I found the perfect man for me when I met my husband. He agreed to be my garbage man. This was a deciding factor in accepting his marriage proposal. Taking the garbage out has never been my thing. Before we got married we established an unwritten pre-nup: I would do the dishes and he would take care of the garbage. We have a wonderful marriage.
Monday morning is our garbage pick-up day. It’s is not the best day to remember to take out the garbage since Mondays can catch my family off guard, so we try to gather up all our garbage on Sunday and either my husband or son take it to the highway where it gets picked up.
A few times we’ve slipped and had to deal with the garbage on a Monday morning in a hurry before the garbage truck showed up.
I try to recycle as much of our trash as possible, such as newspapers, magazines, glass jars, and aluminum cans. Our barn cats get meat scraps and the other food scraps feed our chickens or get composted, but we still manage to have plenty to fill our dumpster.
My husband wants his money’s worth from our garbage hauling service and makes sure our dumpster is filled to capacity before it gets set out for pick-up. Recently, he packed our garbage dumpster so full that some of the bulkier garbage stuck in the bottom and didn’t come out when the garbage man dumped it. This irks my husband.
Occasionally we have more garbage than we can fit in our dumpster. This occurred a few weeks ago when I spent two days gutting out our attic. What I couldn’t donate or recycle nearby went into the dumpster. A lot of what I threw out was my collection of assorted cardboard boxes that I’d been saving for various gift-giving or mail-sending occasions. After breaking them down I still couldn’t fit them all in the dumpster. We’re slowly eliminating the cardboard pile.
My husband despises litter and will go to great lengths to avoid our garbage from getting scattered but he hates it even more if the garbage doesn’t get taken up in time for pick-up to begin with. He’s been known to run down the garbage man headed to his next stop to make sure our garbage gets picked up on the garbage man’s way back if ours didn’t get set out in time.
The next priority after getting the garbage taken up is the rock.
 We always place a big rock on top of the dumpster lid so garbage doesn’t end up scattered in the ditch, especially since we set out our garbage the night before.
 
Sometimes the rock gets dumped with the garbage and we have to find another one. This also irks my husband.
There have been times he’s put rocks the size of boulders on top of our garbage can. This irks me. I don’t appreciate having to heave heavy rocks out of the way in order to add more garbage to the dumpster or to have to move them out of the driveway.
When not in use, the garbage can rock is kept in various places on our autogate and fence depending on its size, but when the lid won’t shut or it’s windy out, little ones like these won’t do.
 We have to get something much bigger.
There have been a few times I’ve taken the garbage up, but invariably, something happens that irks me. The dumpster tips over, I get a whiff of something rank in the garbage and gag or dry heave, my clean clothes get dirty, or I have to find another rock. That’s why I love my garbage man.
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