garbage

Maybe a quick one. It's already almost 5 p.m. I was just outside in the hot sun picking up garbage in and around the wooden garbage-box my building's residents use to contain their garbage bags. Monday is our pickup day. This morning when I took out my yellow bag of paper recycling for pickup I found the doors of the garbage box wide open, and most of the bags within partly gutted, the ground strewn with chicken bones, ballpoint pens, chunks of styrofoam, and some viscid strong-smelling blobs that might have been vegetable matter. I thought an animal had been at them, but I later found out from Margot, one of my neighbors, that a scavenger had been in there last night.

"He's this really crazy-looking thin guy," she said, "you always see him going up and down St. Georges. He was in there pulling bags apart, and finally came out with an empty. He wanted one to put his bottles and cans in."

That is crazy--there must be an easier way to get empty garbage bags. But it was disappointing news, for it means that this will be an ongoing problem, not just a one-off. This the type of thing that I, as president of my strata, have to deal with. This is what political power is to me: I'm the one outside cleaning up sun-cooked garbage, and I get to think of ways to deter scavengers from plundering our full garbage bags.

Other than that, I spent time out at Mom's, entering some new data and printing new accounting reports so she can take these to the lawyer on Wednesday. Jackie was home too, with the week off. We had lunch at the dining-table, overlooking the lawn and the green water slowly draining from the cove, changing color as it exposed the sand below.

Oh: this morning, yes, research notes: The Ruling Class of Judaea and Roman Arabia by G. W. Bowersock.