My Garbageman

My garbageman is cute!

Well, I don't know that for sure, but you see so few blonde women driving 20-yard packers that you really can't help but assume that any blonde woman so employed would be cute. Why do I think that? I dunno. It just seems appropriate somehow.

Like a lot of suburbanites, I've put a lot of thought into discarding things that won't quite fit in the trash can. Once I poured a concrete slab for a storage building and had about a wheelbarrow full of excess concrete. So I shoveled it out on the ground and over the course of about a month threw the chunks away in the residential trash can (or "barrel", as my private waste management company calls it).

Somehow we ended up with a huge snarl of discarded hog wire, so I cut it into sections, folded the sections up into things about the size of throw pillows, and jumped up and down on them to crush them flat. Now I'm in the process of throwing the pillows away about six at at a time, a rate high enough to show progress but not so high that the garbagewoman complains that I'm filling the barrel with junk instead of trash. (I'm occasionally tempted to slip them into my neighbor's chronically unattended dumpster, but that would take the fizz out of the festivities, I think).

One advantage of living in the sticks is that one can burn certain kinds of trash, like broken chairs and wooden pallets. Mind you, you can't burn it just to get rid of it. If you do that, the volunteer fire department shows up and you end up in no end of hot water. But if you stand near the fire, preferably grasping a beer, you're not disposing of trash by burning it, you've enjoying a bonfire. And that's permissible. I'm not sure how the volunteer fire department knows the difference, but they always seem to.

So instead of cutting up old wood and throwing it away a few pieces at a time, I accumulate it in shabby piles and occasionally burn it. While grasping a beer, of course.

One year, not long after I bought my first house, I was trying to plant something and found a huge mass of rocks, concrete debris, nails, broken drywall and general junk the builders had buried just outside my back door. I shoveled the whole mass into the trash barrel and managed, through a process involving much wheezing and grunting, to wheel it to the street. I was on second shift at the time and was home when the garbage truck came. It stopped. The arms unfolded and grabbed the can. The engine roared. The can didn't move. The truck driver gave up and moved on.

You'll pardon me for drifting, of course. I'm just killing time before I have to go into town for rehab. Whee.