Being country bumpkins, when we visit large cities we often find things that are definitely odd to us, though pretty normal to those who make their homes there. Like locking up your garbage.
Ours here--in very similar containers--might be bothered occasionally by a stray dog, but never so much that it would warrant these efforts. Things are much more casual in the country. In fact, our garbage man will go behind the gate and get the can if we forget to put it out by the road. If we are to be gone over the week, we must remember to ask him not to do that, as the extra courtesy does not extend to returning the can to the back--and a garbage can by the road for days on end is a definite security problem.
And yard waste? yes, I understand in the suburbs to separate it from other stuff, but what yard waste is there in this concrete jungle?
What did you discover that was odd this week? You might find what I've been posting over at 365 during the last week to be odd. Some really fun stuff from our city jaunt.
5 comments:
The only time we would need to lock up our garbage is to keep the Magpies, and racoons out of it. Yes Magpies, they are very smart, a guy in our town taught one how to say a few words.
I will have to keep my eye open odd observances now.
One might say that garbage is such a waste ...
Locked garbage?? Indeed odd - but not if you pay by the pound to have it hauled away. That was proposed here, but not implemented. (You do pay at the landfill for the priviledge of hauling it yourself!) For recycling, the county distributed bar coded bins so they can track who is (or is not) recycling. So far they have not started weighing our bin on pickup day.
They must be very protective of their garbage!
Well, this is years later, but I stumbled on this because I'm looking for... guess what... a lock for my garbage can and this turned up in Google Image search! I saw you are perplexed by something like this, so thought I'd chime in with the reason.
Why? Because here in the city, other people dump their trash in your garbage cans! In our case, some "nice" neighbor of ours, walking their dog, has started making a habit of dumping their dog's you-know-what, in unsealed bags, into our trash a couple times a week. It's horrible, stinky, and not something we want to lean in and remove, we have to dump kitty litter on it to at least make it not so stinky and hope it all gets removed when the garbage collection comes.
But gee, if people do stuff like that, you kind of want to lock the cans so they can't. Other people here in this particular city (L.A.), who live up in the more wild hills like we do (we live near the Hollywood sign, adjacent to an enormous wild park area), have a lot of trouble with deer, raccoons, and other wild animals getting into their trash. We even have a resident puma! Who sometimes ventures happily into the more rural back yards. We love the wildlife but we don't want them in our trash!
Lastly, in a large city like this, we have ultra-poor people going through our recycling bins to get cans and bottles to redeem them. I don't mind that a bit--I feel terrible that people are on such hard times, and sometimes come out and slip them a little cash. But the city doesn't like it--they make some income from recycling and this reduces it. Why not just hire the ultra-poor to help with the recycling, seems like a good solution!!! But I'm not in city government.
Anyway--I enjoyed finding your blog! I saw your husband is ailing and I send along positive thoughts and wishes. There are a lot of pretty amazing meds out there, and this sounds weird, but when you get to Grandma-age like most of us, it turns out cancer moves a lot slower. My mom was given 6 months, that was 13 years ago, she only just left us--at 94! And was feisty and fully "there" right to the last few days. So good luck and all my best.
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