Welcome to my landfill

Yesterday when I was trying to think of an appropriately festive way to celebrate an unexpected windfall, this is where I landed: 

That's a 32-inch adjustable trash picker-upper, which would make it easier to pick up the many beer cans that rude people keep tossing alongside my road. That's right: when considering how to commemorate a significant influx of dollars, I settled on a twelve-dollar tool that would make it easier for me to pick up other people's trash. And that's all you need to know about my world right now.

The windfall came from an unexpected source: myself. I learned from my taxman yesterday that we'd seriously overpaid the quarterly estimated taxes on my husband's 2021 income, thanks to a tried-and-true method we're calling ELTEFMMCA (Earning Less Than Expected and Failing to Make Mid-Course Adjustments), so not only do I not have to write a big fat check to the IRS next week, but the refund will cover the quarterly estimated taxes on his income for the entire rest of 2022, so I will not have to write a big fat check to the IRS in June, September, or next January either. Hallelujah!

But of course I had been setting aside money to cover those big fat checks that I will now not have to write (unless someone suddenly starts earning more money), and now that feels like money in the bank. Which, of course, it literally is, but it's money that I've been pretending isn't in the bank so that it will still be there when I need it to make those quarterly tax payments, which I now don't need to do, so the invisible money suddenly became visible and now I want to do something fun with it.

But buying a trash picker-upper? That hardly seems celebratory. I grumble and gripe every time I go out with a five-gallon bucket to gather the latest crop of cans full of ditch-water, and I put every ounce of frustration into stomping those nasty cans flat so I can fit more in the bucket. Today I made it less than half a mile before the bucket was full, and while bending and stooping over muddy roadside ditches to pick up trash provides an excellent whole-body workout, it does not fill me with warm feelings about the human race. 

Buying a tool that would make it easier to pick up the trash feels like accepting a situation that I find repugnant. And yet, it surely would make it easier to reach those beer cans nestling in eight inches of muddy water just beyond my reach.

So far, I have not purchased a 32-inch adjustable trash-picker-upper, but I'm leaning in that direction. Because as much as I resent living in a world in which people treat my bucolic country road like a landfill, that's the only world I've got right now, and it wouldn't hurt to spend twelve dollars to make that world just a tiny bit better.