Trash day

Friday is trash* day around here.
That's the day the private trash hauler, who charges us about $20 a month since there's no municipal trash collection in this small town, shows up to haul away a week's worth of flotsam and jetsam.
The packer truck (I know that's what it's called because I spent a summer riding on the back of one) shows up anytime between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Unless I've been so efficient as to get the trash to the curb on Thursday evening, the first thing on my Friday agenda is to go through the house with a plastic trash bag, emptying waste baskets and dragging the big trash containers out to the street.
The ritual has changed slightly in recent weeks since we acquired a paper shredder. My wife insisted we get one after we discovered the chief perpetrators of identity theft are methamphetamine users and their favorite way to get indentity-theft information is by going through people's trash for bank deposit slips, canceled checks, credit card receipts, and the like. (The #2 ploy is stealing mail from your mailbox.)
Since meth manufacture and use is rampant in our rural area, it just makes good sense to shred personal papers. Besides, it comes in handy for making packing material for shipping Ebay merchandise.
I always have a flicker of nostalgia when I reach for the waste basket under my desk because it's been under a series of my desks for nearly 50 (ack!) years. That puts it in the running for the oldest continuously used thing I own.
Back around 1956, when my parents bought me my first desk, they selected a light-gauge steel waste basket with a Mercator projection world map. It's a Rand McNally map, but there's no copyright date on it.
Nevertheless, you can tell it's from the mid-1950s from the long-forgotten place names.
Like, for instance:

Vietnam is French Indo-China
Hawaii and Alaska are U.S. Territories
The Republic of Congo is the Belgian Congo
The west coast of Africa is lined with long-gone names like Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa
Cambodia is called Siam
There are East and West Germany and Yugoslavia

It's got dings and a few breaks in the rolled-metal rim, but I can't bear to part with this relic of my/our past. Perhaps my grandkids will find it amusing. Or maybe they'll just throw it out with the rest of the trash.

*Notice I don't call it garbage. For some reason that has always eluded me, a lot of people - most of them on the East Coast - refer to all household waste as garbage. In my world, "garbage" means food waste exclusively. Hence, the term "garbage disposal." "Trash" means non-food waste.