Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

Out with the old

The problem with buying and replacing furniture is the waste that’s left behind. The sheer amount of cardboard and plastic that have no chance to fit in the ordinary household recycling bin. The old furniture that’s being replaced: how the heck do you throw away an old desk?

Part of the reason I’ve been hesitant to replace my desk and buy a couch (respectively) is dealing with the waste byproduct. I definitely do not want to spend the time putting the old desk on Craigslist and dealing with tire kickers. That thing has been with me since my end of college days, so I feel like I’ve gotten the full monetary use out of it already. Naturally, none of my friends are in need of a desk - we’ve all got our own.

The proper thing to do would be call the garbage collector and schedule a bulk pickup. Households around here get two of those for free, per year. Each time you get to throw away 10 bulk items. And the collector is militant about this: the workers will leave any item over the 10 count right out on the street. They wouldn’t even do you the solid of taking the bulkiest items. Hashtag PSA.

The improper thing to do, aside from driving to an empty highway and dumping the stuff to the side, is to have parents living in an apartment complex with large communal trash bins. All I had to do is ferry the old furniture - broken down, of course - and cardboard waste to my parents and have them dump it. This saves me the pain of storing the old stuff in what little space I have. No matter how generous my landlord is, the garage space is already rather full.

I’m the type of personality that the sooner something gets done, the better. Especially when it comes to getting rid of clutter. For a homebody like me, the home space is sacred, and must be kept pristine as much as possible. I’m glad this new furniture episode is completely behind me now.

The original.

Morning in America

It’s Monday, and you know what the means? It’s garbage pickup day. Why does the garbage man have to come so early? 6:00 AM is usually when the truck comes through the neighborhood, and as always, the process makes a racket loud enough to wake everyone that’s asleep. Why not come at 8:00 AM, like the street-cleaning crew does?

Good thing 6:00 AM is my wakeup time anyways. Not that I purposely synced it to the coming of the garbage truck, mind you. Going to sleep and rising early has been staple habit since the start of the coronavirus almost a year ago. The morning hours of solitude and calm - before anyone else wakes up - are super precious to me. Usually I start the day with typing a few hundred words on this blog.

Today is the Presidents Day holiday, which I almost forgot about. I absolutely do not have the day off today, so it’s not really something I’d pay attention to. While most of my friends are still sleeping soundly, awaiting a peaceful off day from the grind, I’m at the beginning of yet another work week. It should be a relatively quiet day though, because inevitably a bunch of students will think the university has Presidents Day off, so they don’t show up to class.

This was true even before this whole COVID online class madness.

On Sunday, I washed the M2 Competition for the first time since I bought it back in October. The seasonal rain have made it easy to just keep it as is, but it has reached a point of dirtiness that not even heavy rain can wash away. As I grow older, I am definitely less enthusiastic about the parts of car ownership that isn’t driving. I used to detail my cars every two weeks like clockwork. Nowadays I’m perfectly content to not wash it so long as it looks decent from five feet away.

It’s driving that I like, not car washing or changing the oil.

Red rose.

Garbage out

Back when I used to live with my parents, I never understood why so many households on our block would come to dump their garbage in our apartment complex’s large communal bins. What’s so inadequate about their own garbage disposal arrangement? Admittedly it’s easier to simply dump it all into a giant bin, but to willingly take a walk outside of your own home to dump garbage is not something I can comprehend. Why not use your own? You’ve certainly paid for it.

Now that I’ve moved out of the house and into a situation where we have the same three bins - compost, recycle, and garbage - that most households have in San Francisco, I finally understand what’s going on. The reason people dump their garbage in our communal bin is because the standard-issue bins are too small to accommodate the trash output of a typical home. The place where I am renting consist of three persons, including me, and our garbage output easily overwhelms the absolutely tiny 16-gallon black bin. Without alternative disposal methods, there is no way we could fit a week’s worth of trash into it.

Luckily, the blue-colored recycling bin is a decent size, though you’re always one large purchase away from having too much cardboard to throw away in one collection. With the ease of shopping on Amazon these days, which household doesn’t have mountains of shipping boxes to throw away on a weekly basis?

No wonder the communal bin at my parents’ apartment is so damn popular.

The one bin we can’t hope to fill up ever during a regular week is the green compost bin. Being the same size as the recycling bin, a household would have to be consuming an absurd amount of food to have that much food-waste to throw out as compost. I guess the great imbalance between the volume of the general garbage bin and the compost and recycling bins is to create an incentive towards being eco-friendly. It certainly works: very few of us are so fortunate to live close to a communal bin where we can toss out the extra load with impunity.

Bee Are Zetto.