Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Trash Day Tuesday

Well y'all.
It's trash day again.
I took the rubbage bin (that's Aussie speak for ya...I watched Undercover Boss, Australia and one of the episodes was Veolia environmental services. They have some odd phrases.) to the road this morning and was super impressed with how well we did. 
Well....sort of.
We weren't home friday thru Sunday.
Bu still it's a major difference.

Trash. Garbage. Rubbage. Waste. Debris. Excess. 

Last Tuesday we had a full can plus one bag that made the lid stay popped up.
Today we have one full bag from before we got our recycling bin and a half bag from the past week!
So realistically I think if we had been home the whole time we would have done about one full bag of garbage.

The bag was mostly diapers.
I decided not to keep them separate because I just tied most of them up in grocery bags at the end of the day. I know you can recycle grocery bags but they keep the diaper smell IN the diaper.
Then I also has the styrofoam thing from a pack of chicken (um...the little absorbent pads they put in meat packages are disgusting. When you freeze them, then thaw them back out, they disintigrate. blech).
I think I threw away one or two other things that could have been recycled but I could really wash off the nastiness and I didn't want that just hanging around.

I'm totally blown away because our recycling bin is almost overflowing.
I never realized how much space was wasted in the trash by boxes and bags and paper and bottles.
Normally we could produce a bag of trash a day.
With the recycling bin, I've been more conscious of breaking down boxes and flattening things out better, and somehow managed to minimize the volume of our recyclables by...I don't know...let's say tenfold.

Tenfold.
That's an odd word.
Apparently it has  a synonoym..."decuple".
That's like "double" or "triple" except it's 10.
Also, in Old English it's "tienfeald".
Who knew?

In other news, as I'm sure you noticed (probably, actually not), yesterday's planned Maddy Monday Food episode is delinquent. Truant. Playing hooky. 
I like to use synonyms for my friend who grew up outside the US.
You can never tell which phrases she knows and which ones she takes literally.
Not that she's dumb, she just grew up in a different world.
So I'm doing a service here, peeps.
Just hang with me as I enlighten/educate/inform/spread the word/give the lowdown.

Maddy Monday will return as soon as I have 3 extra hours in my day.
So probably next thursday sometime?

4 comments:

  1. Now you're speaking my language! :) It's "rubbish bin" not "rubbage bin." but I can see how you would think its rubbage bin when listening to aussie's speak because of their accent.
    Also, great lesson! :) I always get hookey and hickie confused. maybe you spell that hicky. i don't know. but i always say "playing hicky or hooky."
    The newest phrase I learned was "cat's pajamas." Did you know it means something fancy or cool? So here's my learned sentence based on my learned definition of cats pajamas.
    The fact that Kim now recycles is the cat's pajamas!
    and "give the lowdown." .... what's a lowdown? it sounds like something suspicious, like its mysterious and evil being so low and down. haha.
    Good thing I can read between the lines and pick up on social cues and context because if I couldn't, well.... then I would be pretty dumb. :)

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    1. Rubbish...duh. I probably knew that, it's just not familiar to me. How funny is that...I'm trying to he a smart mouth and help you out and you end up having to set me straight! haha

      I have heard "cat's pajamas", and you used it correctly! You could also says "the's bees knees".

      The lowdown is like...getting all the good info on something. Like "getting the scoop". Kind of like getting all the juicy gossip or just knowing all the details in general. It's definitely mysterious, kind of like...lemme give you the lowdown on the drug deal that's going on tomorrow.

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  2. :) the bees knees???! ok, thats just too far out there. you can't even see bees knees. do they even have knees? and how did someone even come up with that?
    Yeah - I think i would have used "lowdown" in your last sentence more than just every day talk, but cool! :) I think that idioms are the funniest and most confusing! and now I know another one! :)

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    Replies
    1. I had to figure out where it came from, so here you go:
      (from the Oxford Dictionary Online)
      The phrase was first recorded in the late 18th century, when it was used to mean 'something very small and insignificant'. Its current meaning dates from the 1920s, at which time a whole collection of American slang expressions were coined with the meaning 'an outstanding person or thing'. Examples included the flea's eyebrows, the canary's tusks, and one that still survives - the cat's whiskers. The switch in meaning for the bee's knees probably emerged because it was so similar in structure and pattern to these other phrases.

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