Hey Doc

Wow, I did not realize that it has been a week since my last entry. One of the things I promise my mother to do is to clean out their storage area. As a pack rat my father is, I am not surprised to see lots of empty jars and cans. But plastic lids ? Those re-sealable lids used on tin cans ? What will you do with those things? Yep, his famous words "You never know when you're going to need it".
I learned that it is not easy to throw things away here. Their recycling program will put Santa Clara's to shame. They recycle everything here. But there is a catch, you can only put certain items out on a given day or you get yell at by the collector. I got yell at by a woman because I dumped the kitchen waste into the compose bin. Oh, here, the garbage is collected daily but you bring the garbage to the truck on an assigned time and location. If your time happens to be around 7:00 PM, you better eat your dinner fast and try to catch that garbage truck or you will have to wait for tomorrow. If your have been seen bringing home fully loaded garbage bags, that's a tell-tail sign that you have missed the "Truck".
One nice thing about this system, you are forced to get to meet your neighbor's while waiting for the truck.
I took the opportunity while cleaning, dust off few old photo albums and spent a whole day re-living through the old memories. Too bad that all of the negatives for the photos taken while my parents were young are gone. Thanks for today's technology, I scanned a bunch of them and now they are in my PC, safe and sound. Humm, I better run a backup in case the hard drive crashes. I will load a few up to my photo site in next few days, so stay tuned.