As chaotic as things are, we’re settling into a bit of a routine.  Mornings, the heating of water for washing begins.  My past habit of staying up to the wee hours and getting up at around 10am has changed to going to bed before midnight *gasp* and getting up earlier.  It takes most of the morning to heat enough water to wash up not only ourselves, but any dishes and stuff that needs doing.  No point in heating all that water again in the evening, just to do dishes.

In the morning, someone goes to feed the outside cats and get them some warm water.  A warm water refill gets done again, later in the day, when what we gave them earlier is frozen.

Packing my parents’ stuff, cleaning shelves, unpacking our own stuff, then finding somewhere to put it, happens when we can.  I have been getting a fair bit of it done while heating water and stuff.  Usually it starts with, “I should make breakfast, but I could really use… ” and then I end up going through several boxes to find an item, get distracted and do something else, get distracted and finish another thing… then, eventually, I remember to go back and actually make breakfast.

We’re tea drinkers in general, but since the move, tea is ever-present.  Even when I was just coming out to stay a short while (usually for something funeral related), and I stayed at the farm, the kettle seemed to always be on.  We’re drinking more tea now than we did even just before the move, when the water at the co-op started tasting worse and worse.  We have since found and unpacked our tea supplies – we have a LOT of tea and tea supplies! – so the variety is being enjoyed often.

Loading packed boxes into the van and taking them to the shed has had a bit of a stall.  The van is currently full of stuff for the land fill.

Now there’s a new habit we’re going to have to get into.  Regular trips to the dump.

In the city, we were pretty spoiled.  We had garbage and recycling pick up several times a week – for each.  We sorted stuff for the bottle depot, where we could get our bottle deposits back, so that was a nice way to get some extra pocket change again.  If we had things like electrical waste, paint, batteries, etc., we could make a quick trip to the Eco-station for proper disposal.

There’s none of that, here.

Bottle deposits don’t get refunding in this province, so there are no bottle depots.  But, if we save our cans, they can be taken to places that will buy the metal by the pound.  If we separate out the pop tabs, they get a better return, as they are pure aluminum, while the cans themselves have an inner lining to protect the contents, so they aren’t worth as much.

The nearest landfill is open only 3 days a week, with staggered hours.  In the winter, they have shorter hours, too.  When we get there, we will have to learn what their system is.  I know they have different areas for recycling and other types of waste.  This location is the only one in the municipality that takes construction waste.  It’s been over 10 years since I’ve been there, but I imagine they still have areas for glass, metal, cardboard, paper, etc.  They even had a shed where people could toss in reusable items that others could go through and take, if they wanted.  Then for the actual garbage, you could drive right into the pit to toss it in.

Gone are the days when they would just toss everything into a huge pile and then burn it, which I remember as a child.

We had wire bag holders that we used before the move to sort general recycling, bottle depot items and garbage.  Now, we’re going to have to get use to sorting by however it is set up at the landfill.  We haven’t start it yet, but we will start collecting the pop tabs and aluminum cans to take to a scrapyard once there is enough to make it worthwhile.

While looking for the website for the landfill’s hours, I found that there are companies that will come in and buy scrap metal for recycling.  One had a selling point of weighing the metal right in front of the client, to ensure honesty.  Then they pay you and haul it away.  We should do that at some point, but none of the stuff is ours, so we shall see how that works out in the end.  It would be good to clean up all the weird metal things all over the place.  We will also have to find out what the status is with all the old cars, broken tractors and farm equipment and who knows what else.

All in good time.

First, we need to finish packing up the house and unpacking our own stuff, then work on replacing some of the things we had to get rid of before the move.  Then we need to get caught up on the bills that had to wait so we could pay for the movers, and finally, start fixing the essentials in the house.

Like, say, getting a new hot water tank.

The Re-farmer