Welcome To Monday

      Hooray, they've picked up the trash this morning!  Or at least that's what it sounded like; for all I know, a car-smashing robot waddled down the street, quietly crumpling parked vehicles into compact cubes which it proceeded to ingest.  But it certainly sounded like the trash being picked up.

      This is significant, since it was supposed to be picked up Friday morning.  But better late than never.  The city's trash-collecting contractor for our area has been running shorthanded (and, according to rumor, struggling with truck problems: their maintenance shop is short on staff, too) since last year and as a result, they've been playing a kind of "neighborhood roulette" as they shuffle drivers and routes.  Every week, some part of Broad Ripple and SoBro gets their trash picked up one (or more) business days late.  I think two working days is far as they have ever fallen behind, which is commendable.  The pay's relatively good, the hours aren't terrible -- but it does call for skill: maneuvering a massive truck through narrow residential streets with curbside parking and picking trash cans from among the parked cars with a big hydraulically-operated claw is tricky business.  It's not a job you can fill by waving twenty-dollar bills at people down on their luck.
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      I buried the last of the tomatoes yesterday.  Having been so very sick as the growing season drew to a close, I ended up with about a dozen tomatoes much too long on the vine.  We grew them on the slight mound of dirt and wood chips in the back yard where hackberry tree used to stand, and I have been digging holes in it and burying damaged tomatoes (and sometimes ash from the grill -- the soil's relatively acidic) in them all along.  So I dug a much larger hole and gave the last tomatoes a proper send-off.  There's some basil and what I think is thyme still growing; Tam planted them and we'll see how well they fare.

      The tomato plants were gifts from one of my nieces, extras left when her tomato starts succeeded beyond her expectations.  I planted them thinking in terms of the spindly tomato plants we grew in the vegetable garden at my childhood home -- mostly cherry tomatoes, never very tall.  What grew in the back yard were big tomato bushes; by mid-summer, they were well ahead of the efforts Tam and I made to support them, and growing much too close together.  They provided plenty of tomatoes nevertheless, and enlivened a dull summer.
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      Thinking over the past twelve months, I realized I have very few memories of last winter.  It was a lousy, stressful time for everyone; I didn't do much but work and worry (and cook).  The winter began with discovering the furnace needed to be replaced and that was followed by the dishwasher conking out.  The furnace replacement was rush-urgent, but come December, I will have been washing dishes by hand for a year.   I would still really like to replace the dishwasher and the stove, but it will probably have to wait.