That's the kind of excitement I can live without!

(if you have hair and like free stuff {who doesn't like free stuff? If you don't like free stuff, I'm a bit worried about you dearie} leave a comment on the previous blog post for a Saturday drawing!)

I got a call from my son's school this morning. I see their number on caller i.d. (how did we live without caller i.d.?) and automatically think he's hurt or ill. But when I say hello, I get an automated voice message telling me that there is a campus emergency and all students are to remain in place until told otherwise.
I felt an icy spot of fear form in my chest. Through texting and more voice messages from school, it seems a bullet was shot into a third floor window of one of the dorms. The police were called in and after a few tense hours, they are no longer on lockdown.
I am so thankful for the system that his school has in place and that they kept us informed as well as possible through the lockdown. On the whole, I'm not an alarmist, but when it's my baby involved, I get all Mama bear-like. The school did the right thing here and I'll be sure to give them the positive feedback.

Now for the right, but quirky, kind of excitement....

I'll admit it, I'm a dork. I've been a bit of a tree hugger before being intimate with trees was even on the radar. I remember freaking out as a little girl when we carried our trash way out into the back yard and burned it in a barrel. Of course, with the exception of renting in town while we built a home and a few months in third grade, we always lived in the boonies. There was no such thing as a trash truck. If you didn't burn it, you had to collect it and haul it to the landfill yourself.
As an adult, when we bought our first home it came with a recycling bin and I've been faithful to fill that sucker to the brim each week for the past several years, even to the point where I've gotten nasty grams from the recycling truck for having too much cardboard in my bin. (those prompted nasty grams back. did they want me to trash the cardboard instead?)
Our county is in the midst of a debate because our landfill is almost at capacity. Some people want to dig a new area. Some want to build an incinerator (a lot of NIMBY on that one). In the meantime, some of our trash is getting trucked to other counties and states. The argument is far from over.
One little light of hope is that the county is expanding our recycling program to a single-stream bin which is freaking HUGE compared to our previous one and I don't have to meticulously break everything down and separate it to within an inch of its life. My daughter got a bit of that fish-eyed freaky look when she saw my excitement over that big blue baby. You would've thought someone had just delivered a new (vintage) 1967 cherry red convertible Mustang to my front door. But no, it's my pretty new blue bin and I love her. I hope to see all of her friends gathered at the curb on collection day from now on.
That's the kind of excitement I can live with!