Moving on - Clean-up (Trash) Day in Washington

A more sure sign of spring, clearer than tulips blooming, more obvious than new tattoos on spring breakers, is the arrival of Spring Clean-up Day, better known as Trash Day in Washington. That starts this week and trash has popped up all over Washington. The photo above is the beginning of our pile. It is a broken suitcase, a melted garden light, and a broken coffee maker. We later added 200 square feet of old carpet and the pad. Currently, only some of the pad and a bit of the carpet is all that's left. I am glad that someone wishes to fill their garage with this crap, because it keeps it out of the landfill. I have always maintained that it would be much easier to back a garbage truck up to Wal-Mart and just load the junk directly from the shelves into the compactor. This would save considerable money within the community and would save all the fuel it takes to go shop at Wal-Mart.

I would also like to comment on the traditions and rites that have grown up around the event. It is now divided into two groups, these are:

• Dumpers
• Trollers

The Dumpers drag the junk to the curb and the Trollers cruise the streets looking to score broken coffeemakers and dirty carpet. It would seem that this would be a symbiotic relationship, but there are exceptions.

1. Relatively neat piles created by Dumpers are destroyed Trollers.
2. Many times piles are created in such a way that the lighter materials are not boosted about the neighborhood by high winds. Disturbed piles may exhibit kite-like behavior during high winds.
3. Trollers may leave materials which were not put there by Dumpers. While it may make a Troller a Dumper in a technical sense, very few items left by Trollers acting as Dumpers are deposited in a way that they don't exhibit the "Kiting" behavior found in point #2.
4. Trollers may act to spread small bits of trash about causing them to widely deposited about the Dumpers yard. This may lead to Pick-up interuptus, where the items deposited by Dumpers become too widely dispersed to be effectively picked up at the moment of collection.

So, regardless of the 4 points above, Clean-up works for me to rid myself of crap that I accumulate in my effort to support our market economy. I would be sorry, for one, to see the tradition disappear or be ruined by well meaning ordinance. So bring it on, I think I can cope.

Just a little reminder you only have 9 more days to vote in our Palapa Poll, please take a moment to help our yard maintenance program.