Weekly Post

Great day here in the north. Any time it is above zero is a great day. Some of you may not know this but there is no wind here. The most I have seen is about 10 mph. But if you go to the hills the wind picks up.

I don’t know why but when weather people report on the weather they like to stand on a roof in the wind and snow. We watched a weather report from a guy in anchorage. He was standing on the roof in the wind and snow. Reminds me of a song by Bob Dylan, “don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing” Reminded us also of Omaha where the wind blows all the time.

Our weather man here doesn’t stand on the roof. Once in a while he will take it out side and say it is cold. You don’t need a weatherman to tell me that either.

Another thing that surprised us here took almost a year for us to see this. We got here the first week of June 2003. Everything was so beautiful, trees, greenery was coming up etc. Well we survived our first winter and were going through our first thaw. That is when we saw it after the snow melted – TRASH!!! It was all up and down the road ways.

I had never seen so much trash on the roadways before in my life, I was amazed. Not just paper and bags, we are talking about bags of trash. I even saw and old coach along side the road. This week I was going down Badger Road and there was a Hefty bag of trash in the middle of the road.

Then after the first weekend of May, it was all gone!

Here is the explanation. The way most people dispose of their trash is to take it to what is called a transfer station. There are several around here, and we take ours there about once a week. You can have your garbage picked up here, but that is an additional expense.

People will put their trash in the back of a pickup truck and off you go down the road. 55 miles an hour and trash going everywhere. Well most people don’t do that. They carefully tie and cover their trash so it doesn’t blow out. But there are those who don’t take these precautions.

During the summer, a job provided to the youth around here is to walk the roads and pick up the trash so that it doesn’t accumulate. When winter comes this practice stops.

Then the snows come and covers the trash that has blown out. Which keeps it out of sight. This continues all winter so when the snow melts, you have seven months of trash that has accumulated. Wow what a mess.

Then that first week end of May, the residents of the Borough get together and have one big clean up day party. And presto we are clean for the tourist season..