We really are turning into Ozzie and Harriet, or maybe Ricky and Lucy.   I went to bed last night thinking that I’d forgotten to put out the trash.   What more suburban thought can I have?

The trash has become important to me. The renovation has generated a lot of it, cardboard boxes, styrofoam packing, used masking tape, empty paint cans, unwanted toilets, old cabinets, and broken slate.   The recyclable stuff is easy to get rid of, and a few appliances have been given to good homes, but we have so much debris that twice I’ve recruited contractors to take away truckloads of trash they didn’t generate.   Still the trash piles up behind the house.

I have taken to staging the trash in a backyard queue.   It constitutes the foreground of our otherwise lovely view of the Santa Catalinas. Someday, all the trash will all be gone and we will only have a view of the mountains.   But for that to happen, I have to be diligent about getting the absolute maximum out of our single barrel trash pickup every week.

Last night “Harriet” said, “Did you take the trash out?”   And I said, “No, but I’ll get it in the morning.   They never show up before 10 a.m.”   Can you hear famous last words there?

So early this morning, “Lucy” shifted in bed and said, “There’s the garbage truck.”   And I said, “It’s still dark out!”   It was 6:30 a.m., and yet there was the truck noisily working its way down the opposite side of our street.   So I became Ricky Ricardo, and dashed out into the morning chill in my pajamas and bare feet to roll the barrel out from the carport to the designated spot by the curb.

I looked down the street and it seemed the truck was taking its time picking up the trash in the cul-de-sac, so I ran back into the trailer, put on my unlaced shoes, and ran back to the yard to my trash queue.   Hmmm, what to choose?   An old toilet — no, that would need to be smashed into smaller bits before it would fit, and I thought “Maybe someone will want it.” (Forgive me for thinking at that moment that I was going to find a willing home for a 40-year-old water guzzling el-cheapo used toilet.   I’m not a morning person.)

I finally went for the gray barrel of construction debris, and hauled that out front to dump into our city-approved green barrel.   Even then, it was still only half full, and the truck was still in the cul-de-sac.   Back to the yard again for another shopping trip.

This time I picked up three empty paint cans, and some styrofoam.   I was going for bulk rather than weight, since I had lots of space left and I didn’t feel like doing any heavy lifting.   After all it was 6:30 a.m. — did I forget to point that out? Finally the barrel was full, and I went back to the Airstream into my nice warm bed.

Four hours later, the garbage truck showed up.

The truck we had heard at 6:30 was not the garbage truck.   It was the recycling truck.

And that, dear readers, is the most exciting thing that happened all day until UPS showed up with a few new photographic tools I ordered, including the folding reflector that Eleanor is modeling in the photo at left.   (She is flapping around the carport pretending that she is Wonder Woman.   Like our neighbors needed more reasons to wonder about us.)

It has been a perfectly nice day here in Pleasantville, but I am wondering how much longer we can stay here and pretend to be normal.   Obviously Eleanor is starting to crack already.   In addition to her superhero fantasies, she has proposed we hitch up the Airstream this week and head to Tempe or Casa Grande to go to a festival and do some furniture shopping.   We may yet do that, even though we don’t really need to.   It’s just that sitting still is hard to get used to, and when the trash pickup starts to loom large in our priority list, we both know that it may be time to get outta town for a few days.