Sick of Garbage - in the Redbud (not Red Bud)City !

What has Columbus lowered itself to now! 

No longer can I make fun of the City Government, no longer can I make fun of Udey Dam or the constant moving of buildings downtown.  Now I'm forced to make fun of . . . . . garbage pick-up.

sigh!

This is not the Columbus I have grown to love to make fun of!  HOWEVER - I think HAVING to put garbage in clear bags is a crock of BS.  The official reason for having to put your garbage in clear bags is so the Garbologist who pick up our unwanted waste can look at each bag and decide if the contents are actually garbage.  I'm sure do that!  However - crows also look at every bag also.

Have you noticed that the crows (my favorite bird and the only bird to "play") will hop down the street looking at the bags and pick the clear ones because they can see the juicy tidbits inside. They rip open the clear bags and as I was driving to work Monday there was garbage all over the streets nest to the clear bags! The crows skip the white bags completely.

The next thing you know it will be forbidden to smoke inside a clear bag!  
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Saturday as I was watching would could be the beginning of the end of the world (meteor) we were viewing "Up In The Air" which was a pretty good movie up to the end. The ending sort of faded away and I was told it's one of those "make you own ending" movies.  I hate that!  I payed good money to see this movie and I don't want to "make my own ending". I should get some sort of discount. When I see a movie I don't want to have to actually THINK what happened!

We also watched Public Enemies! A movie you have perhaps heard of.  We saw it in the theater and had watched all of the extras that came with the DVD but had not actually "watched" the movie.  Pretty darn good!!  Much better then the 1st time we watched it as the first time most people were watching the backgrounds and not the actual movie.

We also saw some of Close Encounters!   What a great movie this is STILL!!  Do you know that it was THIRTY THREE YEARS AGO that it came out?

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Speaking of Columbus!  Every spring I am totally in love with this town.  Living in Madison for 30 years I had forgotten how beautiful a small town can be. Columbus is called the Red Bud City but I think it's is the Flowering Tree City as there are flowering trees EVERYWHERE!

There are houses like this everywhere in the town.! 

But then I've been driving around lately and I swear every other house has a Red Bud. In fact Columbus actually has it's own strain of Eastern Red Bud, the cercis canadensis "Columbus".

I propose that perhaps NEXT year we get a group of interested people, map out Columbus on a grid and drive down every street and map how many and where the red buds are in Columbus!   If you feel like this might work let me know. It really would not be that hard if we had 4 or 5 people. 

If we are the Red Bud City we need a count of the red buds.  Maybe even have a contest for the biggest and best!! Then maybe we can talk the city into donating a number of red buds for planting. I'm not a huge fan of the red bud but since we call ourselves "Red Bud" lets embrace it and spread it. Let's DROWN in Red Buds and make this a HUGE thing!!

Maybe the Chamber of Commerce can put this on their website . . . oh  wait . . they don't have a working website.  Red Bud City in ILL, population 3200 has a real nice website, did you know they have Antique malls, golf courses, pubs and a hospital?  They have a big City Hall with a bell tower! They have three highways that all meet in the center of town at their one stop light! And there are 8 specialty shops! wow - what a wealth of information  I'd like to move there!

Wait - it's in Illinois!!  Never mind!

HEY - on my other blog (Lasagna Beds for Beginners) I was asked about my Autumn Blaze Maple the 2003 Urban Tree of the Year!  I want to high five whoever it is in Columbus that decided to plant more of those fantastic trees in the Avalon Park area!!  WELL DONE!! 

The Autumn Blaze is a cross between the red maple and silver maple " brilliant orange-red color, dense and healthy branching, and a vigor that enhances growth and protects from insects and disease."  It can grow 60 feet high and 40 feet wide and is a fast grower.  Ours has grown perhaps 4 feet in two years from 10 to 14 feet! AND - is seedless!  no whirly-gigs to mess things up!


Back in Columbus Wisconsin I was driving past a house near "Who's" place and took a photo of their rock garden with a pear(?) tree and a Red Bud in the background.

I asked if I could take some close ups of there rock garden and they looked surprised and said of course - well . . . . . . . it looked better from a distance.  My buddy Brian would LOVE to get his hands on that garden and fix it up, it could use some TLC.

Then later in the day DJ and I took a ride around the country surrounding Columbus because the clouds were pretty nice for photography!   I showed her where the steer and oak photo (Hamburger Hill) was taken (Hwy 73 and Steidtman Road).

You can see this framed in the West Side Gallery in Columbus along with two other framed panorama's and eight of my canvas works (well, seven at this very moment).

Our ride was uneventful but we did manage to capture this moment.

That's it for today - no blog tomorrow as I'm taking mom to many many tests in Fort Atkinson.  Be back Thursday!

Cheers
Rod