Big ball of garbage

I'm not one to complain........oh wait, I guess I am and apparently I'm rather good at it. It's what I do. I'm sorry I'm not perfect like all you optimistic non-complainers out there. When life sucks, I complain about it. Anyway....

Garbage. It never used to be an issue that caused me stress. That was in Fargo. Here, it's a whole different story. Let me explain...

Our garbage bags are roughly the size of plastic Hornbacher's grocery bags, without the handles and not as sturdy. Needless to say, they fill up pretty fast even though we crush and fold everything into oblivion. Now, it wouldn't necessarily be that terrible if there were an unlimited quantity we could throw away each week. But that isn't the case. We have one skinny trash container outside we can fill each week. This container holds about 5 or 6 tiny garbage bags. We go through one a day, at least. (don't forget, we still have diapers to throw away) It seems like we are always stressing about not producing so much garbage. We wouldn't want to overfill the trash container. This was a lesson learned the second week here. On a wild impulse Andreas decided to sneak one more bag in the garbage bin and this prevented the handy dandy lid from closing all the way. Garbage day rolls around and since the trash bin was full beyond 'capacity', Mr. Garbage man didn't take it. He just threw a new grey garbage bag for the container on top. Sweet, that certainly helps our garbage problem. Our garbage container is overflowing, we have more garbage we could have thrown away since we just moved in and all, but let's just NOT take what's in the bin because the lid won't shut. Makes sense. Garbage men got it easy over here, let me tell you. I didn't think I would survive the garbage issue when my honey discovered that you can purchase EXTRA trash bags and you are allowed to set one of these special extra bags along side the regular trash bin each week. We are saved!

This experience is definitely teaching me to be more conscious of how much garbage we produce and we are taking steps to reduce it. We recycle all our plastic bottles. I burn everything I can in our wood stove (I've discovered my inner pyromaniac). And like I said before, we fold our milk cartons and everything else I can't burn. We're doing pretty good. Sometimes we don't even need that extra bag. I'm sure Oprah will be calling one of these days to invite us to her show.