A Day At home

Keith spent most of the morning digging a bigger hole for their main bathroom shower to drain into. Originally, there was a hose going out to the bananas, which thrived on the grey water. He decided to make an underground drain field instead, but it isn’t big enough. The shower drains slowly, if at all, especially when there had been a lot of rain. 

In the mean time, Betsy and I took the recycling to the transfer station. There were big skip bins for green, brown, and clear glass. Another large bin was for cardboard, and smaller ones for PET plastic, non-PET plastic, aluminum cans, steel cans, paper, and others I’ve forgotten. We dutifully dumped our many pieces in their respective places. As I dumped our box of clear glass, a woman threw a big box into the cardboard bin. I told her that I wished I’d noticed she had that because we were looking for cardboard to take home. She just looked at me oddly, so I added, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” No response.

I continued to dump our stuff, when I noticed her husband also throw a big cardboard box into the bin. Dang, they were too far down for me to pick back out. I mentioned this to Betsy, and the attendant overheard me. She volunteered to climb up on the bin, lean over the edge, and pitch cardboard out to us. I was sure she was going to fall head first into it. We filled up the back of the car. More paths of sawdust in our future.

After dropping the boxes off at home, we were off to the closed bicycle shop where it was my turn to retrieve cardboard from a recycling bin. I stood on 2 stacked rickety plastic chairs I found and hung over the edge to pull out boxes. Several times the chairs scooted away from the bin, and I thought I was a goner. I’m sure the owners will get a kick out of watching me on their CCTV. Betsy has gotten boxes from there before, then brought them blueberry pies as thanks.

We wore ourselves out with all that, so most of the rest of the day, we relaxed. We did try to hand the new tui feeder after Betsy trimmed the bottlebrush. It doesn’t hang right, so we are considering putting it on a pole instead.

Keith and Grant went to the gravel store, but it was closed so they didn’t get the rock to put in the drain field. Another day. The chickens are enjoying the dirt he dug up, taking many dust baths.

Later Betsy and Keith sorted through their stored kumera. Some were deemed too big for humans and will be taken down to Claes’ pet pigs. We had some for dinner in a quinoa and feta salad and as baked kumera chips.

Steps Today: 1,597

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