Recent observations (i.e., rants) from Angela

**This city, and much of the country that I’ve seen, has a TON of broken glass and trash all over the roads and walkways, mostly on weekends. I’m guessing from all the party-ers out there on Fri/Sat nights. Don and I walk a lot. I am sick of the freaking massive amounts of trash I see and the amount of broken bottles everywhere, mostly in public areas, on sidewalks, in parks, along the river walk, etc. We walked this morning up a quiet, unpopulated country road in the valley and STILL there was glass everywhere on the roads and what looked like McDonalds trash from a car-full of hungry kids scattered in a park. We noticed kids drive up there and park, so I can imagine at night it’s quite the location for doing whatever and being loud and obnoxious. Also after weekends you may find some sort of graffiti sprayed on a new surface in town—surprise!

The good news: the kind, hard-working folks in this town clean up the messes very quickly. Some twit painted our bridge to town with graffiti a few weeks ago and we spotted it on the way to work out one morning. I kid you not, the spray paint on the cement was covered up and the green railing re-painted in less than one hour on a Monday morning. Another morning we saw, again on the way to our pool/gym, a huge pile of shattered green glass from a beer bottle; on the way home, swept up and gone.

I’ll tell ya who cares in this town, anyone over the age of 30. I don’t know what kind of kids are being raised here or how much freedom they are allowed, but I am not backing down from my opinion that the youth of this country are total a-holes. There is a small car lot on our way to town; one morning we saw one of the cars for sale had its windshield smashed in, looked like someone walked on top of the car hood and onto the windshield, crushed it. Nice. Who over the age of sanity (30) would do something like this??

**I suspect many would say the cause of the litter issue I just described probably comes from drinking, and here the legal age limit was decreased in recent years from 20 to 18 in an effort to curb the (ab)use of alcohol by minors. A recent news story argued that it hasn’t been working, and in fact teenage alcohol abuse has gotten worse (binge drinking). Now, I don’t really care when kids start drinking or what they drink, just don’t SMASH ALL YOUR DAMN BOTTLES IN THE STREETS and on the sidewalks and in the parks on your stupid night out, okay??!! OTHER PEOPLE live here.

**Finally, what a great idea!! You can buy envelopes in New Zealand that are already pre-stamped! I went to the office store to buy envelopes the other day and I could choose the regular white envelopes, or I could pre-pay for envelopes with postage already on them, saving me a trip to the post office or where ever I might have to buy stamps. Ingenious.