When moving from one city to another, major and minor things change in your life. Some changes hardly affect you, others make you feel uncomfortable. You get to know favourite places, you loose favourite places. You adapt to new routines, some easier than others.
One of the last routines I struggle with is the day the garbage company empties our bin. This used to be on Fridays. Here it is on Mondays. Luckily the Man adapted to this routine more easily than me. Our garden would look like a dumping ground by now if we would rely on me to remember to wheel the bin to the street.
The biggest issue in The Netherlands with having your scheduled collection day on a Monday is that many holy days are marked as official holidays, so nobody goes to work. Including garbage collectors. We are in the middle of holiday season that always comes with these holy Mondays. On top of that we have Kings day, the birthday of the King that is a national holiday, and Liberation day, not a national holiday but some people have a day off. Considering most days look alike during corona era, it’s hard to know which day it is anyway.
Anyway, every time we have a holiday that includes a Monday we have to remind ourselves that our bin will be emptied on the Saturday before. I experienced a big breakthrough yesterday. I was thinking about next week and figured out Kings day is next Monday. I then remembered Monday as garbage collection day and thus concluded that we need to put the bin out tomorrow.
I now consider myself fully integrated.
Our weekly pickup is Tuesday, never a holiday, so the only times we have an exception to the rule are when snow storms necessitate a postponement to the following Saturday.
Our tricky-thing-I’ll-never-remember is that that pickup of compost and waste alternates from week to week; fortunately we have a kind early-acting, organized neighbour who takes the bins out every week, leaving me the much simpler task of bringing them back in.
The really difficult thing for me to remember is that the first Friday of every month is recycling pickup; usually the way I realize this is seeing my neighbours’ blue bags at the curb when I head out the door to work in the morning, resulting in a mad dash to get our recycling out before the truck comes. The implications of missing this are a month’s worth of recycling piled up in the back room.