I have a “mulch pile” in the back yard. I put the fall leaves there, and my husband buries household compost in it. No pick up service where I live.
The local council will collect “garden waste” but you need a special bin or bags for it and there is a small fee for collection.
I don’t tend to bother because I compost most of our lawn clippings etc and if I have too much I live about a 10-15 minute walk from the dump (sorry - “reuse and recycling centre”), which has a garden waste area.
We’ve had a third bin for “yard waste” for as long as I’ve lived here – stuff like leaves, grass clippings, prunings, and similar. But starting last year California started mandating compost collection. So the former yard waste bin is now the compost bin. In addition to yard waste, you can now include food scraps, “food soiled paper” (paper napkins, coffee filters, paper towels if they’re soiled with food, pizza boxes, etc.), and even some thing that can’t go in a backyard compost pile, like chicken bones. They do want you to put the “kitchen compost” in a composable bag first.
Why can’t I stop here and let the car turn in front of me AND have pie ?
We don’t have municipal pickup of anything here – you can hire a private company or schlep your own over to the transfer station; I hire because I don’t want to haul garbage in the same vehicles I move produce for sale in – and the private companies that pick up trash and recyclables don’t take compost. There’s a private person in the area that has a small business doing this, though, and I think they pick up; but I have my own compost pile on the farm, and don’t need or want to send it elsewhere.
We have a compost tumbler in the back which I put plant matter food waste and rabbit litter into.
For the same reason, when I’m in the diamond lane on a freeway and the #2 lane to the right is at a standstill I slow down to 45mph. I have seen too many times people suddenly deciding to risk a ticket and dart into the empty, tempting lane without checking first and the slower speed gives me time to react.
This bugs the hell out of the ones who want to zoom along at 70+ but fuck 'em. In the five or ten miles available the time difference isn’t worth the risk.
I had someone do me a traffic courtesy just this morning returning from Trader Joe’s.
I was on a two lane street with a 35 mph speed limit, and I was in the right lane because I was going to make a right at the next corner (my street), but the cement mixer in front of me blocked my view of the moving truck parked in the right lane ahead of me (the cement mixer turned right at the corner before my corner but it was too late for me to switch lanes). Because there were cars in the left lane, I resigned myself to waiting until those cars cleared. They weren’t going too fast yet because they’d just started from a red light. But the car slightly behind me in the left lane stopped to let me in, so I could swoop around the moving van and make my turn.
I gave a thank-you wave and everbody moved on as per normal.
For a while, the breakdown lane of 128 was open to rush hour traffic, and I used it a few times. But it was too hair-raising to be going at (say) 50 when the next lane of traffic was creeping at 20 or less…nobody ever cut directly in front of me, but I saw it happen ahead of me.
My trash and recycling get picked up by a private company. It’s paid for by my HOA fees. There is a separate bin and a separate day for recycling pick up. I know it goes out separately. I also figure the company will deal with it whatever makes them the most profit.
“The rules of the road are strict and behaving differently causes confusion that can lead to hazards.”
I couldn’t have stated it better myself. I’ve investigated many waves through accidents. Giving up your right of way confuses people makes for a dangerous situation. It’s much better if everyone understands the rules of the road and follows them.
Basically any videogame that is super twitchy, or a platformer, I’ve always been terrible at, even as a kid.
None of the above, because I didn’t play any of them.
(Yes, I’m old. And by the time even the old ones came around, I’d developed an aversion to small noisy places full of flashing lights.)
This happened to my father when I was a kid. Left lane driver stopped to let someone turn in front of them, but the turner didn’t look to see if anyone else (aka my dad) was coming.
Made me leery of taking that kind of turn unless traffic is non-existent or stopped completely.
We buy peanut butter made at the farm market nearby. I haven’t had commercial peanut butter in decades.
Rocco, our parrot loves peanut butter as a treat, and says “peanut butter”. For a while I was reinforcing his behavior by bringing him a little bit of peanut butter each time he said the words, but he became too demanding.
My video game thread…
I played Berzerk and even its sequel Frenzy to death, but those had a definite chess-like strategic undercurrent to them. Robocop on the other hand was simply a case of being dumped into the middle of an arena with no walls where everything is trying to kill you. I tried it a few times and gave up in frustration.
Dragon’s Lair is fundamentally different than the others of course-I simply was bewildered by the seemingly arbitary nature of the directions and timings of your necessary moves. I have always loathed One True Way kind of games, and this was no exception. If it weren’t so expensive I would have played just to see Dirk the Daring die in all the creatively hilarious ways they came up with.
Missile Command demanded precise control of that bloody trackball, something I simply could never get the hang of. Seems there was always one missile that somehow managed to sneak through your barrage by the skin of its teeth, but it only took a few before you were toast.
Crazy Climber was incredibly easy and stupid-until the final level, where pianos or something would come crashing down on your ass from above one after the other. The thing is if you were in the wrong spot when the next one showed up, you often had no chance at all to avoid it, which I found to be massively unfair (you can only guess correctly for so many trials). Gave up in disgust after a few tries.
Gravitar is the only one of the 5 which I had respect for, because unlike the others I felt like it played fair, for the most part. Some of the tunnels were so insanely tight tho that you’d run out of lives before you could get through them.
Honorable mention for Sinistar, which again while hard seemed fair in terms of its rules and challenges, difficult as they might have been. Plus loved its synthesized voice. But in an era where I could play other games on one quarter for an hour or more (Battlezone, Defender, Asteroids, Berzerk/Frenzy, even memorized the Pac-Man patterns before that got very boring), I got tired of constantly having to feed the machine just to get a reasonably satisfying experience out of it.
Ghosts 'n Goblins was my nemesis. It was pretty much “Lose armor and then die” in under 30 seconds every time.
I agree with the above on “Dragon’s Lair”; it was purely a “Did you guess right at this random juncture? If not, gimme more money” game (see also: Cliff Hanger).
Battlezone was always fun though. And both of the Tron games.
I played several of them, but not enough to feel i should vote in a “which was hardest” poll.
My trash and recycling are also picked up by a private company, that we contracted with. But there’s currently only one player in that market, it having recently purchased all the competition. My other choice is to bring it to the dump myself. I do that for toxic waste, large waste, and especially valuable recyclables (large quantities of aluminum) but that’s about it.
I picked “smartphone” for the in flight entertainment since it’s closest to what I use, my iPad. I monitor emails, visit SDMB, and sometimes read an e-book.