Our new house does not have trash pick-up service. Given that our driveway is a two hundred foot gravel incline to the street above I'm not really that disappointed. I can't even imagine hauling a can or two up there each week. Instead, we load our trash and recyclables into the van and take it seven miles down the road to the trash and recycling center.
The trash and recycling center is about the coolest place on earth if you really love organization - and I do. There are different bays for house waste, yard waste, and appliances. There are also recycling bays for cardboard and paper, plastics and glass, batteries, electronics, tires, steel, and more. I couldn't wait to get home and tell Tricia all about it after my first trip. I guess I'm easily amused.
Hauling your own trash really helps you to be more aware of the amount of waste you create in a week. Because it took us a week or two to figure out how and where to get rid of our trash our first haul was a pretty big one. We had to put all the seats in the van down and cram everything in.
My last trip to the center was last Sunday. A few days ago, maybe Thursday, I was walking around the side of the house and opened up one of the trash cans to drop in a scrap of trash I found lying in the woods. When I lifted the lid I noticed there weren't any bags of trash inside. Confused, I opened up the other trash can and found it, too, had no bags. I went inside and checked the kitchen trash can. It was mostly full but still had a bit of room left. Wow, in five or so days we hadn't filled even a single bag yet. I was amazed. Knowing this changed my trashy habits. I began avoiding making trash and crushing what I did make down to the size of nothingness.
Finally on Saturday the kitchen trash was on the verge of overflowing and had to be taken out. We almost made it a whole week. Almost. Though it wasn't on purpose I was proud to see we were somehow minimizing our waste. I say it wasn't on purpose but we do try to avoid things that are heavily packaged and single serving items. Last week I was on a trip where more than two hundred Capri Suns were handed out to a group of kids. Now that's wasteful.
A great way to avoid creating waste is to fix broken things rather than buying new ones. Or fighting the temptation to have the newest version of something that works perfectly. Or finding a new home for unwanted things. There's actually a website for giving your old stuff away. It's called Freecycle and can be found at www.freecycle.org.
We joined Freecycle for the first time in St. Louis. We used it to get rid of our treadmill after we realized how miserable it is to walk inside. After listing it on the site we had about eight or nine interested parties contact us within a few hours. We chose one randomly and it was picked up from our driveway the following Saturday.
A few weeks after getting rid of the treadmill our new dog jumped on our new mattress and made a new deposit right in the center of the pillow top. She completely saturated it. Thinking the mattress was a lost cause I jumped on Freecycle and placed a "Wanted" ad for a queen sized mattress. Someone replied and a few days later my buddy Tim and I drove to their house to pick it up. Standing at their front door we looked down behind the bushes and saw a whole army of cigarette butts. It might be reasonable to believe these people only smoked out on the front porch and that the mattress wouldn't smell like cigarette smoke but I wasn't about to find out. We high-tailed out of there before anyone could answer the door.
Though we are members, we haven't had the chance to use Freecycle here in Columbia just yet. We generally call the Salvation Army to pick up any large items we're getting rid of and the smaller stuff is delivered to Goodwill. Still, I love the idea of Freecycle and look at their listings from time to time. Looking at it tonight I saw the following items offered or requested: wedding stuff, a dog who barks loudly but listens a little, serving dishes, a lawnmower, and a kitten. But by far my favorite was this...
Wanted: Sandpaper
I need a piece of sandpaper to sand out some scratches on my dining room baseboard. Maybe someone has an extra square or two from a small job they just completed? I'd be able to pick it up tomorrow, if convenient.
Ha. While I love the idea of sharing resources and all, I'm not sure a single square of sandpaper warrants a drive across town. Is it just me or is this a bit fanatical?
There's always a crazy to make the rest of us look bad.
Part of the problem was probably the fact my own experiences with science in the classroom were sub par, at best. While I don't remember a single moment of science instruction in elementary school, I vividly recall six years of middle and high school classes that called for the memorization of terminology, cell parts, and the periodic table of elements. My only positive memories are of dissecting a frog in biology and then later using a strobe light to measure the distance between ripples in a tray of water in physics. That's not a lot.
However, a few weeks in we began to learn about space. I became really fascinated not just with everything to be found outside the earth's atmosphere but with the incredible predictability of it all. Equipped with a few charts and a little math you could accurately predict where the moon would be and what it would look like next Tuesday at 10:10 pm. You could figure out what time of day Mars would come into view and which constellation it would be hiding in. It wasn't something you just memorized but something you could go out and actually do yourself. Before long I bought my own telescope, sky chart, and red flashlight. After graduating I continued to read books on both physics and astronomy and even went back to college to take a few advanced math courses.
