Neighborhood Services

Two new services our town has recently implemented:
Free dry-cell battery recycling (at the Village Hall), including old electronic devices
Expired or unused medications disposal (located at the police department, of course)

We’ve been trying to do our part for the environment like using the reusable grocery bags (although I will be the first to admit we could always do more), so I’m really happy to hear about these new developments. If only they had introduced them a bit sooner – I went through the medicine cabinet and chucked a bunch of drugs not even a month ago.

Ticketed

Last weekend my brother came to visit and when he went outside to leave, found two $25 parking tickets on his windshield written within one minute of each other by the same cop. The first reason was he was parked with the left wheel to the curb instead of the right, and the second reason was because he was too far from the curb.

We felt responsible since he had asked us earlier in the day if he should move his car and we told him not to bother. I thought the way he was facing wasn’t correct, but I didn’t say anything because I second-guessed myself and thought maybe it was just me being overly anal and not necessarily against the law. My brother didn’t think much of it either since he lives on a one-way street where it doesn’t matter if the right wheel isn’t against the curb.

We originally went down to the police station just to pay both tickets but as we were walking to the building I started getting mad thinking about it and asked how to contest them instead. I realize they are two separate infractions, but they are listed together as one reason next to the check box so I think the cop was being a bit of a jerk about it. To add insult to injury, there’s an out of state car that’s been parked on the street overnight for going on two weeks now who hasn’t been ticketed at all. The rules are no street parking between 2am – 6am for vehicles that don’t have a city parking sticker, so I included that as one of the reasons I felt they should waive one ticket.

Today I got a response in the mail and at first got mad because the piece of paper stated that my request was denied. But then I noticed that there were two papers, one for each ticket, and one of them was approved, so that means we only have to pay one of the tickets! Hooray! Joe was surprised they agreed to waive anything, so that goes to show you it pays to at least ask. Also, we’ve learned a $25 lesson for the next time my brother comes over.

Froggin’ Under The Stars

That’s what the event we attended tonight, sponsored by the forest preserve district of DuPage county, was called. We learned about frogs (there was a quiz!), heard frog calls from the native species in the area, and then hit the trails to listen to them in person. We heard American toads and Cope’s Grey treefrogs.

Along the way we came across an American toad which was quite fascinating to the kids in the group. I grew up in an area where they were prevalent so I wasn’t quite excited, but we did see a great horned owl which was cool. I’ve never seen one in the wild before.

We also saw a lot of stars, and could clearly see the international space station fly by which was really cool.

Normally the forest preserve is closed well before we had to leave (nearly 10 pm), so it was interesting to see how active the wildlife is at night.

All in all, a very nice way to start off our 10-day staycation. That’s right, we don’t have to work again until June 2nd. Woo hoo!

Package Debacle Solved

Joe ran into the next door neighbor at the mailboxes today and found out that our mail carrier did indeed put them in our neighbor’s box by mistake. The neighbor explained he ran into the mail carrier on Tuesday and the mail carrier asked him whether he had our packages, so the neighbor ran home and sure enough, he did. He gets a lot of packages so he hadn’t even noticed.

Isn’t that exactly what I thought probably happened? And that explains why our packages didn’t turn up Monday night. I guess I should be thankful the mail carrier bothered to ask, otherwise who knows when our neighbor might have discovered the mistake. I’m still miffed about how rude the carrier was, though. Not to mention the fact that he showed up at the mail boxes just as Joe and the neighbor had finished their conversation and didn’t say a word to Joe. He could have apologized, but he didn’t.

In other news, we got a huge 30 gallon storage tote for our Christmas decorations at Target today. This is our fifth one for Christmas. Gotta stop buying stuff I guess. I finally wised up and used a permanent marker to assign a number to each tote and then recorded what I put inside in a nifty Excel spreadsheet. No more guessing games come next year. I can tell Joe, “Go get me tote # 1” with confidence.

Just like magic

Or more like someone finally righted their wrong.

Ah yes, our two missing packages mysteriously appeared in our mailbox this afternoon. I can only speculate what happened but the bottom line is the kids will get their gifts and that’s all that matters.

I think all your well wishes might have done the trick, blogging friends! Perhaps you can send good vibes my way that we will win the lottery? ;)