So, as discussed yesterday, I was preoccupied over the last week or so trying to see the world through my children’s eyes while on vacation. Today I am back to being focused on seeing the world through adult eyes and my eyes weren’t happy at all when I was putting out the trash this morning and had to relocate what felt like one trillion little packing peanuts from a box into a trash bag. Have you ever tried this? It requires the steadiest of hands, skills of the finest surgeon and the patience of a saint, really. For one, the flaps of the box inevitably get in the way during your transfer and launch the peanuts in all directions – except into the bag, of course. Oh, also, you MUST make sure that you are in a completely insulated biodome bubble with NO wind whatsoever, otherwise the peanuts, again, fly in all directions – except into the bag. If you so much as take a breath near the peanuts, then forget about it. No bag.

Ah, then there is the small area at the top of the bag where some of the peanuts land. It’s a netherworld where they’re not quite in the bag, but they didn’t exactly miss, either. Your options are limited – you can attempt to pull up the edges of the bag, whereupon the peanuts will just fly into the air and it will remind you of one of those little snow-dome toys, as the peanuts rain down all over the place like a celebration. or you can choose to just pick them up off the periphery and place them into the bag with your hands, if you have four days. So they’re just sitting there, on the periphery and you are frozen in fear. It turns into a game where basically the world is conspiring against having the peanuts end up in the bag. You’re lucky if, after two hours, you have 10% of the peanuts safely tucked away in the bag.

Which leads me to my next related rant, which is this: why the fark do I have to empty all the boxes and break them down and cut them up anyway? This is potentially my least favorite thing to do. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here before that in order for our town recycling to take boxes away, they have to be broken down and cut up into a certain size in order for the recycling guys to take them – and that size is approximately the size of an atom. It’s really quite ridiculous, to the point that sometimes I just take them to the huge bin at the school that says “cardboard” and dump it all in there. Of course, I have to do this in the dark of the night, wearing all black and a black ski-mask with those little eye-holes because there are stickers ALL over the bin that say “no resident dumping.” I say “fuck that!” If you want to arrest me for recycling, go ahead. I’ll be the talk of the town.

Anyway, back to the weekly recycling haul – I can’t figure out for the life of me why I need to cut the boxes up, because all they do is crush it all when it goes into the truck. So someone please tell me, why do I have to break a box down and cut it up when it just gets crushed by the crusher-thing in the truck anyway? Whatever. My latest thing is that I’ve been cutting the pieces a little bigger each time, just to see what I can get away with.

Finally, the next stage of my national anti-box & peanuts campaign will be asking each and every place where we buy something to ship items to me without a box. That introduces all kinds of potential problems, but there’s a good chance that it will take less time than transferring packing peanuts and breaking down and cutting up boxes. I employed this tactic with the poor souls at Ace Hardware, where Steph and I purchased some porch furniture. They brought it on the truck and I went out there when they pulled in and said they can take it out of the boxes and then take the empty boxes with them. They did! I rule!

Continuing yesterday’s post, here’s my yearbook photo from 1970. Yes, these are really my face. This one made me laugh because a) the glasses are a little crooked, which makes me look high, and b) in the 1990s, I had glasses kinda similar to the ones they’ve put on me here.  I love it: