At work we have a baler in our stockroom and in it we put all of our cardboard boxes. As you might imagine we create a lot of trash and anything that’s uncoated cardboard (non-plastic coated) gets placed into the baler. If you’re not familiar with a commercial-grade baler, it’s essentially a ginormous trash compactor. It’s big…I’d guess five feet wide, eight feet tall, but it is connected to/is mounted to the ceiling which is about twenty-five feet high. As we fill it with broken down boxes, we can compress what’s inside to conserve the space and eventually those many layers of cardboard are made into a bale that’s about six feet wide and three feet all. The bales are bound with wire and placed outside until they are picked up by a recycling company that specializes in corrugated cardboard bales. These bales are little snapshots of our business history. They are slightly different from week to week based on what’s happening in our store.

As you might have gathered, I’m fascinated by the baler. There’s a safety gate that has to be closed before the hydraulic pusher-downer thing will work and it’s this big pusher thing that I’m so curious about. Sometimes I’m curious about how much of the weight I could take before I suffered serious damage to my finger or hand or foot. (Idle curiosity, really.) My guess: not much at all.

Some days (and they’re not as frequent as they once were but when they come, they are real doozies), I feel like one of the boxes inside the baler.

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I gave up fast food completely last year. Chik-Fil-A, Wendy’s chili…all of it. I don’t miss it.

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Flower Guy was in the store the other day. May I be candid? I could live without the periodic sightings.