What She Shovels

We have lived in our house almost a year now, and while we’ve settled into life in Woodland quite well, Wednesday’s trash pickup still hasn’t sunk in. For the previous two years, our trash day was Monday. So every Sunday night after the Simpsons, we’d haul out the trash and recycling to the curb. A year since my trash day has been Monday, I still want to haul the trash out on Sunday night. It’s some sort of “weekend coming to a close” ritual or something.

The other issue is the trash truck comes early Tuesday mornings to the printing company whose parking lot is behind our back fence. So most Tuesdays, I wake up with a start, jump out of bed, throw shoes on and run downstairs to take the trash out, thinking the sound of the truck is our trash truck. Sometimes I manage to remember before I’m actually out of bed, but it’s been more often than I like to remember that I go all the way downstairs, take all the trash bins out to the street and wonder why they don’t get picked up. I’ve finally started looking around to see if our neighbors have theirs out, so on mornings like today I only get the first bin out to the driveway before I realize it’s Tuesday.

In other house related news, the gardens are looking lov-er-ly. The tomatoes, corn, peas, jalepeños and bell peppers have delicious fruits on them getting closer to ripening every day. The new bed that the boys made over the weekend now contains more corn, watermelon, zucchini, carrots, more tomatoes, beans and some other things I’m not remembering right now.

Future plans include:
- another citrus tree or two (grapefruit and kumquat perhaps);
- some kind of decking or patio and benches throughout the backyard;
- the continued (intentional) death of all (bermuda) grass in the 10 sq ft of “lawn” we have out front to be replaced by an attractive non-mowing groundcover that looks good with roses (maybe creeping thyme);
- and some non-foxtail plants in the side and back yards.
There are lots of plans and slowly some of them are taking shape.