| D. and I believe in recycling. Not as the all encompassing solution to this country's resource and energy problems, but as Something Good People Should Do Instead Of Throwing All That Stuff In The Trash. We get a lot of junk mail and grocery store flyers, and then there are all the empty wine bottles and assorted plastic containers that food comes in. I make a special effort to wash these containers and put them in the box in the kitchen from which they are transferred to the official box on the porch once the kitchen box gets full.
Problem: We don't know when recycling pickup day is. As a direct result of this problem, the official porch box is full, the kitchen box is full, and I have stuffed something like three bags of paper and one bag of containers in the sun porch because I didn't want my mother to see our recycling shame when she was here last weekend. I used to think recycling pickup day was Thursday, same as trash day. I was relieved of this notion several months ago when lo and behold, the recycling didn't vanish on Thursday. It did, however, vanish on Friday. But I never hear or see a recycling truck on Fridays, and sometimes (not yet with any discernable pattern) I see my neighbors' empty recycling boxes on hm, Thursday afternoon. I'm starting to suspect it's something like the third Thursday and first Friday of the month. All in all, we've only managed to get the recycling picked up about twice since we've been here.
The current recycling shame is not, however, as bad as the pre-Christmas recycling shame. Before Christmas, I don't think we achieved ANY recycling pickups, and as a result we had something like 11 bags of papers, 7 bags of containers, and 6 giant kitty litter boxes stuffed in the corner of our kitchen (the sun porch idea had not yet struck me). After we finally caved and drove it all to the recycling center, we were amazed by how large our kitchen actually is.
I'm sure I could just call the garbage department or someone and get them to tell me the schedule, but now it's become something like a challenge. Will I fail to solve the pattern and let the recycling once again smother our kitchen? Or will I emerge triumphant with our paper products vanishing on a regular schedule? I'll keep you posted. |
