Garbage Hell

It was 16° here yesterday. And the sun came out for a while in the afternoon so it was a delightful afternoon to do yard work. I took Sheba out for a walk at nine o’clock last night in a t-shirt and I was warm as toast.

T was a delicious day for doing yard work. I’ve filled three four-gallon containers with pinecones and I’ve done perhaps thirty percent of the yard. I’m going to dry them and use them for kindling. And I have to chop up a lot of my wood for the studio woodstove that’s going to be smaller than my home woodstove.

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I’m still reeling over garbage management. It takes up a lot of time and requires a lot of space. I’ve a closet indoors for sorting receptacles and then I have a large area in my shed where I keep larger containers to manage separated materials.

I went to GIRO, the recycling station, yesterday. I go every week. I took bags of Styrofoam (refused even though the Nanaimo District says they should accept it), and two full boxes of old videotapes left here by the previous tenant. The GIRO staff made me remove the tapes and the paper wrappers from the plastic cases and the accepted the tapes and the paper but not the plastic!

I was pissed and fed up with all this garbage about garbage. But what could I do. Then a nice man told the man taking care of me to loosen up and he said they’d accept the plastic cases. But I had to bring all the Styrofoam home.

I asked them if they wanted my fancy front door (they do!) and if they could pick it up (they can’t), I asked them about where to take the mountain of plastic blind parts I have (Nanaimo) and if they take old screws and bolts and stuff (they do).

When the studio reno is finished I’ll be hiring a waste removal service to take away post-construction detritus and I’ll add the blinds and my rejected Styrofoam. It’ll be taken to the Nanaimo dump where you can pay a fee to rid yourself of the unwanted.

See what I mean about the complexity of garbage management? The garbage men here don’t pick up your stuff if you make errors in your sorting. They have not accepted my recycling container for a month because I keep putting things in that they don’t accept by mistake.

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I decided today to put a large window in the studio’s east wall. It will be a wonderful addition as the view is a lovely one of Pinecone Park.

The new ceiling trusses went in yesterday but there’s change in the look of the place from the day before. Later today when the old trusses come out, I’ll take another photo because it will reveal how much higher the new space will be.

There’re now two lights on the studio’s outside north wall with motion detector activation so whenever I go out for wood at night they come on. It’s a nice addition to the courtyard.

And I raked the front yard and it looks much nicer — to me at least. As I keep hammering away and just tidying up what is already here, the place looks better and better.

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I had to call about the cistern. I’m dubiously optimistic ABC Waterworks will actually do the work. But I got through the conversation without stuttering very much at all — so little that I neither self-identified as a stutterer nor apologized. It was nice.

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The Jareds were coming this weekend but they bailed. However, Dwight is coming over for my birthday, though. It’s going to be interesting because we are best buddies but we rarely spend more than an hour together.