Garbage Garbage Garbage....

(Seeger what I did there?)

I don't know how garbage cans became the touchstones of the past couple of days, but they did.

Night before last, a cat woke me up around 3 and I never really got back to sleep after that. I had only one appointment in the late afternoon, so I resolved to tackle a big home problem before it got any bigger:



That can, and screen, have been our solution to a problem from the past couple of summers. We've had a birdfeeder just outside our front window for years, but for whatever reason last summer and the one before, the leftovers that the birds and (mostly) squirrels tossed to the ground had been attracting little Rat Motels underneath them. Both summers, we just put the feeder away and did as much as we could to clear the ground and flush out the rodents.  This time round, we're taking a different approach: I picked up a kiddie pool at Tarjay, which now sits under the feeder and catches almost all of the falling seed. Then, it's a quick drag over to the can in the front of the garage to empty the leavings behind metal where the varmints can't get at it.

But what if it rains?, I hear you wonder, as I did first time it did. That's where the surplus window screen comes in; the water pours through it, the screen catches the seed, and it's off to the can.

The original idea was that we'd move the contents to our composter once the seeds sprouted and were no longer of interest to passing tourists. Problem was, the new seed kept going in every day faster than the stuff on the bottom was, shall we say, fermenting. So yesterday morning, we hauled the can into the back of Eleanor's car, Pepper called shotgun, and I took it to the Amherst composting facility on the northeast edge of town.  I did something similar with sod last summer, and Pepper also joined me for that, because a smaller dog park sits right next to it.

This time, I think she enjoyed the compost trip more; she stayed in the nice air-conditioned car while Daddy shoveled the seed out of the can, and the nice people at check-in insisted on giving her a treat. The rest was, well, no other dogs and not much park, and she seemed to be jonesing for the exit before long. 

I loaded the can back in its spot and did notice that the remaining traces on the bottom were, indeed, pretty aromatic.  We tried to come up with brand names for the wine, beer or whatever was being manufactured in there:

Pigeon noir blanc.

Blue Jay Nun.

Birdweiser.

Seagull's Seven.

Alas, we may never find out; we're taking it out of commission again, this time because of this nasty bird disease that's been spotted close to a hundred miles from here in Pennsylvania.

----

After that early-day dropoff, we got something dropped off for us around 12 hours later. As we were finishing Pina, I noticed an Amazon truck pulling over out front, and it turned out to be a package for Eleanor. Not a peep from the dog. Five minutes later, Pepper started ballistic barking. I dunno, maybe the delivery guy farted and it took that long to waft in.

Moments after that, Eleanor was brimming with happiness over the just-arrived blades for her new power tool. Me: “Well, they don’t deliver the new phone books anymore, so this must be as good as it gets.”



(The movie ended well, as did the finale of Kominsky Method, which we finally got to earlier tonight. No jumping for joy about them, though;)

----

Sleep came better last night, but I was still up by 7, ready to tackle another wall of fun in the bathroom. Today's result:



Me: All in all, it's just a-nother strip of a Wall

A friend posted the Dark Side of the Moon cover in response to that, and I replied: the stripped tile WAS Pink. Floyd must be buried in the rubble.

And said rubble was presenting similar issues for us. We've been tossing the pink tile in our regular garbage tote, along with an auxiliary Rubbermaid Brute can so the tote doesn't get so heavy God Himself can't lift it.  We tested this philosophical conundrum right around 7 this morning when we heard the garbage truck going by, without us having hauled anything out.

There were reasons for this. Thursday has been Garbage Day here for as long as we've lived here, through first the town and then two private companies doing the hauling. But on the Big Six national holidays- the start and end of summer, the Fourth, and then Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's- it's delayed a day.

Except when one of them actually falls on a Sunday and the whole world takes the next Monday off. The whole world except the trash crew. That tote not only had a heavy load of tile in it, but some particularly gamey rotisserie chicken leavings and the usual week's supply of poop.  I madly ran the tote across the street to the side that hadn't been picked up yet. We then grumbled when it looked like they'd thumbed their stinky noses at us and not picked it up. I walked the dog, went over to drag the full load back to our garage, and discovered they had emptied it.

That made us almost as happy as the new phone books used to.