I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Monday, May 21, 2007

Bring Out Your Dead

Well, this weekend I started on my summer sunburn rotation. The first one isn't bad, it's the later ones where I peal. I stood out in the sun for most of Saturday morning unloading cars and trucks of the various detris that had piled up in peoples lives. And seriously people, don't let your stuff get like what we see every year. It's just disgusting. I've helped our streets guys now for the past four years (they get paid per hour, me, I'm salary on my night job). And I'm seeing that each year has a theme. Last year was computers. We tossed dozens of them. I took my little toolkit with me this year to hank some hard-drives out to create my own external RAID system. Not a single computer this year.

This year's theme was moldy clothes. Which we couldn't accept (general garbage). I mean many people with multiple (one truck had at least 10) black garbage bags full. One pick-up truck with the bed stacked in general garbage (including food stuffs, fortunately all bagged) which we couldn't accept. Seriously, where do they keep this stuff?

We filled three roll-off containers full of stuff (we use the back-hoe once we have to close the door). We didn't fill the two metal only containers (we get those for free and get some scrap money back, last year was a whopping $235, total cost of the weekend is about $2300). So, a succesful day. Now I just need to schedule in a contractor to clean up the brush piles (no open burning in the Village).

3 comments:

Todd Wheeler said...

Strange. I'm reading a lot about garbage lately.

Was this a household waste day?

Camille Alexa said...

I was going to say, "Gee, have you been comparing garbage notes with Mr. Wheeler?"

Steve Buchheit said...

Todd, nope, no general garbage stuff, the things they should be putting out on the curb.

I should say here that as the Village, we don't offer curbside pick-up. The individual residents need to contract that service themselves. We have a good marketplace of 4 companies that they can contact. For myself, one company offers prepaid bags (that is, you buy the bag which includes the cost of pick-up) for $22/12 bags. This is better than $56 per month for their big general pick-up contract (which has way more than we need, something along the lines of 6 bags a week, we barely fill one). None of the companies pick up big things for free (like couches, which we had about 8 this past weekend). We could offer our residents such a service, but it would be more expensive (extra people to process billing, etc) and require higher taxes (to offset haulage charges).

And I didn't know you were reading about garbage (I need to check your "Reading" notes more closely).