Tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day Friday and that’s the day The Planet Ann Arbor’s fleet of garbage, recycle, and compost trucks roars into the neighborhood, lifts up all the handy dandy carts and dumps them.

I don’t have any compost this week, largely because nobody was around to do yardwork last weekend and I am saving my kitchen scraps in the freezer until there is enough yard vegetation in the bin to help cut the smell of rotting meat. I almost *always* have a bunch of stuff in the recycle cart so I grabbed that and rolled it down to the curb. Then I grabbed the garbage cart. Hmmm, this is reeeeallly light. Is there anything in it? Well, no there isn’t! I think that is a first. Alas, it was short-lived. I emptied a trash bin in the Landfill Dungeon, one that has been collecting various bits of cosmic debris for *months*. And there is a fairly full kitchen-sized bag that will go out in the morning.

A disclaimer or two. One of the reasons we have such a paltry amount of garbage this week is because we dumped the garbage from our little luxury camping expotition last weekend into a dumpster at the Kelley’s Island State Park. No fish, please. There’s a fish hut for that, a good distance away from the campground and picnic area, thank you very much. (If you embiggen the photoooo, you can better see the Frog Hopper and Lyme Lounge in the background.) But even that was a paltry bit of garbage.

At any rate, we have come a long way since I was a beach urchin and my family lived in a shabby little bungalow on Superior Street and my old coot would burn paper trash in an incinerator out by the alley. I don’t remember exactly when those incinerators were outlawed but I remember being a young adult living in various apartments and shoving *newspapers* into garbage bags.

The Planet Ann Arbor had a monthly pickup in those days. It was staffed by volunteers and I didn’t always manage to participate. When I bought a house and became a parent (those events were related, don’tcha know), I began recycling in earnest. The Planet has steadily improved its recycling operations over the years and so have I and nowadays I call myself the Queen of Recycling. That’s just in fun though because I know all too well that there are many folks who are waaaaayyy ahead of me in the challenge of reducing their personal footprint on the earth.

I am looking forward (sort of) to Talk Like a Pirate Day tomorrow (yes, it is a thing). Actually, I am thinking ahead to the aftermath of TLAPD, which is walking downtown to the Oscar Tango. How many weeks has it been? Toooooo looooonnnnng!

I said I didn’t have any compost. That’s not exactly true. For years, I have composted vegetable matter in the Landfill Back Yard. I am still doing that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2014 at 5:45 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.