It’s icy at the new house. We’ve discovered that when it’s cold and icy, and because our front door faces east, the ice accumulates and makes the door impossible to open.

We get iced in. The front door won’t even budge.

So we just use the back door.

I’m a little worried about the poor, cold squirrels so I bought some whole nuts in the shells and sprinkled them out in the snow-covered yard – we’ll see if any of the nuts were eaten.

I like to explore all sides of the issue. Here’s some reasons why we do not miss living in the city of Chicago, and why we like turn to each other when we’re there to say “I do not miss (insert below reason here)!”

1. Parking problems – tickets, the boot, parking meters, exorbitant parking fees in parking garages.
2. Mayor Daley…well, I kind of miss him.
3. Traffic
4. Tourists – except now WE ARE THE TOURISTS
5. Gunfire on holidays
6. Living among steel and concrete instead of anything green.
7. Gasoline being much more expensive in the city
8. Really, everything being much more expensive in the city
9. Marathons, ballgames, festivals, parades, fairs, and other traffic-delaying commotion
10. Too many dogs, with over-enthusiastic dog owners who don’t leash them, and un-picked-up dog poop on the sidewalk
11. The El – too crowded
12. Rats
13. Pigeons
14. Car stereos turned up to a mind-numbing level
15. Fighting with fellow neighbors on winter street parking with their passive aggresive chairs

Now we can breathe a sigh of relief that we live in the suburbs. Sure, there’s two sides to every story and reasons not to like the suburbs too, but I can’t focus on that, because we live here now.

But we are glad to get away from the rats.

Our new town has a very extensive recycling program. It’s quite brilliant. We moved from the city of Chicago which has the failed attempt at recycling – blue bags – where you put recyclables into “blue” bags and in with the regular trash. We did it, but were very suspicious that it was ever sorted.

Now, we are recycling fools. Our trash/recycling day is Thursday.

In our new house, we get charged for each trash can we fill with garbage, but recycling is FREE – no matter how much recycling you have. You could have a whole yard full of recycling and they would take it. And I’m reassured to see that different trucks pick up the different types of recycling and trash – it’s not all going on the same truck to the landfill.

The only trouble is that we don’t really know yet what’s recyclable and what’s not. Every single thing we throw away, it seems like, we look at each other and ask the inevitable question “Does this get recycled?” We’re still learning. If you put something in the recycling bin that is not recyclable, the people take it out of the bin and throw it on your lawn.

Some Thursday evenings, our lawn has a lot of non-recycled items on it.