$#@%^&@!

our fair city has brought in a new waste management system, which sees homeowners paying variable taxes based on the amount of trash that they put out--i think i may have reported on this a while back. i wholeheartedly support this, and wish the new program every success. it makes lots of sense to me...if you can recycle, compost and otherwise reduce your household waste, then you shouldn't have to pay the same taxes as someone who can't bring themselves to sort their recyclables.

we have been quite smugly putting out a couple of small plastic grocery bags of trash in our tiny garbage bin every couple of weeks...we once went a month without having our garbage bin emptied because we didn't consider it full enough to justify having the garbage truck idling in front of our house during collection.

i suppose instead of being self-satisfied and complacent we should have been chaining our garbage bin to our porch and writing our address on it in big sharpie pen, and realized that we are surrounded by people who create so much garbage that they have to GO AND STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S GARBAGE BIN in order to have properly presented garbage for the city to collect. jesus. we are now going to have to pay our fair city $50 for a new garbage bin. garbage put out in anything but an approved, registered bin does not get collected.

this is a test of my endorsement of the whole program, and of my beloved mayor miller. i don't actually know much about the man, and i do know many people who say things like 'feh, that miller, he's a bum'. i can't even recall if i voted for him, but i do like him and the things he is trying to do to make our city better. the garbage plan is an excellent one, but suffers from the growing pains associated with any kind of transition. i bet when this idea was being passed around nobody thought of a way to deal with mass bin thefts. i don't even really mind the $50 fee for the bin--apparently tons of these are being stolen all over the city, and well, someone has to pay for the production and delivery of them, right? i do sincerely hope someone at city hall figures out how to not punish people for losing their bins to theft. it was my hope that if they knew we were simply replacing a stolen tiny bin instead of upsizing to a bigger one that they would offer us a free replacement, but not dice. i can't say i blame them, really.

nonetheless, i am still pretty ticked off at this, and wish the person who stole our bin (but so thoughtfully removed the bag of garbage that was in it and left it under our porch, along with a few empty beer boxes) a bad case of bedbugs and a guilty conscience. (i also wish this on my neighbour john, and my boss at the dog food factory, for reasons that i may go into some other time). may all of them sleep badly tonight! grr.