Today...

Today is a banner day! We moved into this beautiful home on July 3rd and today is August 18th. In my book that is about a month and a half. As of today I finally have the trash situation figured out, put into place and settled! When we settled on this house, we knew that trash burning would be in our future, but we are city-folk and had no idea what that was all about. Our first trial at burning resulted in a few accidental, mini-explosions of hair spray bottles and unlit fireworks. Yikes! So we did some internet research and found out what we could and should burn. This left us with lots of stuff that we couldn't burn. Plastics, glass, metals, etc. Those were mostly recycleable stuff so I set up a recycling area in the unfinished part of the basement. I sorted as I thought I should, hoping to find out exactly were the closest recycling center was. So now we have piles of trash, "to burn", "recycle" and "other". What to do with the "other"? We didn't have a truck come by and pick up, so how does this work? I asked neighbors, folks from town and looked on the internet. Found out that you can get trash pick up up here, but there is no monthly fee. Turns out that you head to the Pump N Pantry (love that name!) to pick up color coded, pre-paid stickers to go on your trash bags. You call the waste management folks, find out your area's day and get put on the route. Stickers for our area are pink and cost $2. That would be $2 per bag. You put the sticker on your bag (make it a big one!) and put it out at the street. Easy? Easy! Now I still have mountains of recycling to take in and find out the nearest drop off is a few towns over. I put it on my calendar of "to do"s and then when I am at the post office one morning I get to chatting with this extremely nice (but very talkative) gentleman who happens to organize/host one of the mobile recycling units at his house each month. And guess what? He is about 5 minutes from our house! How cool is that? Don only collects #1 and #2 plastic, so that means I still have to travel to Blossberg every now and then to drop off my #3s and up. So last weekend Charles and I loaded it all up, dropped it off and are as happy as recycling clams!
Now I am sure you are bored to tears with my garbage tale so far, but I am very excited to have the big rubber (American made) "to burn" can very handily located between the kitchen and the back door and hidden from sight. Very excited to have assembled a plastic shelving unit that holds our 5 different kinds of recycling bins-glass, paper/cardboard, metal, #1s and #2s and #3 and up. Very excited to have the mini garbage can under the sink for the "non-burnable" and to have a big area in the unfinished basement to hold the bags for pick up!
Who knew that it would take me a month and a half to get something as mundane as garbage figured out?! Not me!