags at Run for the Law.

I first parked and set up my sign in the front of the parking lot right in front of the Floral and Pepsi buildings, and started by picking up the parking lot.  When I was done there, I moved my truck to the other side of the entrance, for better visibility and to be closer to my work in the front hedges. 

I started with the plastic zip ties on the west side of the gate.  It seems that, when some people take down their signs, they just drop the ties.  After the music swap ended and they took down their signs, I found more.  Someone had left rusty wire still attached to the fence east of the gate, presumably from hanging a sign.

I was also finding the occasional string tied to the fence.  When I took one out of a tree with a soft balloon still attached, I understood where they came from. 

I worked the hedge east of the gate, all the way around to the gate, back of the office.  There was a bunch of wild lettuce back there that was starting to bolt; it may well be blooming by now.  It had quite a lot of trash back there, too.

The rest of the afternoon I spent mostly working the west parking lot and the hedges beside it, moving from one to the other as people arrived for First Crush.  I got a nailed-together contraption of 3 treated 2 x 4s that had been teasing me from the front side of the fence, dumped between the fence and the hedge, truly the most remarkable trash of the afternoon.

Early in the afternoon, before the event, I needed to use the bathroom and asked the person setting up in the Pepsi building if I could use theirs; no problem.   Later, after it started, I went looking for a bathroom elsewhere, not wanting to intrude.  The one back of the floral building was blocked by bird guano and locked.  I bypassed the admitting line at the entrance to the Pepsi building and asked the people working if I could use the bathroom.  Sure.  It seems that a Litter Cleaner tunic can open doors, or at least bathrooms.