Like most couples, my wife and I have divided up the chores. In the boringly conventional mode, one of my chores every Thursday morning is to haul our week's trash about 400 feet down our driveway to the nearest public road. There the garbage truck and its crew will pick them up, empty them, and leave the empties there for me to haul back up to the house in the afternoon.
We've lived here for over ten years now, so I've performed this little ritual over 500 times. You could say that I'm an expert on certain aspects of our garbage – in particular, how much of it we produce. There's really little variation; we consistently produce between two and three 50 gallon trash cans full every week.
But for the past three weeks, my wife has been in Indiana with her mom. That means I've had two trash cycles with her gone. In those two weekly cycles, I've produced less than a half of one trash can. I skipped taking it down last week; there wasn't enough to make it worthwhile.
Now it makes sense to me that two of us would produce more trash than one of us, but I'd expect the difference to be about 2:1 – and instead it's more like 5:1. This leads inexorably to the mystery: what on earth is my wife throwing out in such large quantities each week? I don't really feel like inventorying all the garbage to find out. I'm hoping one of my readers out there has already done this, and knows the answer.
Anyone?
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