Hauling myself out of bed at 6:45, and knowing our street gets real early pickup—I pull on work clothes and head for the kitchen to get the gar-bahjge and recyclables.
No sweat. I stagger about, pre coffee, and haul out the sacks…down the front steps, down the side path, to the side of the house where the cans live.
I pour the recyclables into the bin—oops. Wrong sack. Garbage, eggshells and coffee grounds went into the recyclables bin. The damn recyclables bin is huge. I can’t lift it to pour it into the little regular garbage bin. I tilt it and excavate bare-handed as far as I can reach, pour in the actual recyclables (they insist on no sacks) and put the rest of the garbage in the right can. By now I am all over garbage. I start hauling the monster recyclables bin to the curb…and the sprinkling system cuts on.
I head back after the garbage, and Jane joins the fray, coming onto the porch with a load of cardboard (recyclable) that I missed. I head up to get it, and my contact lens folds, I am all over garbage and can’t deal with it. I take the cardboard and carry it out, and, distracted by the folded contact, I get hit full on in the head by one of the sprinklers as it sweeps.
Dripping wet, I take the little non-cyclable bin to the street, head back up the slope, and by now Jane is out there (neatly avoiding the sprinkler sweeps) loading hollyhock stems into the compostables bin. We go at that. I am now soaking wet, all over coffee grounds, with a folded contact, and well, not my sparkling self. It is, however, approaching funny, and I have slashed my arm on something and am bleeding a stream down my arm, my brand new sandals are wet, and I could be in a better mood if that contact weren’t still squishing around in my eye.
Jane stayed after the compostables, adding more weeds, I headed in to wash off the blood and the coffee grounds, feed the importunate cats, and to fix my contact, which finally wandered back where it belongs—I think—and it’s time to fix breakfast. There’s still the pond filter to wash, but I am changing sandals to the grungy ones and drying out before I attack that.
Welcome to Friday morning at chaos central.
Yikes, that’s kinda a crappy morning. If a start like that, one hopes the rest of the day swans by with grace and serenity!
*giggle* Oh, CJ, I’m very sorry. And, oh boy, have had mornings or evenings like that. The size of the bins doesn’t bother me too much, but doing a dumpster dive in either bin *does*. I avoid it unless absolutely necessary.
Our city garbage pickup has an arcane, Byzantine pickup schedule regarding classes of recyclables. (That’s an insult unworthy to Byzantine culture, by the way.) Pickup is every other week. Regular, Yard Waste, whatever else…and I can never remember what’s when. I’m lucky to remember if it’s the week to put out the bin. — When we had county pickup where I used to live, through Waste Management co., all recyclables were picked up every week, sane and sensible and convenient.
This past week, I had yard work done, and trash pickup had already gone for the week. No problem, just set the lawn and leaf bags over there, and I’ll set ’em out this week. This should’ve been fine. — The city came along and tagged my bags. “We no longer accept ‘petroleum-based’ bags,” and they left the bags, the lot of them. Oh ye gods rot. The bags remain there until I can get approved bags and re-bag all those gods be, rag-eared bags. (And tell the guys who did my yeard, who will surely be as thrilled as I am.)
(My yard is not huge, but these yard men are new, and I, oh, foolish mortal, did not think to say, hey, it’s fine to leave the leaves in the flower beds and let ’em mulch down. So the guys very neatly and obligingly cleared them out, bagged them up, and I have at least twice as many bags to remove. I personally don’t mind grass clippings or leaves contributing to the yard mulch. I figure it’s nature’s way and it’s healthy for the soil. So I’ll need to talk to the guys. But I don’t fault them for my lapse.
So…aarrgh, I have multiple bags sitting on the lawn by the curb, and they will sit there until I get to go out next week, after the next garbage pickup, incidentally.
LOL, it’s always something.
And yeah, nothing like going out to put out the trash, not exactly at one’s shining best, and have a Situation with the garbage.
You know, in Star Wars IV, no one ever explained how Chewbacca and the gang made it through the rest of the movie after being dunked in that garbage disposal chute. Bad enough for humans and clothes. I can’t imagine a Wookiee’s fur would smell very rosy after that. Must’ve been one heckuva shower when he got back aboard the Falcon. Lots and lots of shampoo, ah, yes.
We have ‘single stream’ recycling, which means they take almost everything, from those filmy little grocery bags to paper, cardboard, boxes, bottles, office paper, old phone books, metal, anything so long as it doesn’t have food or other contamination. That means THEY sort it.
We have a monster compost bin, which takes a lot else.
Our actual garbage bin is usually half empty, and is only a third the size of the big bins, as is. Spokane has been very proactive about maintaining its river (reducing phosphate: we have to use special detergent) and being on the edge of waste disposal: we’ve recycled since we got our own trash pickup, back in 2007 (getting out of the apartments); and the region also is installing a lot of wind generation for power as well as having Grand Coulee, etc. So we’re kind of nicely green here. I like it that way.
Except this morning, doing the bin dive.
I don’t mind doing some sorting, but if a plastic bottle won’t come sufficiently clean with 1 pass through the dishwasher, it goes in the regular trash. I am not manually washing peanut butter and mayonnaise jars to make the sorters happy. Plastic bags cannot be recycled, but I reuse what few I get for trash liners and kitty litter duty. They won’t take glass jars, either, so I reuse them. I compost what I can, but tree limbs don’t adequately break down, so into the green waste bin with them. My heirloom tomato is very happy, having been planted where the old compost heap was.
We have windmills on the ridge lines overlooking the central valley here. Now that we have reduced our dependence on imported diesel for the electric generators by 20%, we have a new crop of people who are complaining that the windmills are ugly (de gustibus non est disputandum), and that they can kill birds (I think we’ve had maybe 3 confirmed since the windmills went in). There’s no pleasing some people.
I’ve run my peanut butter jars through the dishwasher, and if they don’t come out clean, they go in the recycle bin. Allied Waste does the pickup, and they usually don’t toss the jars back at me. If he can see the effort, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think it’s necessary to rewash the jar. Now, I don’t know what they do at the recycling center, but it would seem to me that even with all of the so-called “cleaned and/or rinsed” containers, there is still a need to clean them. If they are metal containers, just melting them in the furnace should remove any residue. Allied Waste says we don’t have to remove the labels from the containers, whether they’re metal or plastic, as long as the plastic is “1” or “2”. I don’t understand why manufacturers use plastics that can’t be recycled and end up in a landfill forever. I’m not as picky about recycling as my father, though, he removes the lids and bottoms of cans, washes them out, crushes them, and put them in the container that’s color coded for them. When I got my recycling containers, they didn’t have any color but green, so I can use one container for paper/cardboard one week, and metal/glass/plastic the next week, just so I don’t put paper in the metal/glass/plastic bin. Before I moved into town, we had single-stream service at my farm, so it was a snap, just toss it in, let them handle it. Of course, I was NOT sadistic – I will NOT throw used cat litter into the same bag as the stuff that is considered trash. Some things you just do NOT do to people who are working at the recycling center. After all, they’re providing a service to me, why on earth would I want to be crude to them?
As for windmills, I’m seeing a lot of “No Wind Turbines” signs in my area, they say that they kill birds, yes, I’ve read about that, too, that several times in a month, birds of prey get caught by the blades, probably because they’re chasing a smaller bird and focus on their prey. As for any other argument against them, well, I’m not sure that I buy into the “they cause infertility” or “they make the ground shake” or “they’re ugly”. Countries like Germany, Uruguay (the harbor of Montevideo is ringed with turbines), in fact, any country that can harvest the wind, should be willing to experiment. If we’re going to say that wind turbines are dangerous to wildlife, then every windmill on every farm in the U.S. should have been pulled down years ago, right? Not to mention the ones in the Netherlands…..
As long as they use some sense about where they put them, i.e. not right in the middle of major migratory flight-paths & at flying height for the flocks of geese, the damage to birds seems minimal – a lot less than the damage caused by stronger storms and possible sea-level rise if we don’t switch to carbon-neutral energy.
I rather like the strong vertical lines of modern windmills to balance all the strong horizontal lines in our flat landscape, but I know there are people who hate them for ruining their view.
The one thing that seems to be really bothersome, is if you live near enough for the shadows of the turning blades to sweep over your garden and windows, when the sun is low in the sky. That strobing effect is very unpleasant, and the three windmills closest to our town have to stop working several hours before sunset because their shadows would get long enough to reach across the water to the houses at the edge of town.
Those windmills are there, on the dike along the road close to town, as part of the new subdivision which is called ‘City of the Sun’, to make the new subdivision completely CO2 neutral. All the houses have solar panels on the roof, they’re situated to take best advantage of the sun, and they’re heated with waste heat from the garbage-disposal plant. The three windmills were necessary to complete the remaining part of the CO2-neutral energy-balance for those 2900 households.
OT (much more agreeable 😉 ): Life, i.e. water, around Red Dwarfs. 🙂
http://www.space.com/22069-red-dwarf-stars-habitability.html
Paul,
Check out: http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/
Especially the link at the bottom of the exoplanets section, an exoplanets primer (PDF).
There is an exoplanets encyclopedia, but alas, my URL link to it is on a different computer. (Mind you, there are 10 just within line of sight, another dozen in the other room 😉 , and just this one boots half a dozen different systems!)
NO! Wait! It is right here! http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/
Thank you. I don’t find a key to units or some of the more obscure parameters. Thoughts?
Got the car tags. And the cargo mat: nice black rubber with a 3/4″ raised lip, so what happens on the cargo liner, stays on the cargo liner.
Cargo mats are a Happy, and getting all the papers sorted promptly is too. The dealer is backlogged on getting titles processed, so it may be another month(!) before I get all my paperwork and can get my proper tags. The Shuttlepod got rained on whilst being loaded, and I’m worried about taking cardboard temp tags through the car wash.
Heck, I’d take a screwdriver, bag them, then strip the plastic off after. Best of luck on the papers! Hope your DMV realizes these delays happen!
And congrats on getting it in hand! Got pix?
I take the plastic shopping bags to the local groceries. The large chain stores have bins for recycling them. I also have a crocheted string bag pattern or two that can be made up in heavy cotton yarn. I tend to leave them at home, or the stores refuse to use anything other than their own bags. Those reusable bags the stores sell tend to get filled with assorted projects. I’ve also found times when store A refuses to use Store B’s reusable bag.
My only complaint is the recycle bin gets fairly heavy and can be hard to lift and move. They didn’t curve the handles for female hands like my Rubbermaid Rough Totes are. I take the bin to the curb and then I take the recycling in a laundry basket or other container and dump it in the recycle bin.
For recyclables, I grab one of the multitude of boxes from Costco or work; a paper box sized container is perfect. Over the next week or two, I fill it with newspapers, magazines, plastic containers, and anything else that might need to be recycled. When it gets close to full, I plop the whole thing into the recycling bin. Wash rinse repeat. I have to be wary, however; Zorro likes to investigate the boxes too, and I don’t want to take her out with the papers!
Where I am the stores don’t care where the bags are from; it’s not worth fighting the crowds who bring their own. The market I go to sells fairly anonymous bags, if you don’t already have one. I have one bag I made: about half a yard of sturdy upholstery fabric and a couple of yards of 1-inch poly webbing for the handle. (Also makes decent tote bags.)
Poor CJ. The start of your day was almost like something from Keystone Kops. Hope your day gets better.
I hope after such a ridiculous start to your day things rapidly got better and that your eye is okay after the folding contact.
We also have one stream recycling; it makes things a lot easier. Town pick-up is non-existant here. The next larger town over has pick-up. Everything has to be bagged in special bags that are for sale everywhere. I don’t think it’s much cheaper than our private service. Because they are local they will also come and get refrigerators and such quickly…..and will even pump a septic system on a moment’s notice.
Most of our shopping goes into our own bags. Plastics are used for cat litter. I’ve been looking at our kibble bags. They appear to be made of Tyvek. Lots of potential for projects there.
After living in a very environmentally-conscious city (Santa Monica), I am now in an area where there is no recycling. The South just doesn’t go for that sort of thing. I miss it.
I have to admit, as I was reading the post I was thinking how that would be a wonderful comedic scene for an unfortunate character in a story.
Well this doesn’t happen every day!
Tourists warned after French woman and her dog are attacked by gang of six feral cats
A woman walking her dog in one of France’s most attractive tourist areas was the victim of a ‘nightmare’ attack when a pack of six feral cats dragged her to the ground and mauled her[,] severing an artery.
The 31-year-old victim, who was walking at the edge of a wood in Belfort, in the north-eastern region Franche-Comté, was left traumatised by the attack and suffered bites to her arms and legs along with a gashed artery.
Her dog was also badly hurt in the incident.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/tourists-warned-after-french-woman-and-her-dog-are-attacked-by-gang-of-six-feral-cats-8733229.html
mmm. I’ve been just a little worried about what might happen when Bengal and Savannah genes get into the feral cat population…and remember, he’s a cross from a domestic mama and a feral Bengal papa. We have to watch Shu—he’s going through a phase, and we’re trying to train him otherwise—but we have to watch him with our guests; and he was quite difficult with Lynn when we were staying together at Soonercon. He didn’t want her to pick up anything in our room; territorial as all get-out; and since her luggage was there and she was staying with us, this was rather difficult. He’s protective of our stuff, of Seishi, and of the premises. And he had a sister. Lord knows how she turned out. I hope she came into the hands of someone who understands cats.
You don’t think the media was playing it up a bit for the drama?
Congratulations on the beautiful new car!
Have I mentioned mornings are Bad? Kind of like crossing the streams.
I’ve seen that kind of behavior from Siamese cats–not sorting trash (cats are too smart for that) but territoriality. I saw one Siamese cat decisively rout a full grown German shepherd. I suppose the battle would have been more even if it were a Siamese sheep.
Our outside terrors tease the next door dog something awful. I’ve heard Zephyr (the dog) howling and barking to raise the dead, and Smartypants and Little Brother trotting nonchalantly away from the fence line. “Our work here is done.” Froofy, OTOH, shows her appreciation for breakfast by nibbling my toes. Cats iz weird. 🙂
@Chondrite…I hope all the paperwork gets sorted…..the down side of a new vehicle.
I swear Aloysius has Bengal in him. He’s a lean tiger but his behavior is much of what is described as Bengal. I should do a post about it. I had Siamese cats that had my 90lb half Irish Wolfhound so intimidated that he would not eat in the kitchen with them.
i so wish the atlanta area would do better at recycling, you get a list of “oh no, NOT THAT!” and “NO NOT THIS” with your recycling bins!!! 5 yrs ago i had to go to germany and clean out my mother-in-law’s place after she passed away, their trash/recycling system really impressed me – 4 separate bins – paper, plastic, glass, metal, other – made recycling actually easier than what i deal with here in atlanta as there weren’t the restrictions. the plastic grocery bags – i generally manage to forget my stash of reusable bags either at home or in the back of the car – have to be kept separate and taken to a grocery store to recycle, paper towels aren’t supposed to be recycled [well if i only dried my hands on them or wiped up water with them, what’s the issue?]. our current trash company is also early picking up the recycling so we have to put that out the night before.
i used to wear contacts before the days of multifocal lenses in my life, i empathize completely about the mis-behaving contact! ugh! i hope the rest of your day improved!