Ken's Boring Life

If I have to live in a town, I am pleased that I live in a small town, but some things are frustrating. Perhaps because it's a small town, things like schedules are lax. Restaurants and other businesses will sometimes close early if business is slow or they might not open because of a family get-together or something, which is frustrating when I have decided to go out to eat or I need something in the afternoon. Even more frustrating is that our town government does the same thing. We have to bring our trash to a town-operated transfer site, which is fine because the $20 per year fee is much cheaper than if we had to pay for trash pickup. A private company offers that service, but I'm not willing to pay for that.

However, when I load smelly trash bags into the car to take to the transfer station on days and at times when they are supposed to be open, only to find that they've closed for unknown reasons, such as that they all wanted to go out to lunch together or whoever was supposed to be manning the gate called in sick, it is frustrating. Now, I'm stuck with trash bags in my car, and, since they usually do this near the end of the week, it might be a few days before they reopen. As it is, they're only scheduled to be open on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

Ironically, what spurred this post is that they are closed today, on a Friday when they are supposed to be open, for what our town manager says was an "employee appreciation day." Plus, they will be closed tomorrow and Monday for Labor Day, and there was a time when I recall that "day" was singular.

So, I have four bags of trash, including foodstuff, since my wife went through the refrigerator and freezer, dumping all the old stuff. I don't want to bring bags of what will soon be rotting food back into the house, and I sure don't want to leave it in the car. If I set it outside, the raccoons and skunks will tear into it.

What I had to do was load the frozen foods that came from the freezer into a couple of styrofoam coolers that I hadn't wanted to trash and which the raccoons might still tear into, although they are pretty thick, and triple bag the less smelly trash bags to store in the house until Tuesday.

 

That's frustrating. I gotta think that others are not happy with that state of affairs.

I take my trash (garbage, cardboard and recyclables) to drop-off points throughout the county. There are 10 of them. I have 3 that I use regularly, depending on whatever other errands I may be running and where those errands might be. Our centers are closed early on the eve of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, and then each of those 3 days. I've never encountered one that was closed when they should have been opened, although I've shown up early on Sunday before 10AM. That would suck to get surprised like that, except that I keep my garbage in the garage anyway because of bears.

There are services out here that will pick up your trash curbside. But my house is 1/2 mile from the curb, so such a service would be pointless. And the guys at the recycling centers are my old-school internet. It's the only way I trust of finding out what's going on in the county.

 

I can see why they would want to do that because it gives the employees a 4-day weekend; but they should have let everyone who lives there know well ahead of time that the garbage dump was going to be closed for that whole time period, so people would not find out the same way that you did.
A little notice on local radio or newspaper would have informed most people that they were closing for the Labor Day weekend holiday, and fitting the appreciation day in there gave everyone that extra day.
Otherwise , they would have had to work most of the holiday weekend.

 

They probably posted a notice in the town hall, but I am only there a few times a year. There was a stream of traffic with people who, like me, had to turn around, so I'm not the only one who didn't know about it.

 

Yeah, it's posted there, but many of their closures (which have probably not been okayed by the town office) are not. However, considering this is not a holiday, it never dawned on me (or seemingly half the rest of the town) that they wouldn't be open. Most of their closures are partial-day closures that are not posted anywhere, such as closing early or taking long lunches, etc.

Posting it at the transfer site a week ahead would have reached more people since most don't visit the town office or the website. The hours are posted on the gate at the transfer site, but they said nothing about a closure today or tomorrow.

 

The coons didn't bother the styrofoam container, but they did what I hadn't expected. They managed to pop open the trash can that I had put the three trash bags in, and rummaged through that instead.

 

Good morning. Getting up before 7 a.m. is unusual for me, but here I am. The night before last, I had a strange night full of lucid dreams. I don't remember any of the specific dreams, but all I had to do was close my eyes, and I was in a dream. If I didn't like it, I could open my eyes and try again. In all of that, I didn't sleep much, though. After going to bed, I finished the book I was working on and read another entire book, some of it before going to sleep, and another large stretch after waking up at 2 or 3 a.m.

Last night, I went to bed just before midnight, which is early but not terribly so, and slept through the night. I woke up sometime after 6 a.m. after dreaming that the paper bag machine I was running had crashed because someone's dress shoe had fallen into it. I think it belonged to the same supervisor who was berating me for not being able to get the machine up and running again. After finding it stuck in the works, I showed it to the supervisor, who walked off with it and later pretended that he knew nothing about a shoe. Consequently, I woke up in a bad mood and couldn't get back to sleep. I tried to get back to sleep to resolve the situation but could not do so. So here I am.

 

I've been gone all day, up at our camp. We'll be showing it to another prospective buyer soon. We're not interested in selling it for anything less than we'll need to buy a house in Michigan, preferably without a mortgage. If I can't move back to Michigan, then I'd just as soon keep the camp. It's a long drive, though.

 

I was coming out of the SMART Recovery meeting I host every Monday night at the library when I fell. I don't even feel like I tripped over anything, and it wasn't as if I had passed out and fallen; I just found myself falling and couldn't recover from it. My head hit the front of my car, pushing my glasses into my nose and causing an abrasion on the side of my face. My arm was scraped up on the sidewalk, and my back hurts from something having to do with it. My glasses are bent.

And my left knee and ankle hurts. I just noticed these.

 

A part of the problem might have been that I was carrying a bunch of stuff because I didn't want to make two trips.