I'll give. We have the debris from a week's worth of meals piled up in the kitchen. The living room is so messy that I had to collect two small bags of trash (tinfoil ribs containers, napkins, plastic knives, lemon slices, little containers of cocktail sauce) before I could be at all at ease about zoning out on the couch.

What gets me is not just how bad I am about picking up after us, but how much trash we generate. I'm sure a lot of that is due to us ordering in food so often (although not as often as we used to), but even when mr rampy is cooking, we still amass piles of food containers and used saran-wrap.

And while looking at these mounds of refuse, I always think about this story I read in some science magazine about this hippie-dippie family who only generated enough trash in a year to fit in their car's glove compartment. And their car was like a Beetle. Or one of those electric cars with the Ed Begley, Jr. seal of approval.

Me, I generate that much trash in a day. Easily. I cannot figure out how they did it. Washing out pickle jars and using them to store your jewelry is one thing, as is bringing tote bags to the grocery store so as not to gather up piles and piles of plastic bags. But these people were something else. They must have been washing their empty chip bags to turn them into socks and making window treatments out of those plastic rings that hold soft drink 6-packs together. Freaks! Environmentally responsible freaks, but still.

I can't think of empty chip bags without remembering my fifth-grade project to keep the first-graders safe.

Our classrooms bordered a creek, separated from it only by some trees and brush and the remains of the farm that had been on the land before our school. The first-graders were forbidden to go down there, but we fifth-graders thought we should take precautions to make sure they all understood how much they should never never go down there.

So we gathered up some trash after lunch--namely an empty chip bag, a candy bar wrapper, and a Coke can--then filled the chip bag with leaves and wrapped the wrapper around a rock, went a little ways into the brush, pulled this section of an old, broken-down fence down and tied it down it like a pig trap, and then baited the trap with the chip bag, candy wrapper, and Coke can.

The idea being that a little first grader would be lured into the bushes by the promise of free food, get walloped by the fence, and then spread the word that going near the creek was bad news.

You know, like Pavlov's dogs. If they could talk and tell each other how much their taste buds salivated at the sound of that bell.

That's what you get for eating food out of bushes, anyway.