huntblog

The garbage day blues
This week Connie, my wife, has been out of town, she's working about an hour and a half away at wollongong and staying there with work collegues during the week. As you'd expect it's my job to do all the necessary house duties while I'm the only one at home, and so I have been cooking and cleaning a little. On monday I noticed a particularly "mature" mango sitting in the fridge, and I got a little worried that it would start to smell before garbage day, which is thursday, so I thought I should preserve it by putting it in the freezer. Fast forward to last night.

Depsite being pretty busy with radio last night, I managed to remember that it was garbage night, AND I remembered the mature mango, which by now had the same weight and hardness as a small boulder. Taking it out of the freezer, I juggled the frozen mass precariously and dropped it into the bin with a thud. Now, our garbage bin is usually quite empty because it gets emptied every week, and we don't make a lot of mess unlike the young families on either side of us, who manage to defy the laws of physics every week with how much garbage they can squash into an undersized otto bin. Recycling on the other hand is only emptied once every two weeks, and we go damn close to filling it up by the time that two weeks rolls around. This week the bin was three quaters full, and I was the only person in the house half that time. So with haste I put both the bins out as I arrived home last night, making sure they were on the road instead of the footpath so that the garbo could get to them nicely (everyone on our street does this). Fast forward to this morning.

I woke up and got ready for work, and was taking my time enjoying the sun and the lazy summer air when I heard the garbage truck approaching. He was stop-starting his way down the street, at an impressive rate, and I made a mental note after I'd heard him slowly disappear down the road into the next street, to collect the bins before leaving for work. Now I should explain that in my street there are about 4-5 blocks of townhouses next to each other, and so bin space is hard to come by sometimes, so quite often about 20 metres of the street is taken up by bins linging the road. Kinda like a little garbage truck tickertape parade, where the bins are lining the streets to cheer on the bohemoth truck. The other thing about my place is that we live quite close to the hospital. So of a morning, parking space is sometimes in quite short supply.

Anyway I walked outside, and to my dismay some guy had parked in front of all the bins outside my house. This sounds pretty anticlimactic, but let me explain that this guy had to reverse in at an angle and park way out onto the street to manage this feat, because all our recycling bins were not very well aligned, and they were actually sitting in the gutter as I mentioned, not on the footpath. So this guy's car is sitting there blocking off all our bins, and sticking out halfway across the lane on the road. Needless to say the garbage guy went straight past all the bins behind the car. So by the time recycling day comes around again, I'll have a month worth of stuff in the bin, and I shudder to think what the families with full bins that didn't get picked up will do. Their grabage was overflowing as it was. It was about this time that I remembered my friend the "massive mature mango". Looking around frantically I found I'd put the bin on the other side of the driveway, and it hadn't been parked in!

So thankfully although some inconsiderate person has parked in my recycling for another two weeks (even though there was perfectly OK parking 25 metres down the road), I'll at least be spared the trauma that could have occurred if that mango had have been left to thaw and rot in my bin for the coming week.

posted by hunt @ 12:16 PM