By Clyde Noel

A Side of Clyde

Anyone who lives in a house must do a certain amount of housekeeping to keep things clean and orderly. I fill the wastebaskets; my wife empties them.

I could live without DVDs, toasters and WD-40, but I couldn’t live without a wastebasket.

Wastebaskets play a critical role in our house, because the everyday proliferation of paper threatens to bury us after the postal carrier lightens his bag each day.

There’s no question we need more wastebaskets. We had only three at one time, but now we need one in every room. We have eight wastebaskets in the house. My wife empties each one every Monday, before Los Altos Garbage Company picks up the garbage and recyclable trash early Tuesday morning.

Three of those wastebaskets are important to me. They’re the ones in the kitchen, my computer room and the master bathroom.

The bathroom wastebasket is always full of empty vials and cans that are disposed of in the recycling bin.

The small wicker wastebasket beside my desk in the computer room isn’t nearly big enough for the junk mail, fliers and catalogs that arrive every day.

Most of my wife’s complaints are over the wastebasket in the computer room, because it’s full of computer paper she can’t put in the recycling bin. So she ends up having to sort the contents of the wastebasket before putting them in the trash.

The kitchen wastebasket is also controversial, because my wife and I don’t always agree on what goes in. There’s a fine line between what goes in the garbage can and what goes in the wastebasket.

Garbage, as I understand it, is what comes from the bathroom and kitchen, while trash - which belongs in the wastebasket - is everything else.

The Los Altos Garbage Company has given us colored plastic recycling bins that are supposed to help, but sometimes they only cause more controversy.

The green bin is for glass, cans and plastic, while the gray one is for mixed paper, cardboard and newspapers. We put our newspapers in grocery bags before we toss them in the gray bin.

Things were easier when we first moved to Los Altos Hills. We had an incinerator in the back yard, and it was fun to take out a wastebasket full of paper and burn it.

Then along came an ordinance prohibiting the burning of anything in the back yard. I approve of the ordinance, but it took away the enjoyment of looking at each piece of paper before throwing it in the fire.

Taking the wastebaskets downstairs and into the garage to dump in the recycling bins is not nearly as satisfying as burning the contents.

Wastebaskets have come a long way from the days when they served merely a utilitarian purpose. Found in department stores, sometimes bought as gifts, they are now hand-painted by local artists who should have taken up another line of work. The 49ers and Raiders have wastebaskets with their logos, and Macy’s has a line with floral designs and hunting scenes.

I don’t think wastebaskets should be a gift item. They should be inconspicuous, in a corner of the room, with a much bigger opening than the gift-store variety have.

I enjoy the pleasure of taking a piece of paper and squeezing it into a ball. There are fewer minor enjoyments than tossing the paper ball in a wastebasket from a distance.