What do you suppose are the odds? I called the Mayor's Office to ask if they were ever going to get around to doing the last collection of yard waste for the year --- three weeks after we put out our last yard waste --- a mere two hours before a truck finally came around to clean up our street. Weird how the world aligns sometimes, isn't it?
Yard waste collection's been a mess this year. Last year too, but somehow for some strange reason the problem didn't get better just because we were all bored of it. But complicating the cleanup of leaves has been the unseasonably warm autumn. Like, we didn't really get autumn weather until about last week. The leaves didn't start falling until about twenty minutes ago, so getting them raked and bagged has been delayed. The city made confusing, halfhearted announcements of yard waste collection being extended. If we had not destroyed the climate, autumn would have arrived in late September, early October at that latest and the leaves been finished by early November at the latest. Here, they were still clinging to the trees by Thanksgiving.
We've bagged fewer of our leaves the last few years, since the discovery of how well the lawn mower mulches them down, and that a certain amount of that is good for the local insects and the gardens. And as we've had some fewer trees. But there's still more leaves than we can use, and those would be nice to have out of the goldfish pond. Also, our jack-o-lanterns disintegrated into slimy heaps that fit into the lawn bags. So ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had set them in the lawn waste bags three weeks ago, for the first of several announced last collections, and looked unhappily out the window every day at how they hadn't been collected.
So this afternoon I called the city trash collectors and asked if they were still doing the last collection. The woman answering said she was pretty sure they had already done it and asked if there were other houses on the street that had been missed. There were, yes. And then I was on hold again and someone at the Mayor's Office picked up. So I explained yeah, our street never got yard waste pickup. They explained how usually they were pretty good about getting streets that they missed but that there was a truck out today doing pickups.
As they picked up the trash bags with the jack-o-lanterns, the former pumpkins rolled out into the street, and the trash collector had to lob them into the hopper.
Let's take in a few more pictures of twilight decorations around the neighborhood. Or at least sights along the way.
And here's the peculiar mansion from the late 20s in the neighborhood (what is an attached three-car garage doing in a house of that vintage?), a couple blocks away and opposite the street from a Jersey Giant sandwich shop. It's got a dignified understatement in its decoration.
And then there was sunset, which was of course about four times more gloriously in its colors than this picture. (I mean, it was better looking but it wasn't that much better looking, I don't want to mislead you.)
Oh yeah, so that house that burned down this summer was demolished, looks like long ago. I'm surprised the vinyl siding on the house next door hasn't been repaired and I can only imagine this results from some insurance nightmare rivalling my car problems.
Trivia: In 1914 France's army completed its mobilization ahead of Germany's. Source: The First World War, Hew Strachan.
Currently Reading: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, LeRoy Ashby. (Why 1830? Well, you gotta start somewhere and Ashby uses 'Jersey Jumper' Sam Patch's final leap over a waterfall as a good marker for the contemporary idea of entertainment-for-its-own-sake becoming an American ideal.)
All my attempts to build up a lead on this have failed; I was still writing paragraphs 90 minutes after deadline. But My Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z: Atlas published on Wednesday, so I haven't broken this yet!
