Saturday, October 4, 2008

Axel F and Williams-Sonoma styrofoam

Last night I spent about an hour with Ryan trying to cram our "new" mini couch in to the spare room. We ended up [sssh!] taking part of the door frame out because our house was built 100 years ago and I guess people were narrower then.

A fat person could not live in our house. Yesterday I was carrying bags of styrofoam packing material (damn you Williams-Sonoma! Can't you think of a friendlier way to pack wedding presents than stuffing the boxes full to the bring with such guilt-giving material??) and imagining what it would be like were those bags of styrofoam actually unshiftable collections of fat, attached to my body and yes, you would not be able to maneuver comfortably from the front door to the living room, nor would you be able to enter the spare room or reach the closet in the bedroom.

Morbid? Yes. But it was for science.

We took the bags of styrofoam to a dumpster near Wegman's because Ithaca has this really strange way of collecting garbage where they charge you by the amount as well as weight. You have to buy tags for each collection, which on one hand works great because we never had enough garbage in Palo Alto for weekly collection, but we had to pay for it anyway. This way, we put it out when we have enough and stick a tag on it and they pick it up. The tags are for 35 lbs of garbage per bag/can. The silly thing is, they will not take your garbage if it is more than 35 lbs, even if it's all in one can. This leaves you the difficulty of having even more garbage the next time - this has happened to our neighbour twice now. They don't even give you a "warning" as I'm sure they would in the litigious neighbourhoods of Palo Alto, they just leave your garbage. And if you have lots and lots of lightweight garbage (ie styrofoam), you have to put multiple tags on it anyway, despite it being under the weight limit by a lot, because it has to fit in so many conatainers. I'll be damned if I have to pay $16 for the garbage men to take away 5lbs of styrofoam! So we went dumpster hunting and were successful in thoroughly shirking our responsibility, in the name of being cheapskates, all the while pretending that we were doing something highly illegal instead of marginally immoral and that "Axel F" from Beverly Hills Cop was playing in the background.

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