I WAS ON WATERLOO TONIGHT - 1,908 PIECES!

I went to Waterloo Road tonight, and I cleaned up this big field.  It's beside the Dollar Store and across from Giant Eagle, so there's always a lot of trash.

The entire field looked like this.  Mostly fast food wrappers.  But no glass!  Yay!

It's really important that I get all the trash picked up before the landscaping crew mows over it.  They don't pick up any trash.  They just turn 100 pieces into 500 pieces!  And it looks terrible with trash shredded.  I wish they wouldn't do that.

I was hurrying as fast as I could, because there's only about 1 1/2 hours of daylight after work, and I didn't want to come back.  So I picked up 1,908 pieces!  That's my new record for 1 1/2 hours in the evening!

It sure looks nice driving by now . . .

 Last summer, I stuck a big sign up in this field that said, "Cleaned by a Keep Akron Beautiful Volunteer."  Somebody stole my sign, so I don't put those up anymore.

I don't know why anybody would want to steal that sign, but good for them.  Maybe they cleaned another area and stuck the sign up to let everybody know what they did.  That's not a bad thing at all.

It was getting dark, so I headed back to my car.  I noticed the bushes in front of the Dollar Store had trash tangled in them, so I started picking that up, and I found this crazy knife.  

It was 12" long and looked like a cross between a hacksaw and a steak knife!  I never saw anything like it before.

It was all rusty and scary looking.  If you got stabbed with that, you'd probably die of Tetanus if you didn't bleed to death.  What an awful thought!

I'm so glad I got that thing off the street.  I've found lots of knives picking up trash, but I never found one like this before.

I was still thinking about the knife, and I turned the corner, and more trash!  Goodness, it was never ending.  

There are times when I think I'm done, and then I see more trash, and I don't want to pick it up.  But then I realize it doesn't take very long at all, especially when the pieces are big and there is no glass.

Tomorrow, I'm going to work on the Route 8 exit and entrance ramps, and I'll drive by this area, and smile.  It looks so nice when it's clean.

I always say to myself, "I did that."

And then I smile again.