daily days

Another day, another 5 bags and a couple of hands full of trash. I picked up some new, better fitting gloves yesterday, which made picking up trash and cleaning up the ground a little easier.

A woman from my apartment building who owns dogs was out this evening and talked to me a little. She always asks me about riding my bike. She previously lived in Japan and would ride all of the time, but feels unsafe riding a bike here in LA. She also told me she has been picking up some glass in that area (so her dogs aren't hurt!) so she was happy to see me cleaning. At another point a somewhat dirty man carrying a bag and a guitar walked by and smiled and said something about building your community! That was odd, yet also again very encouraging. I stayed out for about 40 minutes, picking up trash and cleaning up the land a little.

Toward the end, a guy appeared with a grocery basket, trying to pick up the few recyclables I had left in the bushes. Then he walked over to the blue bin I had been filling with recyclables and pulled out all the cans and bottles, including the ones I had just put in there. On one hand, I wanted to pull out the ones I just picked up and give them to him and gently remind him that removing stuff from the blue bins isn't exactly legal. On the other, I knew many of those bottles and cans had been sitting in the bushes since last week because I didn't pull the out of the bushes at that time and I don't know if he would have even gone through the effort of removing some (I had gloves and some tools to help). Then again, most of the time when people are digging through the recycling bins, things aren't great. But the money for the recycling program comes from the things being recycled. I didn't say anything in the end, but I could tell he was trying to avoid me.

After reading about The Daily Ocean where beach trash is collected every day and weighted and photographed in some ways, I thought I would share some of the gross/weird things I found today (although I didn't have my camera):
-beer can still filled with beer and a condom (gross!)
-most of a roasted chicken from the nearby Ralphs in a plastic container
-a few security tops from bottles of alcohol (looks like some stole some alkehol)
-a bottle of arnica montana homeopathic medicine
-tons of styrofoam cups and very few plastic bags

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In other news, yesterday morning as I approached the Gold Line at Union Station, I saw a sign saying something to the effect of "You agree to have your bag searched if you step beyond this point", this point being the ticket area leading to the Gold Line. Blood boiling! I knew these bag searching were happening with the Metrolink, but I was not happy to see this. I'm not really sure how I feel about riding the train knowing this is happening now, even though I don't have anything to hide. I just don't want people's noses in my bags when I'm just trying to get to work.

There is also something weird going on with the sheriffs on the metro in general. Today while riding the Gold Line to Pasadena, sheriffs came on the train twice to check tickets, in about a 10-15 minute period. When I maybe foolishly asked what was going on, another regular on the train mentioned this happened earlier in the week too. The thing that I find so weird is that someone that rides the train or bus every single day would only have to be caught once every month to 3 months to make it more cost effective to pay for your daily rides instead of getting fined! I don't know if someone is trying to artificially raise the sheriff costs before they install turnstiles, if they've had some sudden rash of problems and are searching for certain people or are just hoping to make people's day horrible when they legitimately can't find their pass/ticket or what, but this is rather odd.
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