Garbage Trucks

When we moved to Riverton, one of the things that bugged me about our yard was the concrete edging. I HATE concrete edging because people pay a lot of money for it thinking it will keep the grass out of their flowerbeds.  Wrong.  The curbing sits right on the surface of the dirt.  You need a 6 to 7 inch barrier to keep grass out of the flowerbeds.  It's also such an early 1990-2010's thing.  Everyone had to have it because everyone had it, and it would be so sad "if my yard didn't look just like everyone else's!" After 15 years of designing yards in mostly "new-ish" neighborhoods, I know that to be true.

The grass had already grown into our flowerbeds (under the concrete edging) when we moved in.  So one of the things I started to do was remove hundreds of linear feet of edging and throwing it in my garbage cans, a little at a time.

One week, I had two cans that were most filled with garbage bags, but I thought I would throw a piece or two on top, to get rid of it little by little.  Well, the garbage truck came by and wouldn't even attempt to dump the cans, because all he could see is concrete.  So he put a nice note out that said he "couldn't" dump the cans because they were too heavy, the truck couldn't handle it.

Keep in mind that this was the hardest time of my life, selling our amazing home in Bountiful, and moving to a cookie cutter neighborhood in Riverton (don't be offended Riverton friends, it was early on!).  I've already described a little bit about what was happening in 2014.  I was more depressed than I had ever been and in NO mood to be jerked around by a garbage truck driver!

So, I made the right phone calls to explain what had happened, that I could tell that he hadn't even attempted to pick up the cans because I knew they hadn't moved one inch from where I put them. The next day, the garbage truck came back, same driver and his supervisor.  About that same time, my neighbor from down the street came to visit me.  Joan Schneiter is the sweetest woman on the planet, and reached out to me despite my struggles and porcupine quills.

I saw them pull up and opened my front door with enough time to hear him say, "These are too heavy! I can't lift them!"  I said something snarky, like "Your truck can handle these cans! I've had way heavier cans than these (in Bountiful 😏)!  Just dump the DAMN CANS!!!" I yelled.  Guess what.  His truck COULD handle it!  He emptied the cans and drove away with his supervisor in the truck behind him.  Me and Joan joked about that incident for a long time after that.  DON'T MESS WITH KIM!!! As he was driving down the street, what did I do? I put even more concrete edging in the bottom of those freshly emptied cans.  The next week, he had no problem emptying my cans.

This is only the top part. There is that much more
below the red fire hydrant. I'm putting down landscape
fabric and putting rock out there.  This doesn't in any
way feel like part of my yard, I don't want to maintain it!

I'm in the middle of a similar project now.  Because we live on a corner, we have so much freaking park strip!  There were never any water lines run to it, and we don't want to do it either.  I've been tilling out the garbage grass ... and filling my cans with clumps of grass and dirt.

When our garbage was picked up on Tuesday, most of the grass didn't go anywhere, so the cans are pretty full still.  Yesterday I called the sanitation department and told them.  The guy said we may have to figure out how to empty some out, the new trucks have sensors and won't lift cans that are too heavy, blah blah blah.  So I've been trying to think of ways to get some to the dump. BUT that won't be necessary.

When I came home this afternoon, my kids gave me the name and phone number of someone that I should call.  They said something about garbage.  So I called, it was our garbage truck driver. (what?) He told me he had talked about it with whoever answered my phone call.  When they looked at the map, he KNEW he had dumped our cans! He noticed the project I'm working on, so he knows those cans are super heavy.  I mean, there's no way I could move them to the front of the house now.  He said maybe the dirt in there is frozen because it's been so cold in the morning. He said he's not worried about how heavy the cans are, if the truck will lift them, he will empty them.  So, he's going to come again Friday morning on the way to his route and empty my cans again.  WHAT?!?  I was stunned and shocked at the difference between my two experiences with garbage truck guys.  Actually, there is one more experience I may as well share here, since I'm on the subject.

This was probably 1998? 2001?

This was the first house we bought (1998?) which also happens to be in Bountiful. I was just beginning to learn about and have an opinion about landscaping. We had about 25 Tree of Heaven (worst tree on the planet-they spread like quakies on steroids) in our front yard, along with a huge Siberian elm (the 2nd worst tree on the planet).  I got this hair-brained idea to remove the 4 foot fence between us and our neighbor, to cut all those trees down, and to start fresh. We were able to pull all the fence posts out ourselves, except the one against the curb.  So one day, I'm out there struggling with it and the garbage truck comes by.  He sees what I'm trying to do and stops to ask if I want some help with it. Of course I said YES! So he wraps a chain around his bumper and around my fence post, and pulls it out with the garbage truck.  I was so pleased because it wouldn't budge for me!

See? I'm telling you guys. Bountiful really is the place to be!
Just for the record, I did later regret taking all that out, because "good fences make good neighbors." Robert Frost said that.