I dug a fire pit this fall, which basically makes me even less picky about getting leaf bags with sticks in them. I know some folks here have chippers, but I don't, but they make mighty good kindling for the fires.

In any case, I went trolling around the neighborhood (basing my route on the print-out from the city about which streets put out recyclables each day). I was kind of bummed because I barely saw any until I went up a side street, saw about 4 bags, then went up to the corner and heard the hallelujah chorus as I saw about 12 bags neatly filled and standing among a few trash bins also full of beautiful oak leaves.
In my little Mazda, it took 3 trips (2-3 in the trunk, 4 in the back seat and 2 in the front seat). And I even picked up a few odd bags from another street, including a very nice block of trunk that will make a perfect place to put the ipod next to the cooler during the next campfire.
So I spent my day off shredding those 20-odd bags down to cover my veggie garden, as well as feed my holding pile and active pile. In fact, my holding bin may actually cook up nicely since I dug up a bunch of bermuda grass full of dirt and fed it into the shredded leaves along with some rotten squashes I picked up in one of the leaf bags.

So after all this rambling, I kind of have a question. How do you process the leaf bags? Feeding them into the pile "as is" would be like flushing paper towels down the toilet. I rip them apart between the two plys and then break them down and put them in the pile in a 1-2 paper layer. I even threw some compost from my cooking pile into the holding bin, just to help break the paper down. Anyway, until it breaks down, the paper still kind of gets in the way. In one of my compost wacko threads, I mentioned that instead of counting sheep, I put myself to sleep imagining myself turning the pile with my sillage fork. Well, to further my wacko credentials, since I started feeding the paper into my pile, I just imagine how awkward it is when the sillage fork goes into the paper, so much so that it interrupts my sleep!