Disaster is only one step away!

Sunday afternoon I went out our front door to take two containers of compost to the bins at the corner restaurant.  One moment I was vertical on our front walk, the next I was flat on my back.  There seemed to be no transition, no feeling of falling.  I felt my head bang against the concrete.  I hollered my wife's name.

The next thing I remember is being inside asking my wife to get the container of sidewalk salt.

Then I remember my wife telling me to sit in a chair and relax.  After a bit I felt fine and got up to put salt on the sidewalk.  When I got outside I saw little holes in the ice.  Somebody had already salted.  As hard as I tried, I couldn't remember being out the first time.  I did remember later, but was that just a reconstruction?

My wife's reconstruction is that our grandson, looking out the front door, said, "Grandpa!" and then she heard me holler.  She went outside and found me in a fetal position and helped me get up and inside.  She said a neighbor across the street watched her, wondering if he needed to help.  She said I wanted to take the compost then and there, but she made me sit down.

Now let's look at the what ifs.

What if instead of my head hitting the sidewalk it had hit the bottom step?  Would I have a broken neck?

What if I had not been wearing a hat?  My winter hat is not very thick, but it seemed to be thick enough to absorb some of the force.  Later I did see the imprint of the hat in the snow.

What if I had been home alone?  Would anybody have seen me in a timely fashion?  Chuck Frederick, Editorial Editor of the Duluth News Tribune, wrote "Duluth didn't watch out for student frozen on porch" 2013-12-12.  My situation could have been similar.  The neighbors on one side are gone for college break.  The neighbors on the other side rarely go out the front door.  Even if they did, the snow banks might have hidden me.  Drivers going by aren't checking every notch in the snow banks for pedestrians lying on the sidewalk.  Pedestrians going by are checking where they walk and will rarely turn their heads to look up a house walk.  Whatever, I doubt if all of Duluth should be held accountable if I were not found in a reasonable time.

Why did I slip?  I had cleared the sidewalk the previous day, there shouldn't be a problem, right?  Not quite, the temperature was around freezing on Saturday.  Some of the snow had melted and flowed in a thin layer across the sidewalk.  Carrying two containers did not give me a free hand to hold on to the railing.  I probably went "charging" down the steps like it was a spring day.  Skid, flop, plop!

Well, all's well that ends well.  I did have a headache later, but that was a sinus headache around my eyes, not on the back of my head.

Recycling – What are the tradeoffs?

We recycle just about everything there is to be recycled, including almost all of our food waste.  Is there a point where more resources are used to recycle than there are resources saved?

I think of this every time I rinse a tomato juice bottle.  How much water should I use to get all the dried juice off the lip of the bottle?  Do I use quarts and quarts of running water to get a tenth-ounce of dried juice off?  Do I spend five minutes to do so?  I just make a good effort and assume the recycling process will take care of the residue.  Same with olive containers.  It takes lots of soap and water to get all the olive oil off.

I just thought of this again when recycling a shampoo bottle.  Even with it stored upside down, I wasn't getting any more shampoo out.  The bottle has a fancy snap-lid that I used a letter opener to get off.  Then I saw there was probably a teaspoon of thick shampoo at the bottom that didn't flow very quickly.  How much water do I use to get that residue out before I put it in the recycling bin?  With lots and lots of foam coming out on the sixth try, I said this is ridiculous.  I put the bottle in the waste basket.

Even on food waste, it is almost impossible to recycle it all.  See olive oil above.  We have oatmeal most mornings.  We do our best to put all the oatmeal into the bowls.  We can lick the serving spoon to get some of what's left, but how do you get off all that is still stuck to the pan?  We have to get the residue off before putting the pan in the dishwasher, or it will eventually clog the dishwasher screen.  So, we have to use more water than we cooked the oats in to soak the residue and then run that water through the sink disposer.  Oops!  More energy just to clean up.

Now if we can think of some way to buy newspapers without more advertising inserts than newsprint we actually read.  Inserts and the sports pages go right to the recycle pile (unless the comics or weather are in the sports section).