A Walk in the Dark

Monday, 11th, 2021 – Safeway

The week started out dry and about 41°F (5°C), not a bad walk. And we found money.

Yes, another penny. Stop your eye-rolling. It’s still money. There are a lot of things you can buy for a penny. For example, Buy One Get One for a Penny for vitamins. Of course, this offer is for an English penny, worth about 1.2 U.S. pennies. Still, we didn’t find any such deal on a Rolls Royce.

But we also found a gift card.

On it was written “$4.40.” But they lied. It was “$0.00.”

We’ve not seen Eagle 20’s cigarettes (or butts) before.

Evidently this guy wished he hadn’t seen them either. We can imagine a new stop-smoking program: “Our unique Stop-Smoking System uses an innovative technique. Smoke all the cigarettes you want as long as they are Eagle 20’s.”

Strewn along Juanita-Woodinville Way, we found a total of eight of these gadgets.

The first one was unmarked and, after examining it, Chuck suggested it might be a device to put a cork back into a wine bottle. This made no sense to Janet. Why would anyone ever put a cork back on an empty bottle? Then we found one with a “21? Fred Meyer” marking. It is an RFI device to keep people from sneaking bottles out of the store. Ha! YouTube has some videos about how to remove these with a strong magnet or table knives. But, if the devices have RFID tags, how did they get out of the store?

An umbrella.

This umbrella wouldn’t be worth mentioning except it was stamped out of 3/16th inch thick aluminum. It isn’t the cheap plastic trinket it looks like. It’s a slightly more expensive aluminum trinket. We’ll toss it into our trinket collection.

Someone VERY big was playing Tiddlywinks.

Two disks, but they were thick and weighed about forty pounds each. We kept an eye out for yellow discs falling from the sky.

We have an apology to make. Last Saturday, we found a pair of cheap cardboard spectacles and made some fun about seeing reindeer in Christmas lights when you want to see lights.

They were totally soaked and barely held together.

We let them dry for a couple of days and this morning, tried them on. We took some pictures with our phone. This is really cool.

We may buy some for our grandkids for stocking stuffers next year.

Tuesday, 12th, 2021 – Park-and-Ride

The temperature was mild today, but it rained on us for most of the walk. No money, and we removed a rabbit from the road. Well, most of it anyway.

We found a “Male Enhancement Shooter” which, taken out of context, is pretty weird.

We are normally skeptical of these pills and elixirs, but this one has an FDA alert. It contains the same ingredients as Cialis. So, it does work. Does the FDA know it is providing free advertising?

At the park-and-ride, we found yet another used condom.

He probably used the Male Enhancement Shooter.

Wednesday, 13th, 2021 – Safeway

Today, we didn’t find any money and removed another rabbit from the road. We also got a quick flash of lights from a passing King County Sheriff’s vehicle. Nice.

Last night there was heavy rain and wind with gusts to 70 mph (113 kph). Fortunately, when we started our walk, it was clear and calm. When any wind kicks up, our neighborhood is normally the first to lose power. Today, we had power and neighborhoods around us did not. Most of our walk was in the dark, well, darker than usual.

7-Eleven without power. The bright flash on the right is Janet’s vest reflecting the camera flash. There was also a lot of debris from fallen branches along the way.

We cleared most of the larger branches where they were in the roadway or across sidewalks. Fortunately most were small and easily moved.

Near Safeway, we picked up several orange sheets of fiberglass roofing scattered by the wind.

We don’t know where they came from, so if you know anyone who has an orange roof, or had an orange roof, we know where it is.

This is getting old, another discarded condom.

Are these folks looking for excuses? Hey, it’s windy. Hey, the power’s out. Hey, it’s Wednesday. Hey, Chuck and Janet are out walking.

We did find a basketball.

It was a bit deflated. Yes, this COVID thing has everyone down. We have a feeling the owners tossed it over the fence on purpose. Just to make sure, we tossed it back. If we find it again, we’ll toss it back again. Hey, we pass this place three times a week and we like games.

We call this usually-dry ditch Lago di Norway Hill when if fills.

Last year, we put up a “No Lifeguard On Duty” sign. We’re thinking a “No fishing” sign this year. Maybe we should stock it with some carp. And some beer cans, of course.

Today, we found nine more of the devices we found on Monday.

That’s a total of seventeen of these we’ve found. Later in the day, we bagged them up and returned them to our local Fred Meyer store. After warning a Fred Meyer employee that the bag would make noise, and it did set off the alarm, we returned them to the Information Desk. They took a look and said they do not use these any more, but they took them anyway. So, why is someone randomly discarding them along Juanita-Woodinville Way? The mysteries of Trash Walking.

Thursday, 14th, 2021 – 160th to 124th Street

Today was similar to yesterday, clear and calm, but a bit cooler. Given the wind of yesterday, we expected a lot more trash, but this route was relatively clean.

While crossing the freeway, we found random shards of a hubcap, including the fake lug nuts. Later, back on Juanita-Woodinville Way, we found a complete hubcap with the same fake lug nuts.

We have two other hubcaps like this. It appears to have a design flaw, but we now have three. One more and we will have a set of four worth $50.

Is someone rating our walks on Rotten Tomatoes?

So is the rating three tomatoes out of three or three out of ten? It must be three out of three. It you don’t think we rate that high, feel free to visit the site, ratetrashwalkingandjumpoffabridge.org and rate us.

We did make a big breakthrough on the COVID front today. We found a new variant of the virus.

We don’t yet know how contagious it is, but it measures about thee-quarters of an inch in diameter. One thing we do know is masks will be highly effective against it. As will baseball bats.

Friday, 15th, 2021 – 100th Ave NE

This morning had Friday-light traffic and trash with no money and no roadkill. A fairly mundane walk.

The first thing we found along 112th Ave NE was a cracked crack pipe.

It wasn’t worth adding to our found drug paraphernalia collection and ended up in our garbage can.

We found a damaged Scion hubcap.

Fortunately, there was a perfectly-good recycle bin nearby to place it in. To us, the Scion was a weird, boxy vehicle. But it was meant to appeal to younger people which leaves us out. It was discontinued in 2016 after Toyota apparently ran out of younger people.

We did find a tool.

A single Torx bit. It’s not much of a tool and kind of set the tone for our walk today.

We found two discarded CDs within a couple of blocks along 100th.

Paula Lalish and Carole King. Paula’s album is titled “View from an Island.” She appears to live in Port Townsend which is on a Washington State peninsula, not an island. We have not heard of Paula, but have heard of Carole. Unfortunately we won’t hear from either of them because the CDs were badly damaged.

We found an unopened Bang Purple Haze energy drink.

It provided the consumer with the energy to toss it out the window. So, this is a bit of a puzzle. They state “Bang Purple Haze Energy Drink, Zero Calories, Sugar Free with Super Creatine.” An energy drink with zero calories, but energy is measured in many different units including joules, BTUs, and, yes, calories. So is this some sort of fantasy energy for playing fantasy football? We emptied the can into the ditch.

We wrapped up our walk with one of our least favorites, the classic butt bottle.

A water bottle filled with water and cigarette butts and tossed into the weeds. What are these people thinking? “I don’t pollute by randomly tossing my cigarette butts out the window, I put them in a plastic water bottle so I can pollute the water, ruin a recyclable bottle and still ultimately pollute with my butts.” Yes, you win the Trash Trifecta.

Saturday, 16th, 2021 – Riverside Drive & Brickyard Road

Today was cooler and dry. We kept up our pace, but we got bogged down in a few areas, like retrieving balls from ditches, climbing over fences to pick up trash and trying to pry bottles out of grates, but more of that later. We did close out the week with a money find.

We thought it was a nickel, but it was still dark and the coin had been run over. When we got home, we could see it was a New Zealand twenty-cent coin, worth about fourteen cents in USD. We have found several Canadian coins, one Mexican Peso and one USSR Rubel, but this is our first New Zealand coin. We wanted to add the fourteen cents to this week’s take, but the judges rejected it. They said that the only currencies that count on our walks is the US Dollar and, for some reason, the Malawian kwacha. Who hired these judges anyway? And what country are they from?

We thought we found three balls today.

Near downtown Bothell, someone was practicing their drives with a Whiffle golf ball and lost it in the rough. Come on, how do you lose a bright-orange Whiffle ball? We also found a Wilson volley ball in a ditch. Wilson!!!

We put the volley ball in a place where folks can see it. The third ball wasn’t a ball at all, but part of a lamp. It was at the bottom of the Brickyard Road hill and probably rolled down the road into the ditch. It was broken and beat up and ended in a recycle bin. Only the golf ball made it back to our ball collection.

There were two tires on our walk.

The one on the left was a new tire and wheel that did not look used at all. The other was well-used. We hauled them home and put them in our tire collection. Not really, we don’t have a tire collection. We left them and will notify the city.

We came to a storm drain that two liquor mini-bottles evidently got run over and pressed into.

They were firmly stuck between the grates and we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to free them, to no avail. We had to leave them. No, we would feel foolish calling the city, but we do have tools at home.

We’ve found a lot of license plates but this was the first foreign one we’ve found.

It is foreign, isn’t it? Or is Alberta a US territory? And yes, we also picked up the butt.

Someone threw a wrench into our walk.

Most tools we find are low-quality, but this one is a high-quality and expensive Snap-On brand. It retails for $116 on their website. A government worker must have lost it.

We scored a hat trick today.

Three hats. The one on the left was in the park-and-ride parking lot. The other two were in front of the apartments on 112th Ave NE with some other trash.