Some Changes in the Routine

Recently, I have (more or less cold turkey) stopped playing Farmville 2: Country Escape. It was feeling like a chore, and I have plenty of those already. I continue to play Wordle, and in the freed-up time, I’ve been playing the archive. That might _sound_ like a problem, but it isn’t. Wordle feels very much like something that in a few weeks, I’ll be pretty much done with, and in a few months, I will be actively avoiding. It has given me a lot to think about in in terms of letter frequency, probability of one letter following others, and also of how to exploit domain knowledge in a medium-sized universe search.

I continue to do Duolingo, altho I’ve settled into a do a lesson before noon (often after midnight, altho I’m trying to not stay up that late) to get the 2X for doing lessons after 6. This enables me to stay comfortably in the league / promotion zone without putting forth more effort than I am inclined to put in on a day by day basis.

A. has been setting out her clothes the night / day before pretty regularly. That’s nice. It’s also been easier to get her to take a shower on Sunday without it becoming a huge struggle. She’s also settling into the homework routine a bit more. It helps that she’s really into Beat Saber on Oculus, and plays that during her break, but she gets pretty sweaty doing it, so she values the alternation of activity and sitting down.

I’ve started a pattern of consciously thawing some meat / poultry / fish once or twice a week, and then preparing it. That gives me a day or two to think about what I want to do with it, and means I pretty much never am having to thaw something out quickly. Having Sunbasket paused and Imperfect Foods no longer being available means I spend a lot less time trying to figure out what to order, which is also nice.

I’m still pretty unhappy about how it continues to be nearly impossible to convince people to socialize indoors. I have a trip coming up which _should_ give me some social time at meals with people (indoors or out), which will be nice. Maybe once the weather is warmer and people are out and about more, they’ll start to trust that things are actually better. Right now, the paranoia of a next week is incredibly powerful. The state has announced they are going to lift the statewide school mask mandate (transportation is still covered by the federal mandate), which will leave it at a town by town indoor mask decision (or school specific decision). Unless Hudson does a Weird, I expect that they’re schools will be mask-optional beginning of March; I’m less convinced that ABRSD will go that quickly, but you never know. If Hudson really does go mask-optional in schools in March, and it still looks okay in April, that ought to convince a lot of people in the area.

We’ve got meetings coming up (zoom and in person) for house planning. That’ll be fun. Nice to see a bit of progress there.

I poked around at decluttering articles; next post will probably get into that.

Recycling and Waste Haulers

Expect edits.

https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/12/01/whos-afraid-of-a-ridwell-box/

Oregon is not a particularly populous state, and most of the population is in Willamette County. So this paper is focused on where the people live in Portland. I grew up in unincorporated King County, then lived within Seattle city limits for about a decade before moving to the East Coast (went back to Seattle for a year and a half), NH and Mass. In the town I lived in in NH, which I am pleased to call “Mayberry”, there were some private haulers, but R. took the family’s trash / recycling / wtf to the town transfer station, where there were various bins and a Still Good table. Once we were here in Middlesex County, I was like, enough of that, we’re going to get waste and recycling pickup. We used Waste Management until within the last year, when service disruptions do to lack of drivers got bad enough that I said, enough of that, and we went back to R. taking the family’s trash / recycling / wtf to the town transfer station. That wasn’t exactly the plan. I was going to do the dump run, probably with T. on Saturdays after martial arts, but possibly midweek when it would be less busy. I did it a couple times, but then R. had stuff he wanted to clear out and he’s basically taken that task over. This is fine by me, and I’m happy to see entire categories of stuff building up in the basement and garage … being entirely gone. A lot of reusable packaging from food deliveries (the waxed cardboard boxes from Siena Farms and the soft-sided coolers from Walden, as well as other things like the dry ice bags and mylar coolbags from Walden) eventually was eligible to be returned (pandemic halted that for a while), and he also got those moved along.

I think in a lot of ways, that a fair amount of energy that people perhaps once devoted to worrying about people going to hell is now devoted to things going to the landfill. This is _probably_ an improvement, altho I have some qualms. Obviously, I would prefer people to make decisions and adjust as necessary while skipping the anxious worrying part. Ridwell as a company is a really interesting operation, in that they are charging really quite a lot compared to the amount charged by the City of Portland / Willamette County for utility haulers. Of course, seen through small town in New England eyes, where community contracts for haulage are comparatively rare — and I haven’t had access to one of those in fifteen years — mostly I’m just laughing because those white metal boxes on porches out here can be any number of different things from medical related PU / DO to ice cream delivery. But I haven’t seen anyone putting recycling in one.

I object to putting _that_ much effort into recycling. I’ve read way too many lifecycle analyses at this point, and while I will always at least consider making changes to move in a reuse / source reduction direction, I worry less and less each year about landfills, because all my issues there have been displaced by carbon footprint. But despite all that, I find myself incredibly impressed by companies like Terra and Ridwell. They’ve figured out a way to truly monetize middle class guilt, and I have so much respect for that.