Garbage day

Whenever there's a long weekend, garbage day shifts back a day. I know that this is no problem for ordinary, responsible people, but we're still struggling to not put plates on top of the computer or use the bookshelf as a coffee table.

Now, I know it could be worse (remember when I lived in the Mt Waddington house? We'd fill the full-sized garbage can in the kitchen every two days or so, and then just toss in into the garage to wait for garbage day, which we would inevitably forget until we had thirty or forty garbage bags in there, and then we'd have to cast around for someone who owned a truck, but not a nice one, because we didn't want to throw our rotting detritus in a nice truck, and not the last person who helped us out, because we couldn't stomach telling someone that yes, we'd done it again and could we please borrow their truck again. Side story: there was a pool table taking up the middle of the garage, and the mail slot was in the door on the far side, but you couldn't just open that door to get the mail because we'd accidentally jammed it shut, so you had to go in through the house/garage door and down the Walk of Terror between the pool table and the Temple of Refuse in order to get the mail. Usually, two people would come to the door and holler 'RAT' because then the rat would move, and we would know that it was across the garage - in the pile of old coffee makers, say - and not in the garbage, and then one of us would proceed to fetch the mail while the other kept a wary eye out. So one time, Chels was keeping the eye out and I was fetching the mail and the rat was up in its ceiling hidey-hole and I turned to come back, and the garbage bags rustled. They rustled, people! Rat-rustled! That meant we had two or more rats! We both stood there and screeched until I could summon the courage to dash up the Walk of Terror and back into the house. The mail was just junk and bills. return-to-story-sum-up after ridiculously long tangent - Joel, me, garbage day) and I know that, relatively speaking, two people make very little garbage at all, but we've missed every garbage day since ours moved to Friday (that's two, if you're counting) because who thinks of garbage on a Friday? Fridays, you're thinking about the things you have to get done so you an enjoy your weekend, you're thinking about sleeping in, and Halloween, and whatever. You aren't thinking about taking out the garbage.

Yesterday, I was hanging out with the A-A-A-Team, and because of the strike we couldn't make our annual trip to the Stanley Park Spooky Train so we opted to go out for dinner and then carve pumpkins instead. I asked for the pumpkin seeds, because I'm convinced I'm going to roast them and then munch them as a healthy snack, and four pumpkins is a lot of pumpkin seeds. I would have loved to have taken the whole bag of flesh home with me, spread it out somewhere, and picked the seeds out that way, but then I'd be left with this bag of seedless flesh and, as previously mentioned, Joel and I have forgotted garbage day twice. That is to say, we have no room for unnecessary bags of flesh. So I had to go through the bucket while the boys were dumping their pumpkin-face-parts into it, picking out slippery seeds and generally getting slimed. It was both hilarious and nasty.

My pumpkin looks awesome. I will post a picture for you later.