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Health & Fitness

New in Town: We Love Our Garbage Man!

II never had to ask someone to take my garbage before!

In a recent post, I mentioned the previously-unheard-of (for me) activity of arranging for private garbage pickup, and, in doing so, may have implied that our options were limited.

What I meant to say was that, of course it would be silly for each home in a neighborhood to have garbage pick-up from different companies, especially if they were all on the same schedule, so that on, say, Wednesday mornings, it would look like a herd of rhinoceroses was stampeding down the block, inexplicably going backwards into people’s driveways.

In any case, I couldn’t be happier with our service.

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Although I had arranged for pick-ups to begin on a Monday, the truck came for the first time the previous Thursday, while we were waiting for our moving truck to arrive with our actual stuff, which was somewhat like a garbage delivery.

It so happened that we did have some trash from things we had moved ourselves, so I opened the garage door, and pulled out the cheap plastic garbage bins we had had the foresight to purchase.

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The guy dumped the trash into the back of the truck while saying, "You just move in?" I said, "Today, actually." So he said, "You got empty boxes?"

And it turns out they take boxes! We didn’t even have to break them up. I was thrilled because I had been worried about what I was going to do with the 200+ boxes that were about to be delivered. (As it turned out, we solved some of that problem simply by not opening about half of them.)

Then I decided to push my luck. Also in my garage was a 6 foot wide, cloth-covered thingy that had been over the living room sliding doors and had been deposited in the garage by the painters.

"Do you take stuff like that?" I asked my refuse professional.

"Sure," he said, with what I can only refer to as an odd amount of enthusiasm.

And he fed it to his truck, which ate it right up.

Turns out they take everything!

Twice a week, my refuse professional shows up like clockwork, backs his truck up my steeply-inclined driveway, and removes whatever we have left outside the garage for him, kind of like Santa Claus except with garbage instead of cookies. Over the first few weeks, he took: the wire racks we had ripped out of closets; the 12-inch buttonless TV we had taken with us to Connecticut for no apparent reason; the blinds the previous owners had left that turned out to be virtually transparent; all the boxes we actually emptied; even some furniture we decided we didn’t need.

In fact, once we were settled in, we found ourselves struggling to create enough garbage. There were a couple of Thursdays when I only put out one of our two bins, and I felt like our guy would be disappointed in us. We’ve even chosen not to include a trash compactor in our kitchen remodeling plans because it would mean having less garbage by volume.

We love our garbage pick up!

So much so, in fact, that we’ve decided our refuse professional deserves better than the cheap garbage cans we got with the lids that fall off, so we bought new ones. Just one problem:

How exactly do you throw out a garbage can?

 For more on our adventures as first-time homeowners at age 57, and moving to Stamford, visit http://theupsizers.wordpress.com/

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