Comments (0)

By Keith, August 30, 2010 11:46 pm

This morning after work, I popped into Menards to check whether they had lids for their recycling bins.  It had been almost a week to the day since the last time I had looked, so I thought there was a chance that their high tech inventory management system might have recognized that the number of recycling bins exceeded the number of lids for recycling bins by 2.  As of this morning, Menards still does not have lids for their smaller size recycling bins.  They do, however, have some rather large blue bins with lids, but that’s not what I want.

At Lowes, they have quite a selection of rubbish bins.  At the far end of the same isle, they have a massive selection of stackable plastic containers and lids, but none of them seem quite right for recycling.  I left Lowes a little depressed because I seem to live in a small city with very poor selection of anything, really.

To make a long story a bit shorter, I ended up ordering an 18 gallon plastic Rubbermaid recycling bin from Amazon.com.  Although I was dissatisfied with the description of the product, because it did not specify whether or not this “stackable” bin ships with or without a lid, I decided I would not reward the pathetically understocked Menards or Lowes.

It’s a catch-22 for local stores.  People don’t shop there, because they lack selection, and they have a poor selection of stock, because nobody shops there.  I know this is an over-simplification, but I think you get my meaning.  The funny thing about this purchase is that I’ll be recycling the box in which my recycle bin arrives by breaking it down and putting it inside my new recycle bin.

Comments (0)

By Keith, August 29, 2010 11:49 am

Here in the microtropolis of Defiance, Ohio, we have a fairly good curbside recycling program.  On normal garbage collection days, a recycling truck also collects glass, cardboard and plastic recyclables that can be placed in a recycling bin by the road.  I used to wonder why more people don’t recycle, but not any more.  Recently, the answer has become clear to me.

At some point this spring, I became a little lazy and stopped sorting through my rubbish to set aside recyclables.  This was probably about the same time as my landlord removed the recycling bin from in front of my apartment.  It used to sit just beside the steps to my front door.  Maybe he found the bright green bin unsightly or something.  I don’t know, and I didn’t ask.  The recycling bin belonged to my landlord, so I didn’t question why he did it.

I also did not run right out to the store and replace my recycling bin.  Instead, I allowed myself to become one of the lazy thoughtless masses who mindlessly chuck their massive black bags of waste by the road where they disappear to who knows where.  I rationalized that since I’m only one person living alone, I do not really make very much trash.  In fact, I often only put out 1 bag every 2 weeks.  How much landfill space am I actually wasting by not sorting my rubbish?  The utter ridiculousness of this line of reasoning becomes clear when you imagine everyone else in every city in the world thinking this same thought.

But if I had gone right out to a store to buy a new recycling bin, where in Defiance would I find one?  My first thought was Menards.  They seem to have a lot of buckets and bins and things.  It just so happens that last week, I stopped in at Menards to find one.  Guess what I found!  They had 2 nice blue recycling bins for sale at about $12, however, they had no lids which are included in the price of the bin.

Tomorrow morning after work I’ll check at Lowe’s and report back.

Comments (0)

By Keith, August 28, 2010 7:02 pm

This week has been very typical.  I don’t think anything remarkable has happened.  Nothing of note has befallen me, except my digital camera has started taking very blurry pictures in manual mode.  I can work around that.  My commute got a few minutes shorter with the opening of an overpass over US Route 24.  That should help me be a little earlier to work, but it’s not really newsworthy.

Sleep Cycle
This week I’ve been struggling a little with a slightly messed up sleep cycle.  Sleeping from 10:00am to 4:00 or 4:30pm is not optimal when you work third shift.  Better to get 6 hours of sleep than none at all, I suppose.  I have a theory that I need more exercise to make me sleep longer.

Fighting KDE (Linux)
I made the mistake of upgrading KDE Destkop to 4.5 SC on both my notebook (Lucifer) and desktop (Godzilla) PC’s.  My notebook has not had a single problem.  Unfortunately I cannot say the same for my desktop machine.  Since upgrading Godzilla, KTorrent and Dolphin have begun frequently and randomly crashing.  I have not looked too deeply into the cause of the problem, but I’m looking forward to some updates that might fix this issue since downgrading to 4.4 does not seem to be an option.  Please KDE, fix this.

Tech News
In more geeky news, Google added support for calling phones (free) inside Gmail.  I have not used this feature yet, but at some point, I know it will come in  handy if ever I feel like calling people.   Actually, I don’t have very many phone numbers entered for people on my Gmail contact list.  I’ve been too lazy to add them there.

In other tech news, Diaspora, the “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network” has announced a launch date of September 15.  You can bet I will be joining on day 1.  If you go to their website now now, you can sign up for their newsletter which will send out a notification once registration opens.

Posting Daily
They say that it takes 21 days of repetition to develop a habit.  My blogging habit (addiction) has never lasted for 21 consecutive days.  So from this post forward, I will attempt to make blogging on Think Obvious a daily thing instead of randomly sporadic.  If for some reason I cannot complete a post on a given day, I will post a post about why I cannot post, and thus having posted, I will have posted and negated my post about not posting.