Recycling

Recycling

Tiny Town, Rural Area, America - - the place I have called home for 22 years now. Those first years of residency, we took our garbage to the dump! This was a very new concept for a Bay Area Girl gone “Country”!

Years later, our waste management company informed us of a change to mandatory garbage pickup. This was a good idea because the population in our town was rapidly growing as we transitioned from farming community to “bedroom” community of nearby major cities. For 20 years, the townspeople had bagged up their recyclables and hauled them into the next major town, or simply threw them away.

A recycling center appeared, right down the street and then just as suddenly shut down, it’s brief occurrence like a fleeting dream. Schools and organizations would welcome the recycling projects for fundraising opportunity, but soon fizzled with the daunting task of collecting and then hauling messy bags, driving 30-mile round trips to do so.

Then it finally happened… the garbage truck came out on a non-garbage day distributing (no! lets get real here, dropping!) bins to the residents to use for recyclables. The bins were literally thrown from the truck, into the street, no lids and the added paperwork explaining their use flying around in the breezes. Did I mention their size? Big enough for 2 weeks of newspapers or a large garbage bag of random items, but not even close to large enough to contain the list of items to be recycled. Oh! In addition, pick up for the blue bins is *every other week*!

I assumed that this new project must be a royal pain for the waste company until I got the new and revised bill. The customers are obviously being passed the extra costs for this service!

Happy to finally have a new way to get my plastics , glass and aluminum to the recycling centers, I now bag the extras and heap the garbage bags on top of this very tiny bin, hoping someone will get the hint that our “bin” for recycling should be at least as big as our garbage cans! My question is how much energy do I waste rinsing these items to avoid the ants that find my saved recyclables before the 2-week pickup is due? I am holding out hope for a real tall can with a lid to be provided in the near future, or maybe the 3-can system like in the big city…

illusion glass

Now here is some beautiful glassware!

Time For Lettuce

Out the door, I quickly glance at the clock calculating just how close I am to being late. Hurry, hurry off to work… each day challenging me to wrap up the morning’s activities at home in order to be on time for my first appointment.

This morning as I made my lunch, I did that usual pause to decide weather adding lettuce to my sandwich was worth the trouble. Often I leave it off, not because of indifference, but it adds a shortcut so as not to be late. After all, the lettuce does not offer any remarkable nutrition value and it does take time for this final addition to my lunch.

Re-prioritizing has recently become a current strategy during my day’s activities. I have been learning that taking the time to cut a few fresh flowers before leaving the house is worth rocking my punctuality comfort zone. It clicks – that I should give thought to apply this recent knowledge…

Biting into my sandwich and tasting the cool sweet crunch of crisp lettuce reaffirms that these little luxuries in life count way more than once realized while rushing around for the purpose of better efficiency. Channeling this new thought process redirects each activity along the way to a better mode of living out the day…

From now on, I am taking time for lettuce!