My week is off to a good start... in The Mundane Ramblings of an Insane Mind

I am trying to be more positive instead of negative.

But besides that.. I have a weird hobby.. I have been doing this since I was a kid. I like to go trash-picking. Scavenging, whatever you want to call it. It’s amazing what people throw out.

And I’m also somewhat of a hoarder. My garage is nearly packed. I need to sell/get rid of stuff, but I keep accumulating more. And right now is “bulk pickup” in our town, which means everyone throws out good stuff.. it’s the one and only time they can do so (without taking it to the dump themselves).

And my wife is on my case all the time about it. “You’re not allowed to pick up anything new until the garage is cleaned out!” Of course, I ignore this. The other night after work, I picked up a bunch of books. Hopefully I can list some of them on Amazon. I found an aluminum ladder on the side of the road. Yeah, that was weird. But I’ll save it for scrap. I found a decent charcoal barbecue grill today.

But it’s things like last night… I saw this box.. one of those “paper file” boxes with a lid. And I was delivering pizza, but I just had a gut instinct about this box. So I got out of my car, opened it, saw a few statues.. and I took the box.

Later I checked it out and there’s a nice jewelry cabinet at the bottom.. AND it has some jewelry inside… AND one of the pieces of jewelry, which really doesn’t look like much, is stamped “14K Italy”. Took it to the “Cash for Gold” guy.

Long story short, it’s like finding $80 laying in the street. :)

Icing on the cake? I tell my wife about it, and she admits she’s wrong.

The idea at this point is to keep stuff going out as much as new stuff is coming in.

I also got my “new” riding mower this past weekend. We have a big front yard, and we live on a quarter acre lot. We used to have a lawn service, but at $1,000 a season, I’d rather just do it myself (not that we could afford it now anyway). I’ve always wanted a riding mower, but never able to afford one. Found one, a Sears Craftsman, running, in decent shape.. for a hundred bucks! Paid some guy with a trailer $25 to haul it home for me.. couldn’t pass up that deal!