Any change in one’s routine is unsettling, especially when it involves garbage.

For many years, our household’s garbage was collected on Monday, which is the ideal day. The weekend is when we cook most of our food, particularly the stuff we catch ourself, which comes complete with unwanted innards and outtards, to coin a phrase. Take a crab, for example. Crab tastes great, but the part you don’t eat is extraordinarily repellent. After just a few hours it’s enough to turn a dog’s stomach, not that that would stop the dog from digging in.

We wrap the crab pieces up in newspaper (try that with the Internet) and then stuff it in a plastic bag, but still the aroma seeps through. By Monday morning when the garbage man arrives the crab is festering mightily. It’s a pleasant thought to go to work early Monday morning knowing that when we come home, the crab will be gone. On an island where there’s not much to look forward to, it’s a good thing.

So imagine my horror when the garbage company announced it would stop picking up on Monday in my neighborhood and switch instead to Wednesday. All our weekend waste would have to fester another 48 hours, which isn’t good news for us or our garbage collector. The first weekend day of crabbing season was July 4, and I was apprehensive about the new garbage pickup day. When I arrived home Wednesday evening, I expected to find the garbage man lying on his back next to the ditch, having succumbed to decaying crab fumes. There was no evidence of any such happening, so my admiration for the garbage man soared even higher. These guys are tough, dependable and invariably pleasant, and it seemed too much to ask that our crab discards be picked up after decomposing in warm weather Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Raccoons and stray dogs keep a safe distance from our garbage on such days, knowing it’s unsafe to overturn and sift through a toxic waste dump in a can.

But somehow the garbage man accomplished this superhuman task, and he didn’t even leave a nasty note commenting on the aroma of our garbage.

Nevertheless, I still felt guilty for treating the garbage man so inhumanely so I’ve decided to adopt a new repulsive-garbage strategy, which calls for sticking the crab guts and empty shells into the freezer and hauling it out to the garbage can early Wednesday morning. The same would apply to salmon guts and skin during salmon season if we’re lucky enough to catch one, or any other particularly reeking piece of refuse. Fortunately, we don’t hunt moose or elk so we won’t have to buy a larger freezer.

I hope the garbage man appreciates our frozen garbage. By my reckoning it won’t thaw out until it gets to the transfer station where workers pick through it looking for recyclables. If these workers suddenly start passing out on the job, we’ll have to come up with another plan.