On the Lam

The Mister's family lives in a small city about 40 miles from us, and we see them fairly frequently. We were there for the annual "Christmas Gastro-Intestinal Challenge and Gift Opening Free-for All" last week.

My sister-in-law has the shin-dig at her house every year, for which I am eternally grateful. Not only does her husband cook the turkey, he deals with it hijacking all the room in the fridge for three days beforehand, AND the whole carcass leftovers, too. And they seem to be able to put a magnificent dinner on the table without anyone bursting into tears or swearing a blue streak. We can't do that here.

The city where they live has a garbage disposal system where you pay for tags, and each container of garbage has to have a tag attached to be picked up. The idea is that people will reduce their production of garbage if they have to pay to have it hauled away. In actuality, it means that everyone pays for their garbage to go, but if you have enough money, you don't really care about it.

As Christmas, and specifically, Christmas dinner, generates a metric tonne of garbage per person, per day, my sister-in-law asked if we would mind taking some of their excess garbage home with us, mostly light, non-smelly stuff. No problem, says I, our city's garbage system has a four bag limit, so we could easily take another couple of bags because we didn't host Christmas dinner, and had plenty of room in our allotment.

So we took a few bags, one of which was a big, see-through bag of white packing styrofoam. We had to wait a few days before garbage day, and I noticed that the styrofoam bag escaped frequently from where it was stored in the breezeway, and I had to corrall it from the front lawn more than once.

Yesterday, we got a snow squall off Lake Huron, and it got really, really windy. And when I went to put out the garbage tonight, that bag of styrofoam was just.....gone. Like, gone from our house entirely. I looked in the backyard, the front yard and even up and down the street. No sign of it. Gone.
So, somewhere in our neighbourhood is a renegade bag of fugitive styrofoam. Maybe it went the 40 miles home to my sister-in-law's house.