Recycling Day

I love it when my weekly walk to the library coincides with the garbage/recycling pickup. It gives me all sorts of things to think about while walking, rather than the usual "God, I hate exercising" and "man, these are heavy; why do I take out so many books?".
Our city, in it's infinite wisdom, has an 8-day garbage/recycling pick-up, which means that the day moves from week to week, and we end up going a week every month without pick-up at all. (With the Easter holidays just recently gone by, we've ended up with twelve days between pick-ups.) We have a four container limit to the garbage, which usually isn't a problem, but we've filled to overflowing our four recycling containers. Combine that with a windy day, and you've got a street that looks like Mardi Gras.

I also listen to music or the radio while I walk, which can be good (i.e. takes my mind off the fact that I am, indeed, exercising) or bad (i.e. I tend to walk in time to the music, which probably looks ridiculous.)
But when the walk jibes with recycling day, I barely need distractions to keep me amused. The contents of my neighbour's boxes occupies me utterly.

• I had no idea so many people ate pizza. At least half of all the recyclers had pizza boxes in them. We must be the pizza-eatingest neighbourhood ever. And, in case you were wondering, Little Caesars outnumbers Domino's by miles; at least 2 to 1.
• Our neighbourhood can at least boast of having the cleanest clothes in all the land. Almost every house disposed of at least one large, plastic laundry soap bottle. Some of them had two or three. (I have been enlightened to the fact that the Loudshoes family is an anomaly, in that we only do three or four loads of laundry a week. Lots of people I know do three loads a day. Either we are the most slovenly family that ever lived, or very neat eaters.)
• Lots and lots of wine bottles. One house tossed out about 12 empty wine bottles, and the same of "Pina Colada Mix". That must have been some party.
• Clearly, there are some issues surrounding fibre intake around here. I saw tons of "All Bran" boxes, and they can't all be for muffins, now, can they?
• Plenty of cereal boxes. Like, 8 or 10 for some houses. Now, my kids would happily exist entirely on cold, sugared cereal for their subsistance, but at 6 bucks a box, that's not going to happen. Also, little kids hopped up on 8 boxes for "Sugar Balls O' Chemicals" must be hard to live with.
• Apple juice. Everyone drinks apple juice, it seems, except us. We rarely have juice in the house, of any stripe, mostly because I don't drink it. (I don't ban anyone else from having it, but they don't do the grocery shopping.) If there was a sudden drop in apple juice production, I think there are plenty of people who would be in scrounging around like raging meth addicts for the stuff.
• The bulk of the recyclers was newspapers. I'm happy to see that so many of my fellow suburbanites read the newspaper, even if it is The Globe and Mail, which I dislike. ("That Right Wing Rag" is how it is most commonly referred to here. If there's ever one around, I make sure to use it to line the cat's litter box.)
• Diet Coke and Coke Zero seem to be in no danger of going out of business. By far, they were the fillers for the blue boxes. The Loudshoes house was a major contributer in this area.
• I saw one house that was getting rid of what looked like about 5o sardine cans. What on earth could that be all about??

And so I happily spent my morning walk, examining the contents of the blue boxes, and keeping myself mightily entertained. It should be recycling day every week.