I spent a couple hours cleaning my block today. Among the very special trash I picked up, I found not one, not two, but two and a half used hypodermic needles. Also of interest, one of my neighbors seems to have placed a box of 100 fresh, sterile needles outside their house.

I can't help but wonder if that is a good way to do a needle exchange program. You throw it on the street. I put a whole box of them outside my fence on the sidewalk. Hmmm...

On the up side, picking up trash seems to be a great, high-profile way to build community. The trash around my house is so bad that I could definitely use help picking it up, and every time I or my girlfriend are out there, we seem to meet allies that want to fix up the neighborhood. I collected one guy's info today, and she collected somebody else's info last week. If we keep this up, we may build a nice set of contacts of all our neighbors. So that's how meeting your neighbors works. Huh.