Accomplished-Adjacent

One of my favorite places in Brooklyn, one of the prettiest views by far, is the Fairway in Red Hook.  Fairway on its own offers terror in the form of too many aisles, too many smells, and the possibility of never finding the exit.  However, the Fairway in Red Hook sits on the water, Lady Liberty a short distance away.  Mesmerizing sight. 

S's plan was simple.  Take the cans from her house and recycle them.  Since Fairway recycles Polar Seltzer, and since R drinks gallons by the can of Polar Seltzer, I knew I'd get a trip to Red Hook.  Additionally, S and I both got a trip to every single neighborhood in Brooklyn. 

The traffic on the Belt was normal--awful in some parts and only slow in others.  The traffic on the BQE was the worst I've ever seen.  I never know what I'll find when I merge on because there's always some sort of lane changing blockage structure.  This time, there were like no lanes.  Trucks were like perpendicular to the lanes.  When you are perpendicular to a traffic lane, you are doing nothing right, even if you can't tell where the lines are for the lanes.  The lines will never run perpendicular on the same side of the highway.  I was at a loss and made my own lane for a while until I realized I was actually in a lane and it was the line of cars to my right who were totally wrong because they were driving on a shoulder that disappears.  S laughed this whole time because it was simple unbelievable. 

We took about 45 minutes to go two exits. 

Knowing the the BQE is the road to Hell, we found a different way to go to Fairway.  Ah, the backstreets.  Unfortunately, even on a weekday afternoon, we found every Sunday driver out and about in Brooklyn.  We got caught at a light that stayed on red for five minutes, changed to green for a nanosecond, and then changed back to red.  We were there so long that I warned S not to get scared if she looked out her window because a truck had just pulled up to it, but it wasn't next to us. It was perpendicular to my car, its massive grill filling her window view.  Apparently, it was Perpendicular Day for all the trucks.

A good thing about Fairway, once you get there, is that it has a parking lot.  Any place in Brooklyn that has a parking lot is a great place.  We dropped off the pre-counted cans and bottles.  There were a lot.  We found the exit.  We were able to leave.

Flat-hair head

Then came the ride from Fairway to Key Food, one that had a parking lot (score!) and recycling machines.  Lots of traffic.  Lots of wrong turns. Lots of Suri not being helpful.  Then we found it.  They were down one machine already, so we made the most of it until we broke another machine.  However, we'd gotten down to almost no bottles and cans left.  It was like 300+ and we were left with some of those tricky bottles that no recycling place seems to want back, you know, the ones that take a joy ride through the machine and spit back out at you, and just a few that the machine would have taken had it not broken.

S brought her receipts in to customer service and the girl told her to take them to the cashier.  Then S told her that two machines weren't working and the girl stared at her silently before awkwardly saying, Yeah ok.  I told S that I thought she'd offended the customer service girl.  Clearly.

So there you have it.  While all of my own recycling sits in a large black garbage bag in the back of my pantry, we recycled over 300 of S's stuff.  That, my friends, is an accomplishment.  It's not really my accomplishment, but it still is one, which made my day.