Life in the 'Burbs

We went to OSH this morning, and purchased ant traps, also some clear caulk--I think sealing the cracks in the cabinetry will help--and some more Simple Green, plus Simple Green wipes. I have distributed the traps. I keep thinking how much harder this would be if I had children, or dogs, in the house.

The city of El Cerrito refused to take my recycling last week. It was left behind--two giant tubs of it, now turning yellow in the sun--with a snarky form note checked in many boxes to let us know the kinds of sins we had committed. Primarily, I think it is a shatnez issue--we had mixed paper and plastic in the same tub, and bundled paper IN plastic. Also we had included clamshell plastic packaging.

We had also practiced sorcery, settled in the land of Egypt, showed mercy to idolaters, offered peace to Ammon and Moab, made offerings without salt, sheared a dedicated beast, fed the Pesach offering to a ger toshav (since this is August, we had to thaw it out first), delayed payment of vows, barbecued and eaten the flesh of a stoned ox, added to the Written Law, and appointed a king not born an Israelite.

I think we can actually blame that last one on the Supreme Court, but by that time the recycling guy was just checking boxes with abandon.

The recyclers were pretty mad at us about all this sinning, and as I say, they left us with the recycling. A few days later I got a packet in the mail (three WEEKS after we signed on as new customers), explaining how their system works.

Basically, they will only take a few highly resellable kinds of items. No plastic bags. No clamshell containers. No milk cartons. No frozen food boxes. It has to be sorted. Plastic cannot be packaged in paper. Paper cannot be packaged in plastic. We cannot yoke an ox and a llama together when mowing the lawn, or they won't take our lawn clippings. These are the rules.

In San Francisco, you just dump all the recyclables into the recycle bin, and they sort it all out somewhere. Sigh...