She’s my Seattle cuzzint out there at Raincharm! I won’t say how old she is but she’s not too far behind me. Two kids in college and the whole nine yards.

That is not a picture of Jay there. What were you thinking? My cuzzint may be an engineer but she does not look like a bulldozer and, given a choice of vehicles, she is more likely to be found driving a toilet. That’s the Planet Ann Arbor leaf pickup crew there. At 0-dark-30 this morning. This isn’t just Jay’s birthday, it is the first leaf pickup day here in the Landfill sector of the Planet Ann Arbor. Problem? Well. There are some leaves on the ground. Maybe two percent? Or three percent? Or maybe even five percent? I dunno. I did not rake any leaves into the street for the pickup because I didn’t want to be bothered with raking an infinitesimally small percentage of the total number of leaves that fall in my yard into the street. Back in the day when I was a youth theatre guild administrator and set my own hours, I might’ve managed to rake a few of our leaves, just for the joy of it. Full-tilt boogie full-time career? Not. By the time the *second* leaf pickup day rolls around, our leaves will be down and I will be going hucklety-buck. I forget when that is. Sometime in November. Even then, not all of the leaves are down but it works.

I think the planet rotates the leaf pickup dates because ours is not always this early. One year, our first pickup date was something like November 8th and we actually managed to get all of the leaves out into the street by then. The second date was December 11th and we had a few more by then but what happened that day? 12 inches of snow. Leaf pickup? Not. I think the street cleaner finally got some of them in April. But it was sure a fun day and I shoveled a bunch of times (another thing I do for the sheer joy of it) and we had to cancel a tech week rehearsal at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre (not a good thing) and it snowed the whole week and I couldn’t see out zee veendsheeeld of the POC because zee vipers ver totally screwed and my feet were wet and cold all week from running up and down the slush-covered back stairs of the Lydia. That was one long sentence but I miss those fun times.

This year, we have early leaf pickups. I just don’t understand why they bother to schedule the early and late dates. If the leaves are not down yet, why spend all that money on sending out trucks and crews to pick them up? Just sayin’.

Oh, and we also have to manage to rake the leaves at Houghton Lake somewhere in there. Fin Family Moominbeach? We ignore them, of course. Who rakes leaves in the woods?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.