In our county, residents can take their own trash to the landfill.
If everyone did this, I believe the amount of garbage in this country would be cut by half. It is a sobering experience.
Like so much else in life, the first glance is deceiving. Arriving at the entrance, you see neat bins for your recyclables and scrap metal. Beyond that are green and grassy hills. It is only if you have household garbage that you drive back and see the full extent of the problem.
Modern landfills are not the dumps of yesteryear (when I was a kid, it was a fun trip to visit the dumps in the Adirondack Mountains to look for bears). Modern garbage disposal is more akin to putting your scraps in a sealed time capsule and kicking the entire can down the road a thousand years or so.
Trash is put on top of an underlayer that is mostly impervious to water; there is a system to collect rainwater and a leachate system to collect whatever does manage to trickle through. The entire bed of garbage is eventually capped off with soil and planted, giving it the misleading look of a natural meadow. But underneath, the garbage is sealed off from air, i.e. there is no aerobic decompostion like in a compost pile. That trash is going to sit there for a long, long, long time.
At our landfill, you drive right up to a ditch and heave your garbage over the edge, up close and personal.
Standing there contemplating the mess (but not too long because even modern landfills stink), I always vow to create less waste and fewer trips here. Because, as Pete Seeger sings, we're filling up our lives with Garbage.
Most people look forward to the weekend. When they return to work on Monday, they regale each other with tales of their adventures.
I bet few of them will say they spent their Saturday washing kittens.
I discovered, much to my dismay, that our three little white kittens were infested with fleas. These are outdoor cats so they are not held to the hygienic standards of house pets. But when we can see the little black specks fur swimming and occasionally jumping off to bite a human, then something has to be done.
We're 11 miles from the nearest store and on a tight gasoline budget, so a trip to find flea powder would have to wait for a regular errand run. I turned to the internet; a Dawn bath was suggested.
I was not going to try to bathe cats by myself so I enlisted Tom's aid. He brought the victims in one by one.
I put a ring of Dawn around the kitten's neck. Fleas will run towards the head when they suspect you're out to get them so the soap necklace served as a barrier. Then we soaked the poor cat in the extra bubbly water.
Once the fur was wet, you could see how many fleas there were. Ugh! We tried to comb them out but we don't have a flea comb so that didn't work. We picked out as many as we could be most wouldn't budge. We can only hope the soap killed most of the critters.
When we felt we had tortured each feline enough, we rinsed them off and Tom towel dried them.
They were amazingly cooperative; we didn't get scratched once. Their mom, Dale, also has fleas but I draw the line at trying to wash a full-grown cat.
They're out in the sun now, complaining to each other about how horrid humans are to helpless kittens.
What did you do this weekend?
This post was going to be a rave review of the cordless Black and Decker Front Tine tiller, and it is a good machine...but you know us and mechanical tools (see My Generator Rant)
I sold all of my bee equipment and decided to use the money to buy a tiller. We have always dug our garden by hand but I felt like that was getting to be too much for such senior citizens. I knew we could never cope with a gas powered machine and the finicky maintenance so, after tons of research, I decided on the Black and Decker.
I placed the order with Amazon and within a few days the tiller arrived. It required a lot of assembly but it went together fairly quickly. Then I tried to charge the battery. This should take 20 hours the first time but the charger was saying "done!" in 10 minutes and the unit didn't start. I called Black and Decker and they said "bad charger" and sent a new one. Same thing--no charge. So we packaged it back up and ordered a replacement.
At this point, our long suffering UPS driver knew the drill. He claims we are trying to give him a hernia but Tom helps him load the heavy packages so we're forgiven.
It didn't take long for the replacement to arrive. This time the battery charged as advertised. Then we took it for a test run in the garden.
It started right up and immediately bogged down. There was no way I could get it to move and Tom was exhausted after shallowly tilling two rows. We both agreed that it would be less tiring to use a shovel.
I know lots and lots of people happily puttputt down the garden tilling merrily away. I have to believe they have stronger arms than we do or are prithy to some esoteric tiller secrets that we'll never know.
Make no mistake. This is a good tiller, reasonably priced, free from dependence on cords or gasoline. But it doesn't work for us. I have come to the overdue conclusion that most machines are not for us and will not be ordering any more heavy, engine-driven products; maybe I'll spring for an extra shovel.
Our UPS driver will thank us.
On the way into town the other day, we saw a sign proclaiming "Community Lawn Sales, 10 miles, Saturday".
I always intend to go to lawn sales but rarely follow through. I don't like getting in and out of the car, driving all over town, and most of these sales consist of children's toys and clothes. But this sounded promising so we headed out early Saturday down West Walnut Road towards a lot of nothing.
It was a lovely ride, lots of hills and trees, and finally a sale. Our arrival coincided with that of two women and two children in an Amish buggy--luckily there was a shaded area to park the horse and the side of the road for us.
We perused the goods--hmmm, children's toys and clothes. We popped back in the car and drove on. The next two were several miles down the road--some broken down chairs and tools and, yes, children's toys and clothes.
Back in the car. The next sign was at a Firehouse. This at least offered a rest room along with the toys and clothes. At this point we both remarked "If this were New York, there would be a bake sale along with the toys, or at least coffee and donuts."
We had to laugh when we saw the sign for the next sale "Yard Sale and Bake Sale." Finally, something that appealed to us. So we bought our only purchase of the day--cookies and a can of Big Red.
Big Red is a midwest phenomenon. I had never tried it and decided this was a good time to sample a bit of hometown soda. The flavor is very "red", it's supposed to be cream soda with lemon and other flavors but it tasted like cherry bubblegum to me. I think this is a case, like poi, that you have to have grown up with to enjoy.
On to the next sale. And there were the Amish ladies again. We all agreed that the pickings were slim at these sales; they were at the limit of their horse and about to turn around but we pressed on, deciding to take a different route home. We did stop at one more sale but the snacks were indeed our only expenditure.
Hills and trees, buggies, cookies, and soda--one of our more enjoyable shopping excursions.
