The Obligatory Leaf Picture
It’s that time again. The leaf pickup schedule could not be worse for our neighborhood this year. We always have two leaf pickup days. You are supposed to have your leaves out in the street by something like 7 AM if you want the planet to pick them up. On October 24th, I was heading out to coffee or someplace and I saw street cleaners. I wondered what the heck was going on. It couldn’t be a leaf pickup, could it? I hadn’t even looked up the leaf pick schedule yet because our leaves typically don’t even begin to fall by October 24th. It was indeed a leaf pickup. They have got to be kidding. Those planet employees or contractors or whoever they are had an easy job *that* day. Our second leaf pickup is Thursday. You can see how many leaves are in our street. What you may not be able to see clearly is how many leaves are still on the trees. Half maybe? I dunno what I’m gonna do with all of those leaves when they fall. My compost bin can only hold so many. It cannot hold as many as are in the street right now. The best schedule for my neighborhood (and maybe the whole planet A2) is for the first pickup to be in early to mid November and the second in late November or early December. Well, except for the year that the second pickup was on December 11th and we got 12 inches of snow that day. Actually, I remember that more because we were doing Merlin and the Magic Sword (or whatever we were calling it) at the Lydia Mendelssohn the next weekend and, with a foot of snow, we had to cancel the first tech week rehearsal. Not a good thing. And we got more snow that week. And more. And more. Enough to cancel three (count ’em) whole consecutive days of school. But not any more tech week rehearsals. The show must go on. I got so fed up with not being able to see out of the POC’s veendshield as I slithered my way downtown every day that I went in search of new blades for my always problematical veendshield vipers. When the folks at Murray’s heard “’96 Plymouth Voyager,” they just shook their heads and laughed. All out. We’ll have some later. Or tomorrow. The second leaf pickup never happened that year. Maybe December 11th is pushing it just a bit for the second pickup but most years it would be okay around here. November 15th is just too early. And then there’s that stupid little law about making people wait until the night before leaf pickup to put their leaves in the street. Get real, you guys. With the leaves we have, there’s just no way. Whaddya think this place is, Bloomfield Hills or something?
November 12th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
I agree about the leaf pickup fiasco. Around here, everyone rakes INTO the streets (the vacuum truck’s equipment isn’t long enough to take it off the area between sidewalk & street, or so I’ve heard), so that when it rains, our storm drains plug and the street floods. At least that’s how it works historically. Somehow, the vacuum truck never makes the rounds when the leaves are dry and freshly-raked into the street – they wait until there’s been a couple of good blustery days followed by some pretty good rainfall, then we don’t see them again until the whole process has repeated itself!! Suburban Planning, I think they call it?
November 12th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Duh, you have a *vacuum* truck? I don’t even know what eeeeeez that! We just have old-fashioned stuff. Dump trucks and bulldozers or backhoes or whatever the heck you call ’em. Vacuum truck? Where you livin’ again? Bloomfield Hills? (Bwa ha ha ha hahahahahahaaaaaaaa!)
November 13th, 2007 at 6:04 am
…the folks in Flint have that attitude toward Grahnd Blahnk, that’s fershure. Naw, we are just a tiny 5-square-mile city that has been well-managed (at least in comparison to Flint). The city (DPW) bought a “vacuum truck” some years back, and it gets used for EVERYthing – storm drain maintenance, leaf pickup, you name it. “Vactor 2000”, I think is the brand name???