Happy Hippie Christmas!

I don't know if you experience anything like this in your neck of the woods: We live in a university town, and the landlords near campus have synced up their leases, so that most of the students move between August 14-16. It tends to be a madhouse of traffic and hundreds of overflowing bags of trash on the curb. But it's also a trash picker's paradise, because so many of the selfish little brats -- sorry, I mean students -- can't be bothered to take stuff they don't want to St. Vinnie's or Goodwill (even though they park semi-trucks right there in the neighborhood to collect stuff) so they dump it on the curb along with the pizza boxes and beer kegs than never got returned to the liquor store.

Well, last weekend when he was at the grocery store, Mr. Ether was cajoled into taking a newspaper that is published by homeless people here in town, and on the front page there was a big article referring to student moving days as "Hippie Christmas." That kind of tickled my funny bone.

The other phenomenon at that time is that there is usually a gap of a day between moving out of the old apartment and into the new one. A lot of times, students just move all their stuff to the lawn of the new house and camp there for a day. A few years ago I was picking up my child at her day care center on campus, and witnessed a yard full of furniture, lamps, etc. A young woman was sitting on a chair in the middle of it all, reading a book entitled Feng Shui Made Easy. Oh, to have had a camera!