A Dumb, Smart Place

"I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart."

-Christopher Fowler

A lovely, misty, rainy affair out there this morning.

I'd like it a lot better if I wasn't flying out of here tomorrow. The PIREPS this morning tell us there's ice and severe turbulence lurking in all that. Should make for a fun trip.

I also would have liked it a lot better if it wasn't trash day. I'd thought about taking a photo of our ridiculous recycling bag, but you'll have to settle for that blue dot in the lower right of the photo because I wasn't willing to stand out in the cold rain to get the shot.

When we lived at Tara we had a private trash service, a model of efficiency with two huge rolling trash cans, one for garbage and one for recycled items. Here at the Schoolhouse we're at the mercy of the Corning Sanitation Department, which is, well, not so good.

There are no trash cans, for starters. One puts out bags, white for trash and blue for recyclables. You have to buy the blue bags, and they aren't cheap.

With no trash cans, one's garbage accumulates out in the trash shed next to our building. Each unit has its own little can, which of course we can't put at the curb because the trash guys won't touch them. Instead, it's the bags.

Or for some folks plastic bait barrels, we'd call them in Florida. Filled with bottles and the like, then left willy nilly on the side of the road when the trash man leaves.

As for the blue bags, Peg warns me that they can be a little picky if you don't break down your cardboard boxes. Which apparently means tossing them out of the bag onto the side of the road to sit there in the rain, an admonishment to homeowners who don't know or play by the rules.

It is all very stupid, and results in us generally just putting everything in the trash bag. Or sometimes we throw a bunch of trash bags into the back of the truck on Friday and dump them at the lake condo, where we have an actual trash service for the neighborhood.

We pay something like $13,000.00 a year in property taxes for the privilege of living in Corning. The schools are truly superior, but that's about where the positive comments stop. Our sidewalks are crumbling, and apparently that is the responsibility of the homeowner. The water coming out of the tap sometimes includes brown slime, a worrisome thing in a place with four Superfund sites within the city limits.

The cops sit around looking for Floridians to hassle. We've been stopped twice--the last time Peg wasn't technically "stopped" by the po po, because the car wasn't moving. She was sitting still with the motor running, dialing up her grocery list in the Wegman's parking lot. Holding your phone in a car with the motor running is a traffic offense here, and a biggie in terms of points on your license. So Peg got a ticket.

On balance this is a great place to live, a verdant valley full of very smart, progressive people thanks to Corning, Inc. But it's not entirely great, with very high taxes and crappy public services.

I'll quit my grousing about Corning after a couple days this week back in the Sunshine State for work. That dystopia always reminds me that there are worse things.

Time to slip on a tie for a Zoom hearing where I'm going to get the stink eye from a screen full of expensive lawyers, and the judge I suppose, for filing an emergency continuance motion when I was hired at the last minute. One doesn't go to law school to become popular, I guess.