270. We return with some greening

I'm about to resume Pirenne. I have a bunch of chapters lined up -- though I'm currently reading a book club book instead, The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin so I'm hesitating to resume publishing until I return to reading Pirenne. Until this gets resolved, here's something different.

Cherry Blossom Festival

It's fitting that our event greening season begins with this festival in Japantown. And there are actual cherry blossoms in the trees this year.

This is our only event that spans two weekends, and, given the season, we often get a day with rain -- the first Sunday it poured for several hours at the end of the day, so check that off the list. I managed to get a very ill timed cold, so I missed the second Saturday entirely and only went in for three and a half hours at the end of Sunday, so I could do my vendor bag sorting specialty. (Vendors think they can put everything into a securely tied black bag and it can then go into anything that looks like a trash container. No. We, I, have to open each bag and sort out the best of the compost and the recycling. These are the worst bags we have to deal with. Over the -- many -- years I've developed a technique for expediting the sorting of these bags. But it's still a pain and I end up hating the vendors.)

So, all things considered, it went well enough and, most important for all the events to come, I'm now back to being able to tie can liners (to decrease their circumference and make them fit the container more securely) with my gloves on. It usually takes three to four days of work to regain this vital skill.

Taste of Temescal

Last night I worked Taste of Temescal, an event we first worked last September. It's a tiny, two person, event that requires setting up our eco-stations in front of a large number of restaurants spread over too many blocks of an "interesting" neighborhood in Oakland. Then we make sure the stations don't overflow for the several hours of the event, and then take it all down again and haul away the sorted trash.

I worked it last September with a crew-chief I'm fond of, but she wasn't available this time so, even though I'm still recovering from my cold, I agreed to work it as it's good to have at least one person with experience of an event. And I'm happy to say the guy who acted as crew-chief (they have to deal with getting the truck, loading it with supplies, and then returning the supplies and disposing of the bags of sorted waste -- none of which I'm keen to do) was very appreciative. I had learned a bunch of lessons from last time so it went really smoothly and we even had time to eat some of the great food that is the reason for the event -- including my favorite, Burmese tea leaf salad.

The guy acting as crew-chief called his girlfriend, who was one of my favorite crew-chiefs of last year (she managed to get a full time environmental job), so she came down and we hit several of the restaurants together. 

And then I rode BART home where I discovered I somehow managed to lose a good pair of gloves at the end of the shift -- probably while blowing my damn nose.

Dutch King Day

April is proving a particularly busy month for us this year. Or at least for me. The final weekend started with Dutch King Day, an event I've worked many times before, but not last year. This festival of orange is celebrated around the south windmill, just short of the beach in Golden Gate Park. 

Thanks to my reading of Pirenne, this year, for the first time, I had questions for the event staffers (many of whom are associated with the consulate general's staff). As an American, I'm happy to say that they were no more familiar with their history than Americans seem to be about the comparatively short history of our delusional democracy -- the home of the free, forsooth.

When I got home I did my own research and answered the questions, "When did the Netherlands become a kingdom?" since where I am in A History of Europe they are still a bunch of principalities within  Valois Burgundy. And, "How did they become a kingdom?" as, since Carolingian times it has been the Papacy that has raised princes to kings, and I can't imagine the Papacy doing this for the Protestant House of Orange.

The best answer to the first question I got at the event was, "Sometime in the 17th century." Wrong. Napoleon (and he is also the answer to my second question) created the Kingdom of Holland for his brother Louis in 1806. After Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna created the Kingdom of the Netherlands as a northern check on the power of France. (If they had been really serious about that they would have included Belgium to create a modern Lotharingia. But I suspect a Protestant Netherlands and a Catholic Belgium were seen as a fair religious compromise -- I wonder if Talleyrand had a finger in this pie?)

I'm surprised I didn't know this because King Louis I's queen was Hortence de Beauharnais, and their son King Louis II was the older brother of Napoleon III.

Meanwhile back in the park... The day was delightful. The crowd wasn't overly crowded but it was busy enough to keep boredom at bay. The fenced in celebration area has shrunk over the years, and that is a very good thing. Also, amazingly, it wasn't windy this year. I take some credit for this. I recalled previous years when I had to chase down wind-blown toters loaded with trash and eco-station materials, and reminded Mary of this problem so close to the ocean. We brought bricks and carefully weighted down the boxes used for collecting the trash. This technique works, up to a point, but it works even better when our preparation stays the wind. 

There were four of us working the event, not too few or too many, and at the end of the day we loaded the truck with all the bags of sorted waste (almost all compost) and our boxes, signs, and bricks. We even left early.

Bay Area Book Festival

The next day was a charming little book festival I'd never worked in Berkeley's tiny civic center, a convenient block from BART. For this event we were over staffed, for a change... until the end. I usually avoid closing down events if I can, but I'm glad I was there to help with this one. 

As is my way, I stormed the food vendor area as soon as I arrived -- like a Napoleonic Marshal taking the high ground. After all these years, it still amazes me how few people really appreciate (to the extent of emulating me) what I do at these events. Even crew chiefs who appreciate having me around -- and there were three of them working this Sunday -- don't seem to get this. I spend my first hour or two sorting and hauling multiple toter loads of cardboard and compost from behind the food vendors, after I had been assured there was nothing really to do. 

I tried to keep up with the vendors all day, in part because there really was almost nothing to do in the public realm, but also because I wanted to stay ahead of them so we could wrap up faster at the end. And the plan mostly worked. There was only one of the typical, black, "fuck-you" bags the food vendors always leave behind right before they drive off. I sorted that and took down all the stations and we should have been done. 

The problem with events like this with lots of (non-food) vendors, is that they almost always leave behind random stuff they don't feel like taking home. As our shifts were coming to an end, we still had all that junk, in areas of the event I hadn't even visited, still to deal with. I stayed an extra half hour and collected almost everything. Other people were still taking down the tents and tables, so there would be stuff to clear later if we wanted to wait an hour or so. I didn't. Both the crew chief and I passed on dealing with one booth which had left behind boxes of books. Books are not recyclable and they are heavy. Neither of us wanted to haul them to the library or the Goodwill. 

After we filled up almost all of the (I think) eleven small dumpsters, I walked the block to the BART station and caught the train home. That should be the end of the story, but no.

Sunday night is when I take out the landfill and recycling for the building. When I got home I found both toters full to overflowing. The residents in my building are, with two exceptions, myself included, Millennials who make enough money to live in these surprisingly expensive apartments. And yet, the occult technique of box flattening continues to elude them. I wouldn't mind (as much) if they just said to themselves, "while I lack the intelligence to flatten this largish box, I will set it here next to the recycling toter so some god or wizard will see it and flatten it for me." Instead, they put it in the toter which it nearly fills. And then pile more empty boxes on top.

So I come home, empty out all the boxes, flatten them, reload as much as I can, and haul both toters up the stairs to the alley. In the morning, around 7am, the Recology crew (we're on good terms as I gave them my spare key to the locks they put on some toters and dumpsters) will haul our toters down the alley, empty them, and return them to near our front gate. We pay for this service. Or that's the way it usually works. But not on this Monday morning.

Instead, the cleaning service hired by our next door neighbors takes our toters along with their's to the street and bring them back empty. Except that they put them all -- except for our one locked recycling toter -- in their back yard. The recycling toter, which they don't have a key to, they leave in the middle of the alley. At least I can find it and drag it back home. I spend the next several hours making calls, leaving messages and texts, trying to get our black toter back and trying to make sure this doesn't happen again. Finally, I notice that the cleaners (or someone) failed to lock their back gate. I go down and grab one of the black toters and drag it up their stairs and then down ours. Something that should have taken a few minutes (in my pajamas) has taken most of the morning.

And that brings to a close my tale of greening and trash hauling in the glorious month of April, 2018.