ASUS Zephyrus S19

[Kellemora]

My brother built a steam room shower in his basement. He had like four or five showerheads in there, and then that steam making firebox in the corner. I went in there one time and could barely breathe, and that was a couple of decades ago.

We have a guy here that comes around on our street on every other Wednesday looking to see if someone put things out for him.
He also takes furniture, but not furniture with any type of cloth or cushions on it. Mainly dressers, chests, things like that.
After Debi's mom passed away, we had a bunch of stuff nobody wanted, which we moved into the garage so it didn't get ruined outside. Set a pole lamp down by the road with a sign on it Tuesday night that said Blue Pick-up Truck collection guy, back up the driveway we have a whole truckload for you. It was all good stuff so he was as pleased as could be. He took everything, even a couple of things he didn't normally take, simply because it was all clean and inside.

I still have my old water heater laying on the floor in the crawlspace under my house. Even the iron man didn't want it.

[yogi]

I've heard stories about those Scandinavian steam rooms, saunas. They have quite a few for public use and there is no sex discrimination using them. Both males and females sit in there with and without towels wrapped around them. It seems like an odd thing for us Americans, but up in the Arctic Circle you do what you have to in order to keep warm. I guess.

We had two junk collectors in the old neighborhood, and they both came by on Tuesdays. What one guy didn't take the other guy did. One day we put a mattress out there which was in pretty good condition. That was not the junk man's traditional fare, but we thought we would give it a try and see what happens. Tuesday came and went and the mattress was still there. However the following Thursday it was gone. LOL Good thing it disappeared too. There probably is some ordinance regarding leaving mattresses at the curb.

Only been here five years but I already have an impressive collection of junk. There are no junk collectors in this town so that we would have to call 1-800-JUNK to dispose of it. Unfortunately they charge for taking away junk unlike the old neighborhood. That's why I still have it all in my basement.

[Kellemora]

My brother would tell me some stories about a few of the countries he visited, and what was normal there would be strictly taboo here for sure.
I don't remember which country it was in, but it was for some big event they held their. That had one bathroom, albeit it was about 100 feet long and 12 to 14 feet wide. Toilets lined up side by side with only a vinyl curtain between them, no doors, no curtains in front, just a curtain on each side of you, and they stopped a good foot above the floor.
The amazing thing was, people sitting across from you would be carrying on conversations with the people across from him, but since he didn't know the language, he had no idea what they were talking about.

We have two major pick-up times each year, but you have to take your stuff to the dumpster they place on your block. The one for here the past couple of pick-ups was only three doors down from us.
Before the city took over trash hauling here, the companies that hauled away our trash would take nearly anything. But the city is strict about what you can put into your trash cans. No construction waste of any kind, no yard waste of any kind, etc.

Since the frau and I recycle as much as we can. We go when we can fill the back of the Blazer up with bags of crushed aluminum cans. Then we put bags of plastics in the back seat area. Plastics, even sorted by types don't fetch much. But we stop there on the way to the aluminum can guy, so the buck or two we get their pays for the gas, and the can guy we usually get between 35 and 75 bucks, depending on how much we have, and what the daily rate is on the day we go.

[yogi]

Way back in the early days of my career at Motorola I heard a story about the toilet customs in Japan. We were selling off our semiconductor business at the time and going back and forth to Japan was routine. China wasn't involved at the time if you can believe that. Some Japanese places were modernized but traditionally the "toilet" was literally a hole in the floor. You would squat down to do your thing and wet cloths were provided to clean up in the end. That was then, but now I understand no decent home, and certainly no hotel, is without bidets. They seem to be quite anal about their toilet routines over there.

Speaking of toilet etiquette, there is an old story about Lyndon B Johnson when he was president. Apparently he didn't let such things as the call of nature stop him from conducting business. He not only would take calls while in the John but also met with people and signed papers. One photograph I saw was exactly that, LBJ signing some document while sitting on the pot. It could have been fake, but he impressed me as the kind of guy who would do such a thing.

You are about the most conscientious recycler that I know of. LOL You put a lot of work into your waste, but apparently it pays off even if it's only in a small way.

[Kellemora]

When I was a tyke, and dad took me to Sportsman Park for a baseball game.
The urinal was just a half-pipe laid lengthwise across the floor with a long divider the length of the pipe, about 1 foot above the pipe, made of tin, held up by steel poles about every 6 feet.
The toilet area was like steel drums with a metal toilet seat on them, with only a sheet of ten between them also.
That would have been mid to late 1950s, before Busch Stadium was built.

When I was in Hong Kong, the motel bathroom was at the end of the hall. You walked past a row of four sinks to on area with four old style toilets, meaning the water closet was mounted on the wall above the toilet by about 6 inches. Typical black seats as we had here in commercial businesses. The motel bathroom had big red and gold curtains between the four toilets, and a small curtain in front you could pull closed if you wanted to.
The ladies bathroom at the other end of the hall was much more luxurious. They had six sinks, plus 3 sit down tables with mirrors, and each of their six toilets was in like a closet with louvered doors.

I have a can crusher in the kitchen and the can receptacle right next to it. Hidden behind a louvered bi-fold door.
Next to the aluminum can receptacle is another receptacle we use for Pet plastic, then another one for other plastics, but not bags. We reuse most of our bags, and some types of plastics we just toss because even the recyclers don't want them.
Paper and cardboard I shred and use as mulch. Corrugated cardboard gets place outside between the side of the garage and the fence where I go every day to feed the birds. Keeps the weeds down. We never have enough corrugated to cover the small area and keep it covered, because it decomposes so fast.
My wife is paying for most of her cruise with money from recycling stuff. The largest amount of money comes from cans.
We no longer do steel cans, because the cost to wash them out is more than you get for the steel now.

Years ago, when we could burn trash, all tin cans went into the firepit, and were picked out after they were cleaned by the fire, they were easy to get out of the ashes at the time we hauled ash away.

[yogi]

I recall a few places in which the urinals were just a trough attached to the wall. None of them were down on the floor as you describe, but I can see how that would amount to the same thing. It all seemed pretty normal looking back at it from 2022, but anything like that in a public place now would probably get them shut down by the health department. LOL

O'Fallon stopped taking any paper products for recycling as well as any colored plastic. Tin and aluminum are ok to put in the bin too. They don't demand that the paper labels be removed, but apparently it makes their life at the sorting center more simple if the cans and bottles do not have labels attached. It's interesting to note that some manufacturers make it easy to remove the labels while others go to an extreme to keep them in place. Generally soaking things in hot soapy water will do the job, but some adhesives simply do not become undone that way. The crazy part about all this is that the paper products and the unwanted plastic can be put into the regular trash which ends up in the landfill. We get a lot of things delivered to our house in cardboard boxes so that it would just be overwhelming to put all that into the regular trash, although it is legal to do it. They do have a recycling center at city hall and that is where you can take paper and cardboard. They just don't want celluloid mixed in with the regular stuff for some reason. They said it all has to do with the Chinese no longer buying our discarded plastic. I'm not sure how that rationalizes the no-paper rule, but that's the argument they gave us. They didn't reduce the fees when they made the changes. I guess it costs just as much to pick up a six pack of plastic as it does a full bin of recyclables.

[Kellemora]

I still keep pet plastic separate from the HDPE types, but no longer separate them into their exact numbers like I once did. Simply because our recycler said they all go into the same hopper now.
What is strange, many are now saying to recycle with the lid still on. Stamped right on the lids now too.
I have a hunch it has to do with the ring that stays on the bottle in most cases. I removed the ring and the cap and put those in the HDPE bin. So I get paid more for clean Pet plastic, or used to, now I just crush it and tighten the cap so it doesn't come uncrushed. We can get more into a bin that way.
By the same token, I crush my aluminum cans much smaller than most too.
But not like the guy who crushed them almost as thin as a coin in a compression tube he made.
I've only been at the recyclers a couple of times when he was there unloading.
It's funny to see him pull in with a pick-up truck filled up with 30 inch tall PVC pipes all standing upright in the bed of his truck. Those pipe are all filled with the crushed cans, so he had to dump each one into their big conveyor bin hopper.
If he is there, we have to wait until they can do ours of course, so if he sees us pull in, he lets us go ahead of him, hi hi.

[yogi]

We recycle things, but not to the extent that you do. When we first arrived here to Missouri we were given two bins; one for trash and one for recyclables. I don't recall ever being told exactly what is recyclable so that if it was not organic it went into the recycle bin. Then O'Fallon technically stopped recycling anything. They hired the company that pick up recyclables in the neighboring town. That company, however, was very picky about what it would take, and any paper products would not be acceptable to them. I think grade 1,2 and 3 plastic is all they wanted mixed in with the empty cans. The explanation for it all had to do with the way it was sorted. The new company did not have a way to separate the paper products from the rest of the recyclables and threatened to not take anything from us if we didn't follow their rules. We got a list of what was acceptable, but as I stated earlier there were no instructions regarding labels which of course are paper products. The first few times after the switch they came by to inspect what we put into the recycle bin before they emptied it. We had not removed any labels at that time, but received their seal of approval nonetheless. Since then I've read where they prefer the labels to be removed if possible. Same with the plastic rings from the caps. They passed inspection in spite of their not being the right grade of plastic.

In my particular case I don't see the point to crushing anything. Since you recycle things by the CWT I suppose it would make a huge difference. If I were going to compact the metal I'd probably want to melt it and sell them ingots of aluminum. I probably could not do that with the steel cans. There no doubt is some kind of rule about blast furnaces being housed in one's garage.

[Kellemora]

We do have recyclable bins here too, but hardly anyone uses them. Why should we give to the city for free, what we can be paid to take to the recycling centers? They used to take plastic bags, but now claim they clog up their shredding machines. That's OK, the plastics guy takes plastic bags of all types, just keep them separated into three types and they are happy. It doesn't even hurt if a vinyl bag is mixed in with the mylar bags, but we are supposed to keep T-shirt grocery bags separate from vinyl bags, from aluminum coated mylar. Trouble is, bags don't weigh enough to get anything, hi hi.
It would take five years for a person to amass enough grocery bags to fill a six inch cube of space in a landfill.

FWIW: Aluminum cans bring a higher price than scrap aluminum, so you don't want to melt them down.
Here we are allowed to add aluminum foil, and aluminum pie pans and other aluminum containers in the soda can mix, because they are the same grade of aluminum. We get a fairly high price here because the cost of getting them a few miles down the road to the Alcoa smelter isn't much. The further away from a smelter you live, the lower the price they pay for the cans. In Missouri, most of our cans went up to Reynolds Aluminum smelter in northern Illinois.

The places that have automated plastic separation, do so using these tall towers filled with I assume salt water to a specific viscosity. After the plastic is shredded and washed, it goes into the towers where it sits for a few hours, but since it is all steel tanks, you can't see what is going on inside of them.

I know from shredding paper, shredded takes up more space than not shredded, but plastics are different, they seem to take up less space after shredded.

[yogi]

We not only give the city our recyclables, but we also must pay them to pick it all up once a week. It would not matter if we sold it ourselves. The fees are assessed whether you use the service or not. It's part of the water bill in fact, which I get a discount on due to my old age. LOL Apparently we aren't going to run out of landfill space any time soon so that it really doesn't matter if you separate the trash from the recycle stuff. They do complain about yard waste if you don't bag it separately and identify it as such. I have so little of it that I put it in regular trash bags and never had it rejected. Once in a while a tree branch goes into the trash bin and those never got rejected. The reason, I'm sure, has to do with the fact that the driver would have to get out of his warm and cozy truck to toss the branch back on my driveway. Collecting the trash is all automated anyway. They don't seem to care what you throw out.

[Kellemora]

Since they automated our trash pick-up, you can darn near put anything in the trash can. They lift them up and dump them as fast as they can and zoom onto the next one.
Now on the days they are using an overhead commercial truck, their dump unit just dumps into a hopper bin in the front of the truck, so the driver can see what all is in there. But the gimmick is, put something you don't want them to see in a soda carton or box, the put the box in with junk in a black plastic bag, so it looks like normal kitchen garbage, then off it goes.

I don't know why people worry so much about hour landfills in the first place.
After all, we dig a hole, take something out of the hole, use if for awhile, then either pass it on or discard it.
If discarded, it ends up back in a hole in the ground.

[yogi]

I have some personal experience regarding why people care about landfills. When I was very young there was a landfill at what was then the outskirts of the city. I don't know how many acres it covered, but it must have been at least 100 which meant there was a lot of open land. I grew up a couple miles from that dump and would on occasion ride my bike to the park directly across the street from it. I'd watch the garbage trucks drive around the hills to the edge of the abyss and dump their load. It was kind of a cool thing to watch for a kid. By then they discovered there was rock at the bottom of the pit that could be used for making bricks. A brick yard was in fact constructed and operated for at least a dozen years. During that time the rest of the landfill area became packed. There was no more space in which to dump the city's garbage. So, now the city had a problem. The garbage kept coming but the space to put it all vanished. Well Chicago is a big place and they found some other vacant land, but there were protests and law suits and all kinds of discontent when the city announced its plans. The neighbors, for some odd reason, did not want to live anywhere near a landfill. So ... the next choice was 20 miles out of the city and very costly to haul all that trash such a distance. Taxes had to be increased which also pissed off the neighbors. I can't imagine it was much of an increase, but they did object. And Chicago being what it was had all kinds of clean air and anti-pollution ordinances so that no incinerators were allowed inside the city or the surrounding burbs.

You are right about the process being simple. Dig a hole and put your garbage in it. That works fine for a single family, but it is not so fine when you have a few million people and their garbage to deal with.

[Kellemora]

There was a landfill in Kirkwood, right behind the gas station that originally stretched for over a mile. It only took about 5 years to fill up that space. But they always dumped waste dirt over the top at night after all the garbage trucks had emptied.
Now there is a whole apartment complex built where the landfill was. I do remember the flaming pipes way up in the air, and when they finally quit flaming, they were cut off and covered up too.
I lived right down from it, and the only odors came from the garbage trucks themselves. Probably because water was sprayed over everything as they dumped, and then some type of greenish stuff sprayed over that too.
I lived there for like 5 years, and only one summer did we smell any odors from it, and even then, it wasn't bad.
The sewer disposal plant smelled much worse.

I've seen some really nice landfills over the years, cleanly operated too. But I do wonder where they get all the dirt and gravel they use to cover it up each night, hi hi. Perhaps digging another hole to turn into a landfill, hi hi.

[yogi]

The land fill I talked about not only had a brick yard but at some point also was a ski hill complete with artificial snow making machines. That only lasted a few years but it served to show that a landfill site can have multiple uses. They had to wait a certain number of years, I think it was twenty five, before they could build anything substantial on top of the old landfill. Today there is a thriving shopping mall on that ground with no evidence whatsoever of it's previous use.

I passed a landfill every day on my way to work for five years. This was thirty miles north of Chicago and several miles from the small town I was working in at the time. Never did I smell garbage from that site. They did have methane burning chimneys along the top of the hills but that was the only way you could tell by looking what was going on there. You would think people would not mind living near that kind of operation. However, just the word landfill turned everyone against it. I think it had to do with a perceived value of their property, or something. All I know is that the landfill that is now a shopping center is worth many times more than it would be without the mall.

[Kellemora]

The Peerless Park landfill is now over 200 feet deep and has like another 200 feet before it is filled to level with the surrounding terrain. All you would see for years when driving by the place were large black tarps on the ground, and steam rollers zipping around on them. Plus the telltale flaming pipes was about it, you never actually saw any garbage there, unless you were a garbage truck driver and was emptying your load into the chutes that take it down to ground level.
I assume by now it has finally filled up though.

There was another small landfill on the way to Fenton where they continually sprayed lime water over it, instead of covering it with dirt and rock. It too got tamped down with flat plate stompers, which actually looked like that was to break up the dried lime water so they could spray more over it. They only had one larger fire tower so I guess there were pipes from the fill areas feeding to it. It never had a smell either.