If It's Wednesday This Must Be Spring

My son doesn’t know what to do with his empty pill bottles, so he doesn’t do anything. He’s got a big sack full of them. I’d show you a picture but I’d have to wake him up.

He just had some personal privacy issues, identify theft things, stuff we have to think about these days. He doesn’t personally care if strangers know he’s taking Zoloft or whatever. He just didn’t know what to do, and neither did his mother, and they both hold onto these pill bottles for a long time until I just throw the damn things out. Come on, people. There is no solution other than soaking and peeling off the labels, and you can’t recycle the amber ones anyway.

But this is me. This is probably just us. I do the same thing. I’ve been through a few personal shredders over the years. In the old days, this was because I was dealing with client-side privacy concerns and had to make sure certain docs were shredded. Now, again, we’re all concerned with identity issues, and so I hang on to all those credit card offers so I can shred them, except my shredders always break.

This is because I have a high opinion of shredders, very high. Too high, some would say. I get impressed over how good and efficient these little suckers are, the little shredder that could, and sometimes I leave staples on and then one day I think, I wonder if this can shred a shoe? and the answer is no.

So I have a couple of boxes of unshredded documents. And various broken and otherwise end-of-life electronic devices that need to be properly recycled. Light bulbs. Batteries. I’m trying to be a good citizen of earth and I suck at it. I just make more of a mess.

I’ve been doing a lot of recycling lately, in other words. It’s been fun. I’ve dug several monitors and a couple of old TVs out of the garage and taken them in to our local electronics recycler, who are actually really cool people. Our county recycling center is nearby and so I dropped off batteries and light bulbs and a bunch of books, and since I was in a mood I started hauling anything that remotely qualified as scrap metal, since that was also a free dump. Bikes, old appliances, etc.

This is technically spring cleaning, but I’m leaning more towards re-entry. At least personally, I had a busy pandemic, lots of hours stuck inside, right here at this desk and keyboard. It’s not that way now, and I look around and see stuff that needs to be done.

So for the third morning in a row, I pop whatever anti-inflammatory is handy and hope I haven’t done anything permanent to my back (don’t think so), and head back outside. So yeah, it’s spring cleaning but with a little extra boost. It’s post-pandemic behavior, and we’re all doing it in this household and maybe in your households.

And while we all know or have heard of obnoxious people who’ve taken this opportunity to get in great physical shape or do all sorts of projects around the house, we’ve been in stasis and the dust has, as it turns out, not. My wife looked around yesterday and suddenly said, “I want to paint this wall.”

Again. You’d have to know my wife. This is not a natural thing for her to say, but this has been an unnatural experience, and trust me on the pill bottles. They add up and it just feels abnormal. Toss and move on.