Trash talk and dead bodies.

I don't want to keep dwelling on things that are different in this alternate universe to which I have moved. But I will. The thing is, it's just close enough to the old life I had that it throws me off. 

Take the trash pickup. Longtime readers of this blog -- all good-looking and tasteful, with powerful intellects and enormous patience -- will recall that in New York, I complained a lot about the free-for-all that was our trash situation. People put everything short of dead humans out for pickup, and maybe they disguised a few of those. You could use any ol' trash receptacle you had handy. And the garbagemen came by on Tuesdays and Fridays, with a "recycling" pickup on Wednesday.

Here, the trash pickup is one day a week: Monday, You don't dare miss it because they won't be back. So people have their stuff out Sunday night, although I haven't seen a pickup here before noon Monday. It's one of those towns where you get two large trash cans when you move in, one for garbage and one for recycling garbage, and everything has to fit inside. The truck comes by and picks up the can and dumps it into the hopper. Another truck comes by later and gets the other can. It cuts manpower by two thirds, and it keeps people from trying to leave a sofa or a piano for pickup. 

Well, they wouldn't try it twice. 

My main problem is that I don't know what the hell day it is. I had tuesday-wednesday-friday tattooed on my consciousness. When a holiday would bump the week forward a day, that was bad enough. Here, around Wednesday I do not know immediately what day it is, because the trashman would not be back for days. I'm a rudderless boat on the sea of time now. 

And I'm scared of my sink.

This is the first time in my life I've lived somewhere with a garbage disposal. The InSinkErator came with the place. I am glad to be able to get rid of most food garbage instantly -- so I'm not stuck with it until next Monday! -- but man, it's scary and loud. 

All I ever heard of these things were what happened when you let utensils fall into them and what HORRIBLE things happened to YOU when you tried to get them out. 

Stone cold killer

I mean, the way this thing goes through a head of celery or a chunk of beef has to give you pause. I could easily see Steve Buscemi's leg sticking out of the sink in a remake of Fargo. 

Wish me luck with the InSinkErator, and that I do not forget what day of the week it is when Monday arrives. Last week the truck dude failed to completely empty my garbage can and it's got some bad juju going on right now. If I miss him tomorrow, I'm going to have to shove all the garbage into the disposal. And I think that may work no better than trying to get Steve Buscemi in there.  

The spice must go!

Okay, I went with the Dune reference for the title, but I had to choose between that and several others: 

On the rack

In a Pickle

Herbs and a-whey

A Change of Seasons

Spicemaggedon

And several others. I'm sure you'll have other ideas. 

What finally made me settle on the title above is that I realized that the guy whose famous series was about a substance that made faster-than-light travel possible, a substance called Spice, was named Frank HERBert. So there. 

Sorry, I'm crazed from lack of sleep. 

 

We have a moving truck booked, and if you've ever hired house movers, you know they won't take food. Especially stuff in open containers. Why should they? Who wants to deal with that?

If we were moving locally I could bring all the open herb and spice jars and condiment bottles to the new place in the car, but we are moving hundreds of miles away, and between humans and large dog there isn't going to be a whole lot of room. Plus, while we can get to the area in less than 12 hours, the movers may take three to seven days. Even with all our crap, we can't fill up the truck ourselves. So we need suitcases and a hotel room. 

So no, no room for spices. Ironically, the thing that makes travel to the stars possible in Dune cannot travel at all here. 

And no one wants your old, open spice and pickle jars. I had a small handful that had not yet been opened, which I will donate with canned soup and the like. But the rest? Down the toilet, down the drain, or just into the trash. 

I just finished the job and I have an incredible mound of plastic and glass for recycling day on Wednesday. I also have a garbage can that smells like an amazing antipasto. 

Now the goal is not to cook anything between now and next week that will be bland because I had to do the purge. Needs coriander? Sorry, that's down the sink. A bit of rosemary? Headed for the landfill. Onion powder? Pardon the oniony scent in the loo. Hundreds of dollars' worth of flavors, gone. 

Can't be helped, I guess. I've already had to part with so much -- sentimental items, books a-plenty, money like there's no tomorrow -- so what's a recently opened jar of dried bay leaves compared to that? 

On the bright side, some of those seasonings looked a little too seasoned. I think my bottle of dried savory had a Durkee label from two or three iterations ago. Never had a lot of call for savory .. . .

Live white man's clothes.

Over the weekend I completed a chore I've been dreading for years. 

When preparing to move, it's important to identify the things that should not move with you, to cut down on the waste of lugging things that you didn't use and won't use. That meant, among other things, trying on every single article of my clothing, discarding the worn-out ones, and donating the ones that don't fit anymore.  

It's time.

I've done some weeding before, but this is the first wholesale clearance I've done in twenty-plus years. So you know a LOT of things have been hanging around, waiting for me to lose those excess pounds I put on over Christmas/New Year's/Easter/the Giants winning Super Bowl XLII. And it's time to say, well, if I ever accomplish the weight loss, I can buy some new duds. 

Meanwhile, I had to try on everything. 

The upshot: two lawn bags full of trash, for starters. Old painting clothes, beloved tees with holes, socks and sweatpants with weak elastic, suspect underwear. Out out out. Then: FOUR lawn bags with clothes in good shape that either don't fit at all or just make me look like a potato. That's a pretty good load that won't make the moving truck. 

For the first time in decades I can wear every article of clothing that I own.

The trash men got the garbage and the good stuff was broken down into smaller bags and dropped off at the church clothing collection box. 

Now, about that: I understand that so-called "fast fashion" is polluting the Third World:

Dead White Man's Clothes: It’s the dirty secret behind the world’s fashion addiction. Many of the clothes we donate to charity end up dumped in landfill, creating an environmental catastrophe on the other side of the world.

In short, 15 million garments show up in Ghana a week; no one will wear most of them again, and it's all turned into a tremendous landfill. And that's just one African country. Our donations are also said to have collapsed the local clothing industry.

It's depressing, and I have plenty of reason to accept the Australian Broadcasting Company's report. However, I have to ask: If the clothing collection boxes we see everywhere are just essentially collecting garbage, why is there money in it? Who's paying for them? Most of them are not for local thrift stores or charity drives. When you see them in a parking lot, that means someone is paying rent for those boxes to be there. Who's spending money to collect clothing no one wants?

There's more to all this than I know. 

But in my personal defense, I am not a buyer of fast fashion. I have very little fashion sense of any kind. If I have a shirt that is not obviously stained or ripped and is comfortable, I will wear it until it becomes embarrassing. 

Unless I get too fat for it. 

What I'm saying is that I get quality clothing, not stuff meant to be worn once and discarded. So I have reason to hope that the things I've donated will find a better user along the line. There's still a lot of life in that suit I had to give up. 

Or maybe that suit will be picked up by a funeral home. The jacket will be split up the back for ease of use and put on suitless corpse so he looks nice at the wake. And then my good suit will be interned, not in a landfill, but a human landfill -- the cemetery. 

And who knows? When the final trump is blown and the dead emerge from their tombs, there will be one guy who looks at himself in his resurrected body and say, "Hey, this suit isn't mine! But -- it looks fabulous!"

And: "Why'd they have to slice up the back?"

You’d better watch out!

We had a very dry and pleasant and even warm autumn to this point, so now we're getting it in the shorts. First there were wildfires, which I have never seen in the lower tier of New York State. They followed on the heels of drought warnings as day follows the night. Containing those bastard fires was extremely tough for our local firemen, and a big salute goes out to them. 

When it rained all day yesterday, it was a big relief. People always say "We needed the rain," but we really needed it this year. It usually rains here a lot, especially in November, which is normally a big gray wet smear of a month. And this is why we almost never have to deal with wildfires. 

Prior to the rain, a lot of the locals started to get their Christmas decorations out. I just can't do it before Thanksgiving, but I didn't fault them for taking advantage of the clement weather. I too have hung ribbons and lights in cold so miserable I could barely feel the fingers that were doing the work. But I just couldn't focus on doing the job this soon.  

Note that for some folks, the beginning of
Yuletide does not mean the end of 
Gloattide. 

I know when I drag the decorations out of the cellar, I will get that powerful feeling that I had just put them away. It happens annually, and the feeling is stronger each year, because of the ol' toilet paper situation, that life -- like a roll of TP -- goes faster the further along you are. 

And alas! I probably should have put my porch lights up already as well, because as I write this at 3:30 in the morning on Friday, it is snowing like (to use the technical, meteorological term) bejeezus out there. The dog sensed that this would be a bad time to have to go out to pee in the yard, so he woke up at three and started whining. And here we are. 

Compounding this, it's garbage day! Which means I don't know if I should take the can up to the street or not, as the trashmen will have to avoid the plows. The plow might even nail my Rubbermaid, which sounds vaguely pornographic. So now I don't even know what I'm doing. 

Jupiter pluvius, I guess, but sometimes his schedule is very inconvenient for me. 

What's cooking?

I was nuking up some leftover Chinese food for dinner the other night. I was minding my own business, getting the table set, as the microwave oven hummed and my chosen meal spun on the turntable. 

Suddenly it stopped, and there was the sound of a crunch.

Did the door come ajar? This unit is well over a decade old, and the door doesn't have a programmed lock; opening it on purpose or by accident will pause the cooking. 

No, the readout was blank. Huh?

Well, try, try again, right? So I started it going, and the crackle came out louder, and smoke began to spew from beneath the machine. 

This, as we say in the trades, is not good. 

The machine stopped on its own again, but the smoke continued, so I carefully reached for the plug. All I could think of was that warning video I'd posted a couple of years ago about the hideous dangers of the electrical components of microwave ovens. Fortunately, I was (spoiler alert!) not electrocuted, or even mildly shocked. 

I removed the still-cold food from the interior and turned the machine on its back so that if there was an actual fire going I could find the source. But no, whatever was burning had ceased. The bottom plate was warm to the touch, but it would have been that way just from the cooking. 

Whatever else this appliance was, it was dead. Really most sincerely dead. Dead as an armadillo run over by nine wheels of an 18-wheeler dead. 

I've had microwaves die on me before, but usually they just refuse to start -- they don't start heaving smoke. I was sorry to see it go. I wound up heating my dinner in a pot on the stove, like some kinda hobo. "King of the roaaaad!" I wanted to sing. 

Unlike most kids today, I did not grow up with a microwave oven. My dad loved science fiction but did not trust microwaves. I'm not sure if that was ironic or logical. So my mom couldn't get one until Dad had passed on. At least the microwaves didn't kill him. 

We got a new one within a couple of days. It's the same brand and it works just fine. It's supposed to air-fry too, and if it actually does that well, it will be the first air-fryer I've used that did. But it's not the same. The old one -- carted away the next morning by the garbage men -- was actually big enough to fit an entire lasagna pan. A full-size Corningware lasagna pan. You don't see that everywhere. The new one? Maybe a quart casserole. 

 

Well, that's the way the water boils. At least the new one works. No more cookin' over a campfire and fightin' with the other bindlestiffs over my beans. This is the twenty-first century, you know. 

A toilet tale.

Few things in the ordinary course of home life will catch your attention as sharply as an overflowing toilet. 

It happens a lot, and more so now that our toilets flush with low amounts of water. The newer low-flow cans are better than the first generation, but there's still not a lot of oomph there. On the other hand, if the clog is a real banger, there's that much less water to go spilling out all over the floor. 

I had a pretty good clog the other day. I won't bother you with details except to say that neither of my first two tricks worked. Those are:

#1: Leave the toilet and hope it resolves itself. Sometimes it does. If you have a second toilet you can use, sometimes it pays to let the water do its magic. When you return, the bowl is almost empty, and most likely the clog has moved along.

#2: Try to use the plunger for one good shot. Nine times out of ten, one nudge with a good plunger is all it takes. 

No, my can chose option #3: Start spilling water all over the place. 

I did get it cleared up, fortunately, although it required a load of towels to be washed with Lysol Laundry Sanitizer and the floor to be sanitized as well, just in case. No damage was done to the ceiling below, so I have to consider it a success. 

But that's a small problem. There are larger problems afoot. 

A couple of months ago, the town sent out an alert about our collective garbage use. When the town makes a contract with a private collection firm, it estimates regular household use to come to a certain quantity per household--no more than four big cans' worth a week. That's a huge amount for the average home. However, I can't help but notice that some houses nearby, including one right across the street, put an awful lot more than that out quite often. Which is why we got the alert: Our overall garbage disposing has gone over the upper limit of our contract. 

If you live in America and you are not blinkered, you know why: Houses in residential areas, even here in the exurbs, are being rented out and stuffed with grown-ups who come from distant lands without following expected protocols. 

When the houses were built in our development, we had to sign a covenant that said we would not rent it out. Well, that was nice while it lasted. The former neighbor who sold his house told me he had no idea it was going to be used this way. An old expression about one being born every minute comes to mind. Well, he doesn't have to live near it.  

But it all brings us back to plumbing. A friend of mine who would know says that while the town (supposedly) figures our the growing population for water and sewer needs, it still only calculates based on two or three adults and maybe as many as four children per household. When you have eight or more adults under a roof, repeated in house after house, there's going to be a shock to the system. We're not there yet, but if current trends continue, we may be in for a surprise one day. We may flush that toilet and the sewer may say, "Your flush is important to us. We are experiencing higher than normal flush volume right now. Please enjoy this backed up sewage while you wait." 

This is what we can expect in a country where our "leaders" think it's a great idea to let millions upon millions of unknowns enter and spread out to every city, hamlet, village, and town. Johann Friedrich von Schiller famously wrote, “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” So what chance do civil engineers have?

Off to a bad start.

 

So today started off with a bang. Walking dog Izzy in the dark, thanks so Daylight &@#^* Savings Time. It's recycling day, but unlike our late party dog Nipper, Izzy is not terrified of trash cans. Or at least he wasn't until this morning. 

This morning he decided to dash to the curb and go around the large garbage can someone had left on the sidewalk. That unfortunately put the can between him and me, and when he closed the loop he knocked over the can, sending recyclables everywhere -- mostly plastic bottles but plenty of aluminum cans. This made what is known as a Loud Noise, which startled Izzy, who decided to put a couple of miles between himself and the source of the noise. I, caught by surprise, still had the leash in my hand, which suffered a small laceration between the ring finger and the pinky as the slack zipped through. It was too dark to see how much blood was unleashed (ha) but there was some. 

After restoring order, putting all the stuff back in the garbage can, we returned home -- of course, all this happened at the point of the circle farthest from our house. But we made it, and the injury was not too bad. However, it was a perfect way to start a very busy day, and I mean that dripping with as much sarcasm as I can muster. 

Help me, Obi Mr. Coffee! You're my only hope! 

Out for a JOG.

Another trash day, another chance to play JOG, or Judging Others' Garbage. And we have some good ones today! 

Uh-oh! A mirror! Notice that the owner carefully places it out on the curb. He does not want to be cut to bloody ribbons by shattered glass. But he's perfectly fine with letting the garbagemen take the chance. After all, they use one of those rear-loader trucks that periodically require shuffling garbage into the interior, which means there's got to be shattered glass involved at some point. Good luck, trashmen! 

I suppose I could mention that this also will subject the garbagemen to seven years of bad luck for breaking a mirror. Why seven years? Well, according to Barry Markovsky at the University of South Carolina, the Greeks and Romans had various superstitions related to a person's reflection, and when the Romans developed quality glass mirrors, they transferred the bad-luck juju to the breaking of the reflective surface. It should have meant bad luck for life, but the Romans also "believed that the body renewed itself every seven years," so there was a statute of limitations. Which is interesting, because in fact all the atoms in the human body are replaced in seven years (most in the first year), and yet the human consciousness continues seamlessly, which makes it seem like the Romans were onto something. 

Man, Bumble's had it. I've seen him around for years, but he's toast. Him and his empty box of Christmas cheer. And you know why? Because if you look closely, you'll see that Hermy did not remove the teeth of this Bumble. That's right -- because he was not rendered harmless, Yukon Cornelius had to kill this Bumble. Blew his arm right off. It's too sad. I can't go on. 

Quoting from the town's announcement vis-a-vis furniture: "Bulk/Large Item pick-up begins the 1st Thursday in April; it will end the last Friday in December 2023." Yeah, but this is just one little chair, right? They can squeeze that in. Sure, they can. Or at least, after you've polished off that case of Stella you probably would think so. 

So there I go again, Judgey McGarbageface, judging everyone's poor refuse behavior. What are you putting out on YOUR curb? 

Fat can.

I repent for my wayward youth, throwing beer cans everywhere, emptying ashtrays at the traffic light, chucking wrappers wherever. The world was my garbage can, and I try to make some small amends now by picking up garbage on my little walks with the dog. Remember the inflatable pool alligator I spotted a few weeks ago? No one ever claimed it, (the house whose front yard it was in has no pool), and it had blown out farther to the curb, so one trash day I picked it up on my way home with the pup and put it in my own can. See ya later, Alligator. 

Tuesday morning, around five a.m., I noticed that my neighbor's trash can had fallen over. It hadn't made a big mess, but it was on its side. Izzy dog wanted no part of it, but I thought it would help the garbage men if I set it upright. I was surprised at how heavy it was -- and was far more surprised when an enormous fat raccoon stirred himself from the depths and jumped out of the can. I let go, and let out a yelp; the raccoon gave himself a shake and went on his way as fast as he could -- which, being big and having just been awakened, was not all that fast. Fortunately Izzy chose not to get involved.

The raccoons I have known have been pure scavengers, peace-loving bandits who only wish to take what they desire and slip away without confrontation, the high-class jewel thieves of the garbage-dining community. Only when rabid do they seek to plant those claws and teeth into others, and then, look out -- you may both be going down. 

About the same time I enjoyed my shocking encounter, this meme swam into my attention:

I know several people who claim that this reflects them. As for me, I am a morning person, and I am not small, and my cuteness is debatable but not probably obvious. However, I do claim some kinship with these little rovers, and I find them much more agreeable than other yard jerks like squirrels, deer, and mice, or even chipmunks. And come on, look at that face. 

All things said, I am a bit partial to raccoons and will try not to surprise any anymore. I will not pick up a downed trash can without giving it a gentle wakeup kick -- rude, but not as rude as the garbage man heaving the can into the back of the truck. And I will always keep a firm lid on my own garbage cans. 

Ooky.

I'm sorry I've been out to lunch -- well, more than usual. Last week was nuts, mostly workwise, but also MRI wise and dogwise (he desperately needing a bath). This week could be just as whacko, but we'll see. 

Meanwhile, we're more than a week into October, about that time that anyone who is going to decorate for Halloween has at least started doing so. Let's see how it's going.

Very festive. The garbage can is a nice touch.

Enter... what? The house? The grave? 
Message unclear.

A jolly pile. But we all know this is a 
repurposed snowman. The factory in China
threw the switch from Christmas to Halloween
and they started to come out like this.

I think I first saw the tall one in 2020, the year of the world's
stupidest pandemic, and thought it ironic that the plague doctor,
one of the scariest looks ever devised, was meant for public safety. 
Well, he's being scary again. He seems to have scared
Pumpkin Child into fainting.  

spoooooookynah

I'll see you tomorrow for Indignant Persons' Day (observed), although probably not to comment on the holiday this year. Brace yourself for -- something different! 

Crate day in the mornin'!

Another trash day, another morning inspecting the neighbors' garbage. And what an interesting find we have here! 

Forty crates of wine grapes, emptied and waiting for the trash collectors. A veritable 6x8 wall of wine. It was a magnificent and imposing structure, like the ancient menhirs, Mesoamerican pyramids, or the monolith from 2001. What kind of wino lives here?

Actually, probably not a wino. For an active alcoholic, making your own wine is one of the worst ways to feed the disease. Takes too long. This is the kind of project the wine enthusiast engages in, and I have no problem with that (except it would have been nicer for the garbagemen for them to not put ALL FORTY crates out at once). 

This family is from Eastern Europe. I have a friend who grew up in Communist Yugoslavia, and his family made vast quantities of wine, as well as grappa and olive oil. In a Communist country you did as much off-the-books work as you could. Everyone did. The black market was probably twice as big as the legit market. He's been a proud American for a long time, but for years he still made his own wine because it was a family tradition. 

I personally also made alcohol -- I used to make beer at home, home being my apartment. I did get some really good results, and I enjoyed the process. I made mead, too. Like any great hobby, you can start with a small stake and escalate it to massive proportions -- the way with fishing, you can start with a rod and work your way up to a boat. But I gave it up after a few years. Too much work for too little booze. 

But back to these forty crates. Each was sold as containing 42 pounds of grapes. How much wine could you actually make from that? Well, I looked around at some winemaking sites, and found out that you could get as much as three gallons of wine from each crate. So this wall o' boxes would translate to as much as 120 gallons of wine. Federal law allows more than that per year for households with more than one adult, so they're not considered bootleggers. However, maybe for the alcoholic this could work out after all. 

I wish them well in their winey efforts. I used to do odd jobs for a family that made their own wine, and it was pretty weak, watery stuff. I hope this family gets it right. 

And I hope I don't awaken to an explosion one night, with bits of fermented grape raining over a four-block radius. That would be hard to hose off the roof.

More Napoleons of crime.

Puppy dog Izzy and I usually are out when it's not too bright, before any other dog-man walking combos in the morning, because we are early risers and maybe not too bright either. It's not so bad at this time of year, but in the winter, when the sun comes up around noon, it's a little depressing. 

Being out early, though, we're usually the first to see what the nocturnal drivers have left around. For a while we had a run on banana peels, when the local 24-hours gas station/convenience store was selling bananas at the register. But lately we're just back to the old favorites -- cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, and beer cans. Although these days we're more likely to see abominations like White Claw or hard seltzer represented than Coors Light. 

I can't complain too much. As I've noted in the past, one of my first cars had a hole rotted out in the passenger seat floor, so when I wanted to empty the ashtray at a light I would just lift up the mat and dump it through the hole. I have a long, sordid history of litterbugism, for which I am trying to pay bit by bit, picking up trash. 

It's the beer/other booze containers that make me laugh. You know the geniuses are thinking that if they're pulled over, but there's no empty container, there is absolutely no way the officer will suspect they've been drinking at the wheel. 

"No one will EVER KNOW!"

The drinkers of things like White Claw or Twisted Tea also believe that they don't smell of alcohol regardless of how hard they've been pounding the juice. Okay, kids, you just keep on believing. Might as well start to practice standing on the side of the road, reciting the alphabet backward starting with V.

Obviously, the solution to this is for us all to drive Peel Tridents. 

Not only is there no window to throw garbage through, but for about half of the year the weather in New York wouldn't let you even get that thing on the streets unless you carry it there. What are you going to do then? Sink it in the snow? And in the summer, that bubble bakes you like a potato.

Besides, there's no room in it for a fully grown man and a six-pack of anything except wax bottle candy. If you drive it drunk and hit a pedestrian, it's 50/50 which of you will die. Plus, with all the gas we'd save, John Kerry could fuel his private jet for a hundred years. 

Modern problems require modern solutions! 

Moving and rudeness.

Anyone who has been reading this blog -- extraordinarily smart and good-looking that you are -- probably knows that among my many characteristics, I dislike unrequired rudeness and I admire the men who provide the basics of sanitation in our lives: clean water and trash collection. 

If one were to go back in Earth's history to any of the cities of the past, even 150 years ago, the first thing one would probably notice is how horribly filthy everything is. We are naturally repelled by filth, as nature's way of telling us to back off, but since we discovered the microscopic causes behind disease, we are more repelled than ever. Go back to New York c. 1840 and your nose would probably be the first thing that alerted you that you were not in 2023 anymore. (Not that it's exactly a bouquet of roses these days either, granted.) There are still plenty of places on the planet where clean water is a luxury, not a given, and trash collection is little other than wherever you can dump it; places where cholera and dysentery are still common. "Public health" is an oxymoron there.

So we ought to be as respectful of our garbagemen as we are of any service provider who performs an important function in a clean and peaceful polity. Which means stuff like this is a no-no. 

This family is in the process of selling their house, and this is the third huge dump they put out for the trashmen. I'm wondering if they're bringing anything at all with them, because it seems like everything in the house must be going in the garbage. They even had a set of tires -- with rims -- out there at one point -- and it's illegal to throw away tires with the trash. (The trash pros left the tires the first go-round, but they disappeared later.)  

The town says you can put out one large item (like a piece of furniture) per week. They flew past that limit a while ago. Old tires, of course, were mentioned as something you can never throw away, but state law says you can bring them to any place that sells tires and they have to take them (a small fee may apply). 

The county says you can bring your crap to the dump for about $130 per ton. In my experience they usually don't even bother charging if you don't bring a dump truck full of debris in with you, as long as you can prove you're a county resident.  

And it doesn't seem like very many of us are aware that these guidelines exist. This crazy thing called the Internet, where you can look things up instantly, is getting to be a thing. These people ought to check it out.

The best and most efficient option if you have a lot or junk is to rent your own dumpster and throw your garbage away yourself. Just chucking everything on the curb is inefficient. 

It also is the height of rudeness -- taking your problem and making it someone else's problem without asking. Like littering, drunk driving, useless mask mandates, and silly games involving personal pronouns, taking one's own problems and shoving them onto someone else's back is at the very least showing no consideration for one's fellows. 

Well, the trash legends did not take all that junk on the Tuesday run. The scene this morning:

Will they be willing to cart it away Friday? Will the slobs add to the pile by then? Will they ever learn? The drama continues unabated. 

Am I being nosy? Is that rude? Yes and maybe, but rudeness is A-OK in our neighborhood now.

Please be seated.

I had a terrific blog entry planned out for yesterday morning, but then I fell down the stairs. 

Son of a bitch, man -- I don't think I'm technically old yet, but the older get you get, the less falling down the stairs is a joke.  

The scenario: Carrying down two lightweight but bulky containers of recycling to the garage, which accesses through the cellar, to participate in the weekly Recycling Kabuki before it all goes in the landfill. Being a manly masculine type with XY chromosomes, I cannot make two trips when it's the slightest bit possible to make one. Yes, I have socks on, the lightweight kind with little grip (there are shoes in the cellar). But no, I have never in two decades plus fallen down these stairs. 

First time for everything, they say.

Would have been nice to
fall down more scenic stairs.

It was pretty spectacular. Empty cans went flying, and I myself thudded two or three times, once with the back of my head, once on my tailbone. Scared the hell out of the dog. Didn't do me a bit of good either.

Those of you who have been hanging around here (God love you) may recall that at the beginning of 2020 I was in the hospital for a couple of days with spinal issues, and before that I cracked my head on the driveway through the miracle of black ice and was dizzy for weeks. So hitting my butt and my head was sort of a twofer. Which would hospitalize me? 

Fortunately, neither. First, I sat on the steps trying to run diagnostics; then I opened my eyes and looked around and had no sign of dizziness. I was in a good deal of pain in what Dave Barry calls the behindular area, but it was not spinal and excruciating. No breaks. 

Australian video commenter Ozzy Man, in his long-running Destination F series, enjoys pointing out when people have landed hard on the coccyx, because coccyx is both difficult and funny to say. Well, I had landed in Destination F, because I bruised that coccyx quite well, and it hurt like the dickens. 

So, looks like it's OTC pain meds and icing for up to four weeks, according to Mount Sinai. Fortunately I've been able to sleep and to work, both of which can be difficult after an injury however stupid. And I have joined a long line of comic characters injuring the tusheroo -- enough that TV Tropes has a whole page dedicated to the art of injuring the butt. 

What have I learned? Maybe to start paying attention to what I'm doing while I'm actually doing it for once in my life. And, despite the risk to my man card, maybe I should consider making two trips. Not saying I will, but I should consider it. 

The tripods have landed.

Lately I've been talking about my wife's crazy product purchases in this space, and I'll give her credit for two things -- the stuff she's been getting is not expensive, and if it works as advertised it would be helpful. 

Well, my latest present from her is this set of tripods. 

If you use liquid hand soap, or a shampoo or the like that comes in a pump bottle, you may find the Flip-It! bottle emptying caps useful. I like to get everything I can out of the soap bottle, which in the past has meant trying to balance it on its cap or just water down the contents and try to get an adequate handwashing out of what's inside. 

Well, no more! The amazing tripod cap allows you to stand that bottle right up on its top, and gravity does the rest. 

I didn't think much of the Flip-It! at first, but I was surprised how little residue is left in the bottle after Isaac Newton has had a chance at it. When the soap is gone, one quick rinse and into the recycling bin, to likely go in the landfill with the rest of the garbage. Well, at least I tried. 

The kit comes with two tripods and six adapters, so any standard bottle should be accommodated. I've used a medium adapter (the dark gray ring above) and a small one for two different soap bottles. I imagine shampoo/conditioner bottles need the larger adapter. 

Though I've taken a flyer on all sorts of gadgets and gizmos, I probably wouldn't have bought these. Still, it's always fun to see if an idea works as described, and the Flip-It! does. Two caveats: Because it is designed to adapt to shampoo bottles, you will likely get more liquid hand soap dispensed than you want if you're not careful. Also, both times I used it, the adapter was difficult to get off the empty bottle -- probably dried soap gluing up the works. 

Still, as cheap but clever ideas with no working parts go, I give this two clean thumbs up. My review: Flip-It? Good!

The straight poop.

Most people around here are pretty good about cleaning up after their dogs. 

Not all. 

There's one house in our walk that seems to attract all the dogs to want to go there, and all the dog owners to want to leave it. I don't know what the problem is. I have my theories. 

To set the scene: This house -- a nice one on a corner lot, but no better than its neighbors -- is almost completely enveloped by an eight-foot-tall PVC fence. Part of it is a legal requirement, as they have a swimming pool. Also, they have a couple of dogs of their own -- small ones, I think. I'm not sure. I've never seen them. I've never seen anything. I'm going just by sound.

The thing is, their having dogs who can't be seen or reasoned with by passing dogs may be enticing the latter to leave a little telegram from Western Poopion. Dogs have their motivations. But why don't the dogs' owners perform their cleaning duty?

I believe it's that stupid fence. Not only is it twice as high as the law requires, but they built it right up against the sidewalk. You feel like it's shoving you to the curb. I assume it's perfectly legal, as you need a permit to construct these things, but it just feels rude. It didn't have to be that close to the sidewalk; it's like they were going to be damned if they let more one square inch be outside their yard than they absolutely had to. It inevitably makes one feel like they think they're too good for the plebes out on the street.

I've heard of jalousie windows, but this is a jealousy fence. 

I don't blame them for the high fence. If I had a pool, I wouldn't want people looking in on me while I was using it. But I do wish they'd left a little breathing room on the sidewalk. 

So there may be resentment involved. More important, however, there's anonymity involved. Since we can't see them, they can't see us, and less conscientious dog owners might be taking advantage of that. 

Not that the homeowners are unaware of the situation. They have taken steps. 

Four of these signs, spaced about fifteen feet apart along the sidewalk. That'll turn the tide.

To show you how well it works, yesterday morning in the dim early hours, pup Izzy and I almost ran right into a huge pile of crap square in the middle of the sidewalk. I don't want to punch the dog owner in the nose for leaving that there, but someone ought to. 

I knew that Monday morning would come soon enough, and that corner is a school bus stop for kids of all grades. Easy to anticipate some kid booking for the bus and -- yeesh. What a great way to start the day. 

Many years ago I knew a kid (not me) who was bullied regularly at school, but when the bullies found some dog crap and nailed him on his pants with it, that was the last straw. The kid actually refused to go to school after it. It caused more trouble for him and his family that I even know about. It was years before he started school on a normal schedule again, and he had to catch up. Being that this was a New York City public school, I unconditionally guarantee that no punishment was ever dealt out to the bullies. That was the environment in which I learned you can neither rely on nor trust in authority in this world.

Bottom line today: You can't leave land mines like that dog poop around. 

So what could I do? I used a waste bag to pick it up. Then I threw it over the fence toward where I think the pool is. 

Nah, just kidding. I brought it all the way home and put it in our outdoor repository, and will dispose of it on trash day. I wasn't being nice. I was remembering what it was like to be a kid having to go to school on Monday, and what happened to that one boy whose life was nearly ruined by one cruel act too many. 

The moral of the story: If we'd all clean up after ourselves, and stop grabbing every inch we can, the world would be a better place.

De-Canification.

Much to my surprise, I have had the new garbage can now for more than two years. I was so excited about that Rubbermaid special that I blogged about it in September of the Lost Year. At the time I held on to the old trash can, even though the bottom was three quarters rotted out, because I thought I might need it if we had a really huge trash pickup. That has not happened. So, I plan to get rid of the old can at last.

But the question I asked back in the day still obtains: How do you throw out a garbage can? If you put it out as garbage, it doesn't look like garbage, it looks like what it is -- what garbage comes in. So... how? If I had a chain saw I'd cut it up, but I don't. Leave a note on it? These guys are working fast, seconds per household; they don't have time to read even if they actually noticed the note in the dark. 

I said to myself: "Self! What can I do?"

Then I saw what another guy in the neighborhood did.

This. Is. GENIUS!

He's taken the wheels and the lid off so you know the thing is busted at a glance. He filled it with garbage so it can't be shrugged off an a can leftover from the last pickup. Then he wrapped the whole thing in an ENORMOUS garbage bag so they have to put it all on the truck and mash that bastard up -- unless they're too chicken.

Well, I've seen our garbage men in action, and they're no chickens. 

I guess it worked, because after I got that picture, the Phantom Can of Number 9 was never seen again. 

I'm not going to try this on Friday's pickup because the guys are still dealing with snow around here. But when it's clear, look out, garbage truck! My old can is coming in! 

That didn't come out the way I'd hoped. 

Cull the herd.

I know the time has come to get rid of some books. 

I've talked about this before, maybe on this blog, but I've done nothing about it. In my heart of hearts, I do not want to. As a boy and as an apartment-dwelling young man, I dreamed of one day having a home with a dedicated library. You know -- all wood and leather and comfortable chairs and reading lamps and peace and quiet and books as far as the eye could see. I didn't care what the rest of the house looked like. I never got that far.

None of that worked out -- we have two rooms with large bookcases and a desk with bookshelves and a small shelf downstairs with cookbooks and home books and stacks of books around and a box of books in the cellar that I had stored in my in-laws' cellar and had to retrieve when they passed on. 

And random piles.

Thank God I don't live in an earthquake zone, because I am sure I'd be buried in them one day. People would say "He died doing what he loved" and my wife would say "What, gasping for air under half a ton of old paperbacks?"

If I'm to avoid that fate, I figure I should sort the books first into sets:

1) Books I need to have about me and would take into the grave with me for the afterlife like a Pharaoh

2) Books I treasure 

3) Books I like and would like to read again

4) Books I think I liked and pretend that one day I will give them another shot

5) Books I read but didn't like and won't read again

6) Books I bought new but will never read

7) Books I bought used but will never read

Seems like a pretty easy go from there, right? Just eliminate piles four through seven and I'm done! 

But of course it's never that easy. Deep inside I hate to get rid of books. Worse, no one wants them. I have perhaps three or four valuable enough to sell online, but people don't collect books anymore -- not like they collect really valuable things, like Star Wars figurines. The library doesn't want them -- they certainly don't want paperbacks, although I might convince them to take a stack of new hardcovers that I bought in a moment of madness and now regret. Stores that sell used books, once thick on the ground in any city, are now barely extant. Recycling is the fate of these books, and it'd be sad even if I had not spent actual money on them. 

Well, if I don't do it, one day my wife will be stuck with the job, and that's a sad thought. (Women tend to outlive men by about seven years.) Looks like my dream library remains as far-off as thoughts of being interred in a book-lined pyramid. But I can dream, can't I? Call me Nectanebook, last of the book-obsessed mummies.

More old drunks than old doctors?

In 1953, American businessmen and civic leaders began an anti-littering organization called Keep America Beautiful, which persists to this day. It got a large boost in the sixties, when First Lady Lady Bird Johnson began a campaign called the Beautification Project. The whole ball o' wax probably hit its zenith when a public service ad -- probably the most famous ever -- featuring fake Indian Iron Eyes Cody made everyone feel guilty. 

And yet the litter keeps showing up all the same. 

Usually the stuff I see by the side of the road includes fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts. Sometimes there are soda cans, but more often beer cans, little airplane liquor bottles, and other open containers that would get you in trouble with the cops if they pulled you over. 

So this surprised me. 

I was walking Izzy early in the morning, and he was poking at something on the ground. I wasn't surprised to see it was a bottle, but was surprised to find it was a bottle of Ensure, the nutrition shake generally used by the elderly and other populations who have trouble getting adequate calories. We were on a stretch between houses, so it wasn't likely to have rolled out from someone's garbage. But who would pitch this out of the car?

Ultimately I decided it was an old drunk, a guy whose doctor told him he needed more nutrition and also needed to stop drinking vodka. Well, our drunken driving friend decided he would meet the doctor halfway, and mix vodka into the Ensure while tootling about, making a Poor Old Man's Black Russian. (I guess if he wanted a White Russian he'd use the vanilla.) Having consumed the cocktail, he pitched the vodka-scented bottle out the window and hid the remaining vodka for his next drink. 

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. But if you're abiding out there, Dude, please remember, you're too old and weak to go to prison for killing someone driving drunk. You wouldn't like it a bit. Save your POM Black Russians for home. And please: Keep America Beautiful. 

(NB: The bottle was not actually tested for vodka scent; I pitched it in the trash when I got back home, just in time for the garbage collection.)

Board of it all.

Today's trash day, and guess what is going out into the garbage and why! 

It's hard to tell, perhaps, from that picture, so I'll explain: It's our ironing board. And the weird angle is because it won't stand up. And it won't stand up because one of the legs snapped off by the hinge bit. And that's why it's going into the garbage. 

And why did it break?

Never iron angry.

Not me, not your level-headed model of coolness in the face of frustration Fred. Who's also a big fat liar. Actually the anger came from my wife, who was trying to iron the big curtains in the family room that had come out of the dryer, and they always seem to fight ironing like it's Ali and the iron is Joe Frazier. 

And she was allllllmost done when the board snapped and hit the floor. Which, as you can guess, just elevated her mood precipitously. 

But it should be noted that this is a pretty old board, as modern stuff goes. How old? Let me pull off the cover and show you the original surface....

That's right -- it was a Crayola-themed ironing board. Why? I am not sure. I just remember when we got married, and our previous roommates had owned the ironing boards in our lives prior to that, and no one puts ironing board on the bridal registry. So one Sunday night -- for some reason I'm certain it was a Sunday night -- we were shopping around and saw this one cheap. At the time, that being the nineties, Binney and Smith was licensing the Crayola name and logo on a lot of things, like stuffed toys and T-shirts. But why an ironing board? 

Well, apparently there are several craft projects that you can do with an ironing board and Crayola products. I suppose this ironing board was a way to promote that. I had plenty of Crayola crayons in my youth, but I promise you, my mom would never have allowed any of them near her iron.

Over the years we got some good use from the board, cheap as it was. In my office days I liked to have a nice pressed shirt -- that, children, was before recent times, when you can show up to work in your nothing but your nacho-stained underpants and no one cares. Often on Sundays I would iron shirts and some pants for the week, and maybe shine up the shoes. It wasn't all that long ago, but I feel like it was an entirely different galaxy from the one in which we live now. 

Well, I'm sorry to see the old board go. It was fun, even if we had to cover up the thin Crayola cover with a more sturdy padded cover with boring ol' flowers on it. I always knew there was a green crayon underneath anyway.