Screaming blue drums with openings designed by space aliens!

Out at our place I find that we have to jury-rig things a lot. That is, figure out a way to make stuff work. (Or is it jerry-rig? Or rerry-jig? Depends who you ask, I guess.) Making do makes for a lot of ugly stuff, but maybe that’s the reason homesteaders build their hodge-podge empires way out in the country, so that nobody can look down their noses at you as they cruise by in their expensive Snooty Cars. As for us, we can’t afford most of the stuff we do, so we make do.

Case in point: These lovely electric blue 55-gallon drums. One of them used to hold jalapeno peppers; the other, olive oil. What are we doing with them? Why, whacking their tops off and filling them full of chicken feed, of course!

Chicken feed comes in mouse-friendly woven sacks that weigh as much as a Volkswagen and don’t keep anything out as well as they keep the seed in. That includes not only mice but moisture, mold, and anything else calculated to waste your chicken-feed money. You need something else to keep the feed in, even if it’s ugly.

Viola. (=Joke. It’s a literary friend’s corruption of the French. Voila.)

A local outfit uses these drums for food ingredients, then sells them to local yokels for $5 each. Hey, a bargain! But the openings are two inches wide on  top,  and I have absolutely no idea how to wrench them open. Never seen caps like these; they look like they were designed by space aliens. How to get the drums open? Hmm, how ‘bout power tools?

I sawed the top four inches or so off of both drums last Saturday and left them out in the vague hope that they’d get washed out by the rain. No dice. The vinagery smell has diminished, but rain doesn’t wash out congealed olive oil. My solution? Well, maybe I’ll dump the oil out on the slash pile in the hopes that will help the wet wood ignite. (I’ve been meaining to burn that slash pile for several weeks. I’ll report on my success in this endeavor next week, if I survive.) Then wash out with soap, if the poultry’s water line  ever thaws out. Then reattach the lids with a cheap door hinge, and fill with chicken feed. Note to self: dry barrels out before filling with feed. Oh, and get the barrels into a dry location before filling. That would be splendid: trying to wrestle a screaming blue headless drum weighing 240 lbs. into the shoop. Yippee. I think I’ll try lighting a bonfire with congealed oil first.