Scavengers

There's something annoying about city living. OK, there are a lot of annoying things about city living. I just wanted to talk about the scavengers...

Many years ago, I placed a small pot of herbs at the bottom of our front stairs. It managed to walk away with somebody.

Some of the non-profit organizations in the area will designate a certain day to pick up any items you want to donate (clothing, furniture, etc). All you have to do is leave it outside your house with the postcard they mailed you (or you stick a sign/paper with their name) on your bags/boxes. They will pick it up sometime during the day. Sounds pretty straight forward. So we leave our bags/boxes outside our house somewhere near the garage door. Now the annoying thing about people in the city -- or perhaps it's just my neighborhood -- is that they'll come around and scavenge through all the bags/boxes left outside for these organizations. This has happened numerous times in my neighborhood.

It's not limited to donation left outside. People in my negihborhood also rummage through garbage cans on the day before and day of garbage pick up. Can you believe that?! And they will also put their garbage into your garbage cans too!

Our garbage pickup is on Monday. Last Monday I took our garbage cans to the curb around 6:30 pm. DH had one small bag to add to the garbage can later in the evening. When he went outside, he found that someone else had topped off our garbage can with their huge garbage bag. We knew it wasn't ours because we usually don't fill up our garbage can completely, plus they used a garbage bag that was a different color/design from the ones we use. That's really annoying when we can't even add more last minute garbage to our own garbage can because the neighbors are using our garbage can for their overflow. This is not the first time this has happened. On the other hand, we also have people who come by to scavenge for bottles/cans from everyone's recycle bins on the night before garbage pickup. I find them less annoying.

So our garbage was picked up last Tuesday. I happened to look out the window when the garbage truck came by, and noticed that they rejected a plastic dish rack & drip tray which my R neighbor put in her recycle bin. The Garbage Man just left these two items on the sidewalk between her two garbage cans. When I looked outside the window again a few hours later, I noticed that my neighbor's garbage cans were still out there but the dish rack and drip tray were gone. Someone had passed by and decided they wanted it.

OK, many of you know that I'm in the process of moving house. As I'm packing and moving stuff, I stumbled upon an old 8-bottle Florentine wrought iron wine rack similar to the one you see above. It's in great condition, but I don't want to take it to the new house. It just takes up too much space for 8-bottles. So I wanted to get rid of it. Given that I know there are scavengers in my neighborhood, I thought why not just leave it outside the house? Somebody will surely come by and pick it up. Right? ... Wrong. I put it outside by the garage door on Thursday morning. The wine rack was still there at night. It boggled the mind as to why somebody wouldn't want this wine rack which was in practically brand new condition. I mentioned this to DH and he told me that it's probably because I put it too close to the house. Huh? That never stopped the scavengers from picking through the donations bags/boxes, which were always placed outside next to the house. So today (Friday), I moved the wine rack closer to the curb, next to the tree outside our house which Mayor Newsom decided we must have along our street. I looked outside an hour later and the wine rack had already disappeared. Geez, why was it so hard to get rid of this wine rack when nothing stopped the scavengers from walking away with stuff near the house in the past? It's a mystery. Anyhowz, I'm glad my wine rack has found a new home. I already miss it just a little, but I really don't need something that takes up so much space...

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New house updates...




On Monday, we had our water heater replaced in the new house. These are photos of the old water heater. As you can see, it's pretty old, and there's even corrosion on that pipe. The installer told DH that the white stuff on the pipes was asbestos! Who woulda thunk. We assumed it was paint. Well, I'm glad this has all been replaced...

We're getting an estimate on the electrical system update from two different companies. None of the outlets in the house are grounded, not even in the kitchen/bathrooms. And we need to add a few more outlets in the kitchen. I think one company's estimate was around $3700 (eeks!). I'm not sure what the other company's estimate will be, but I'm guessing it'll be about the same.

We are having our blinds installed today. Yay! I'll get to see them this weekend when we move more boxes. We're still waiting on the shutters.

Carpets are delayed. The Carpet Measurer came by to measure the bedrooms on 7/2.We're waiting to get the estimate for our carpets and pay for them to get that order going. The lady who was helping us went on vacation so we had been waiting for her to come back. We didn't discover this until we hadn't heard from her in 4 or 5 days after getting our carpets measured; she neither called to let us know she'd be on vacation nor made arrangements for somebody else to cover for her while she was gone.

Our stove arrived last Friday. Plugged it in. It works. Haven't tried cooking anything yet.

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My right knee has been bothering me for a month or so. I think it got tweaked one day when I was sitting cross legged on the floor with DD on my lap; we like to sit on the floor and read together. DD can't sit still and I think my knee got tweaked when she sat on my knee in a bad way. It was just a minor annoyance at first where I only felt some pain when going up or down stairs. Then on July 4th, it really acted up. I felt pain even while walking. So I've been limping along since then and trying to take it easy on my knee. I'm even wearing a knee support/wrap which I think helps a little. I think my knee got worse from moving boxes around and down the stairs. I've been doing A LOT of that lately. Now I walk up/down stairs like DD, placing both feet on each step. Right foot first going down, left foot first going up, whichever keeps my right leg straight so I don't have to bend it. When the pain is at its worse, I can even feel it when I'm sleeping or just trying to turn over in bed. :-( I think my knee is improving though. I just have to remember to take it easy... I'm not 20 years old anymore... ;-)

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Rip it. Rip it. I've been working on knitting cables and just plugged along for about 50 rows before I realized that I crossed some of my cables wrong here and there since row 8. Eeeks! So I frogged the entire thing and started over. No photos yet...

I love to read but find little time for it lately (well, actually since DD was born, lol). I think I have found a solution to this problem. Audio books!!! I'm currently working through "A Place of Hiding" by Elizabeth George, and I am already on disc 2. The nice thing about audio books is that I can also knit at the same time as long as it isn't something super complicated. This is working out better than trying to knit and watch TV simultaneously...

Since Ravelry, I've stumbled upon something similar for books, Shelfari. Haven't had much time to explore it, and it will take me a while to enter in all my books. It'll be another WIP. I already have 14 boxes of books packed up, some at the old house, some at the new house. I have no idea what I have or where it lives. Same goes for my yarn, which is why I haven't entered anything in my Yarn notebook on Ravelry, plus I have to find some time to take photos of my yarn and organize the photos. I'm not very good at organizing photos and it seems to take me a long time. I'm still trying to sort through photos of M from the last few months so I can share them with the inlaws.

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