Snow, rubbish and elephants!

Well, it finally stopped snowing some time yesterday afternoon. Far too late to think about doing anything constructive. And apparently too late for the dustbin men to come and empty our general rubbish bin. One branch of refuse collecting emptied the bag of paper and card for recycling and hid the bag under the snow so that I've had to retrieve it this morning. However, emptying the general rubbish bin was clearly the responsibility of another refuse department, presumably with a different type of dustbin wagon, one that cannot deal with snowy road. 

It's complicated enough keeping track of which bins you are supposed to put out each week: food waste and compostable rubbish (el compost, as my friend Colin informs me it is now called in Spanish) every week, recyclable glass and plastic on alternate weeks and recyclable paper and card together with the general rubbish bin on the other alternate weeks. They give us a handy chart so that we know what is going on, very helpful. But if they start missing collections for weather related reasons, the whole system will fall apart. As it is, our general rubbish bin is full. I swear someone else is adding their rubbish to ours because, with all the recycling we do, we actually generate very little general rubbish. 

This is one of the problems of the streamlining of refuse collection. Back in the golden age of refuse collection, bin men used to go round to the back of houses and carry the bins to the front pavement for emptying. Now you have to put them out on the pavement ready for collection, causing a nuisance to passersby. Consequently most of us now keep the bins in the front or side garden - an elegant addition to the floral displays and the garden gnomes and such - so that it is easy to drag them out of the front gate. However, this leads to bin piracy! Shock, horror! On the street where our daughter lives, there is a regular race on refuse collection day to retrieve your bin, usually marked with the number of your house so that you don't get someone else's scabby, smelly bin by mistake, before some antisocial neighbour fills it up again. 

There is quite a lot to be said for the large refuse bins you see on Spanish streets. It avoids possible dustbin wars in neighbourhoods. 

 So, making my way out to replenish our food supplies from the supermarket today I had to squeeze past an un-emptied bin by our garden gate. It was still there when I returned. Hopefully they will catch up with themselves before too long! 

I walked along the local bridle path on my way to the supermarket. There was a steady drip of melting snow from the trees and the temperature is less severe than it has been but there is still plenty of by now rather sorry-looking white stuff around. 

In the meantime, I have been helping Phil out with some of his translation work. Yesterday I came across a section that said, in Spanish, "The British have a proverb that can be useful to all of us, 'an elephant cannot be eaten in a day'". 

Really? Do we actually have such a proverb? It sounds quite a sensible one but I can't say I have come across it. And like one of the characters in the French film "Amélie", I am usually pretty good at proverbs. 

So I googled it. The best I could come up with was an old joke. Well, not really a joke, more like the kind of thing you get in crackers at Christmas. It goes like this: question - How do you eat an elephant? Answer - Well, one bite at a time, of course! It fits in with the idea the writer wanted to get across: Rome wasn't built in a day; do things little by little; slow and steady wins the race. 

 In my googling I found lots of business advice pages, using the metaphor of eating elephants. Here's a quote from one: 
"Take small bites out of your elephant. Take the right bites. But most importantly, determine what your elephant will look like when you’ve eaten the whole thing this will help keep you focused on the results, not the work." 

You see what I mean? Somewhat overcooking the elephant in my opinion. 

That's all!