Today is garbage pick-up day in our part of Toronto, and I wonder how long they’ll be doing it every week.

I have no insider information and don’t mean to be alarmist. It’s an essential service and I’m sure pick-up will continue, but I wonder whether the city will have to reduce the frequency. Sanitation workers will get sick, too.

This means I’ve done a few things over the past couple of days to get ready.

One is getting back to composting our fruit and vegetable waste. We have a backyard composter we use from spring until mid-December, and I went outside yesterday to get it ready for another year. I feel pretty much recovered from the flu and enjoyed the hard physical work. Enjoyed doing a normal spring chore, as if everything in the world is normal. I now have two piles of compost I need to dig into the garden, but I’ll get to that soon. The composter is up and running.

There’s also the blue recycling bin. Since today is blue bin pick-up—the trucks are grinding down the street as I write—I spent part of yesterday putting every piece of recyclable material in the house into the bin. All the scrapped paper in our offices went in, along with random old newspapers and piles of magazines I’m never going to read. All the condiments in half-empty jars went into re-usable jam jars. I make jam every year, so there’s a good supply in the basement. Then I binned the old jars.

The empty wine bottles went in, too. Which is lousy. I usually take them to the bottle return at the beer store, where a man works the parking lot, hurrying over with a cart as you pull up.

“Can I help with that?” he always asks.

“Thanks so much,” I always say. Then I have to find an excuse to get him to take the return money for his labour and his obvious need.

I learned this part the first time I met him, when he noticed I was moving stiffly. Can’t remember, but I’d probably hurt my back playing hockey. 

“You want me to take them inside?” he asked. “Save your back?”

Dim as I felt—my back really was sore—I picked up his cue.

“Oh, would you? That would be so great.”

Now I find it works to say I have to run another errand, remembering it while he’s unloading the bottles.

“Gosh, I need to run. Do you mind getting rid of these for me?” 

“There has to be at least five dollars’ worth of bottles here,” he’ll say. 

“You’ll be doing me a favour. If you don’t mind.”

At which point he’ll graciously wheel the empty bottles inside and take his five bucks. 

It has to go like this. I once made the mistake of saying, “I’ve got some bottles for you,” as I opened the trunk. The man went all shirty, sending the cart flying across the parking lot. We both need to play our roles, which I suppose is part of belonging to a community. The man doesn’t remember me from one drop-off to the next, but I miss my local community already.

All of which is to say that I put the wine bottles in the blue bin, and it opened up some space under the back stairs. Now I can use tubs there to separate and store paper waste, washed bottles and whatever cleaned plastic containers I can’t avoid using. I set it up like this once before while doing a huge spring cleaning, and found how much more you can fit in the bin if you don’t just toss everything inside willy-nilly but—now here’s a word—curate it.

One last thing. We also bought a yoghurt maker yesterday, since too much of our plastic recycling consists of yoghurt tubs. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but none of our local kitchen stores carries them. 

Of course, you can buy thirty different brands of yoghurt makers on Amazon. But I have a hate-on for Jeff Bezos, given that Amazon pays no taxes and Bezos is a ridiculously over-rich billionaire with more money than anyone needs who treats Amazon workers miserably, paying them a pittance and refusing bathroom breaks so they have to pee in bottles, not to mention sleep in their cars.

Sorry. Venting.

It’s been niggling at me, though. All those containers. I’ve also been reading about how some Amazon workers are unionizing, and how the union in Chicago just got a deal the workers are happy with. Plus, the warehouse workers don’t have much chance at any other job right now. If we all stopped ordering, they’d be out of work, too. 

So I was wavering–when my husband had a thought. Maybe the rewards site for credit card points had a yoghurt maker on offer. So he checked and they had three, one of which gets a good rating on consumer sites.

…Coincidentally, as I wrote that, the doorbell rang and I looked out the window to see a Canada Post truck pulling away. The yoghurt maker is here.  

Sorry, Amazon workers, but we’ve lost twenty per cent of our retirement savings in the market meltdown. Not that I check the figure online very often. Only every hour. Redeeming points felt like a pretty damn good idea right now, especially since we’re not going to be using them to travel.

And now I have to go dig in the compost. At least the garden will be healthy this summer.