#430 Burning Thirty Years

I looked at all the paper to be discarded.  What's upstairs was all bundled to go to the recycle center.  The way it works, the town sells the "good" paper - shiny catalogs, office paper, glossy newspaper inserts, but they have to pay to have "rough" paper, newspapers and light cardboard, hauled away.

They have one truck body (I don't know how else to describe it) for each.  The rough paper one fills up fast.  I usually go late on Saturday mornings (they are open also on Wednesday mornings), and there's usually very little space left for newspapers.

If I brought even a quarter of all this stuff at once, they'd bar me from the place forever.  And what's upstairs is tiny compared to what's in the basement.  Jay never threw out a piece of paper in his life, and what I'm finding downstairs has moved from Pittsburgh to White Plains, to Dallas, to here with him.  Thirty years worth.

If I try to take a reasonable amount per trip, it would take forever.

I have a fireplace.

Heh, heh.

It took nine hours over the past two evenings, but I have burned all the upstairs paper.

I stink.

One thing I discovered is that the "rough" stuff and office paper burns easily and quickly, with nice white, yellow, and red flame.  Catalogs and magazines are difficult to burn.  Plus, they burn with blue and green colored flames, which means a lot of metals in the material, which means pollution.  They are a pain.

So, I'm not going to attempt to burn the shiny paper in the basement.  But burning only the rough paper will reduce the quantity left to go to the dump or recycle considerably, so that's what I'll do.  And the town can make a little money on the shiny.

Plus, I'm a bit of a pyromaniac.  I love to watch the flames.

Win-win situation.

~~Silk