Hubby and I recycle. We have a compost bin. And we have a raised bed garden. We don’t keep chickens or bees, we’re not that cool. Besides, I don’t really like live chickens. Don’t they peck? I often tell people there was a hitching post at the K-mart in the town where I grew up to underscore how rural it was. But it’s not like I was using the hitching post.
There is one particular aspect of recycling that we disagree about. We don’t fight about it, that would be ” inconvenient,” but sharp words have been exchanged and probably will be again because I don’t see either of us budging. And it’s about recycling.
See, a couple of years ago the city started accepting a whole lot more at curbside, including cardboard. Until then, we’d stored cardboard in the garage until it built up and then went and recycled it at a neighborhood location. Now it just gets taken to the curb. And Hubby wants to recycle every scrap of cardboard we can, including toilet paper rolls. In his mind, once an empty toilet paper roll comes off the roll, it’s just cardboard; in my mind it is still an extension of the bathroom.
The problem comes in in the progression through the house of the empty toilet paper rolls. When Hubbby changes the toilet paper roll he sets the old cardboard aside on the bathroom counter. When he gets around to it he moves it to the small cookbook bookshelf in the kitchen. That’s the last stop for all recycling in the house before we gather it up and take it out to the (attached) garage. This progression can take upwards of 3-4 days. And even though there are only two of us in the house there is always, it seems, 2-3 empty toilet paper rolls somewhere other than the discreet bin in the garage.
I really don’t like the empty toilet paper rolls, complete with bits of toilet paper still stuck to them, sitting anywhere, but particularly in my kitchen, so I’ve taken to throwing them away. When Hubby discovered this he informed me that I could crawl on my two broken legs and take the toilet paper rolls out of the house immediately if I didn’t want them “sitting around” (sharp words), but I merely shrugged and said if he wanted to recycle toilet paper rolls he should stop leaving them in my kitchen. Once I found them in the living room! A half-way point between the bathroom and the kitchen. What is this? We’re decorating with toilet paper rolls now? What about my personal decorating style led Hubby to believe I’d be “cool” with empty toilet paper rolls gracing the entertainment center right beside my stack of much-beloved Harry Potter books? Three guesses on what happened to those toilet paper rolls.
More on this story as it develops, although honestly I don’t see resolution in our future. BTW, anyone in the Lansing area know where we can recycle batteries – not rechargeable batteries but regular ones? We’ve got a powerful stack of lantern batteries from the storm.
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