The weather here just turned quite terrible. It went from finally becoming a little warm, to going extremely cold with a flash snowstorm and then melting the next day. So everything around here is brown and muddy and wet snow slushy junk.
This town has a terrible problem too, I don't quite understand it. Well it has many problems, ranging from no good chinese/indian/mexican food, to 12 year old smokers. Tangent, did I mention this yet? Apparently there's not much more to do in this town than to smoke. Everyone smokes. Everyone right down to the junior high kids. I almost lost control of my car one day when I was driving by and I saw a father bend over and give his 12-year old looking son a light for his cigarette. Everyone sits on their front porch smoking. They look at you funny, too, as you drive by. They eye you up and down. I can drive down a street and there will be 4-5 groups of people just hanging out on their porches, not talking, not doing anything except smoking and eying you up and down. It's very unnerving, and a little sad to see a group of kids, literally kids, passing around smokes.
Maryl assures me it's just this town, that Canada itself has strict smoking laws, so strict that you can only light up in property you own.
Anyway, the problem I'm about to describe comes up every wednesday. Because wednesday is trash day. Here's what I'm used to, in california. You take your trash out of your house, and you put it in a big brown trash bin. Sometimes it's really big, and can fit 4 trash bags, and sometimes it's medium, and sometimes it's small. If you have overflow, you put your one or two bags next to the regular disposal unit, and you hope the trashmen pick it up too. For recycling you have your own recycling bin too, usually it's a blue box but sometimes you actually get a big trash bin as well. On rare occasions you can slice up your big cardboard, tie it with a string, and put it next to all of that.
And here's what it is here. Everyone throws their damn trash out on the side of the street. You're really lucky to see bins of any type, for trash or recycling. Apparently the rule is, as long as it is in a green or black hefty-like trash bag, they'll come pick it up on the side of the street. So every Wednesday and Tuesday night, all the streets are filled with big trash bags. That's not so bad I suppose, but the main problem is the way they handle recycling. You take your pizza boxes, you take your cardboard, you take your newspapers, and you just throw it outside next to the trash. You're lucky to see people using a bin. Every wednesday, the streets become flooded with bits of flying newspaper and trash and boxes. It's all over the place. In the streets, on the sidewalks, blown up the side of your house. Everywhere. It's so ridiculously dirty.
This is a nice, quiet town. But it's dirty. Once, I saw some government-employed type go running around picking up random pieces of litter. Yeah, you could do that, or actually mandate proper receptacles and bins for people to throw their trash and recycling in. Or maybe I'm just crazy? Or maybe I'm just spoiled living in good old clean california, with it's clean air and it's clean streets and it's clean-shaven denizens. Hehehehe! Hehe!
Ah, Peterborough.