Monday, July 12th, 2021 – Safeway
The nice weather is continuing in the Seattle area. Fires are burning in British Columbia to the north and in eastern Washington, but the prevailing winds are keeping the smoke away so far.
We removed a roadkill rabbit but did find money on our first day of the week. Pressure is off.
Two pennies, a dime and a EURO one-cent coin. Okay according to the TrashWalking rules committee, foreign coins are not allowed to be counted as found money. That is big of them. Let them walk thirty-five miles a week picking up trash and the sparse coins. They would probably count soda and beer bottle caps as dimes.
Near the beginning of our walk, we passed a house that often leaves “free” stuff near the street, and generally it disappears. Today there was a matching set of sofas.
This is like a Goodwill Outlet Store.
We found a butane cigar/dope lighter about half full.
These are refillable. But, at two bucks a piece, why bother? Just toss them.
A nice Volkswagen emblem.
It had been held on with some type of tape, still adhering to the emblem. VW has gone downhill since their heavy-metal muscle cars of the sixties.
Hey, it’s a Volkswagen, for goodness sake.
The problem McDonalds litters made another mess on Norway Hill.
These may or may not be the McLitterers. If they are the same people, we are dealing with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The McLitterers tie their litter up in a bag before tossing it. These guys try to make as big a mess as possible.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2021 – Park-and-Ride
Well, hey! More money.
Another shiny dime. We are on a roll.
As we started out our walk, the sofas are gone.
They were free, but maybe they lowered the price.
So much for workmanship.
The construction crew along Juanita-Woodinville Way repaved and set up new crosswalks. One of the markers immediately came loose. Good job.
We have found several “locking lug nuts” and now we have the tool to loosen them.
No, we wouldn’t go around loosening locking lug nuts, but it’s good to know we have the power.
We bet this guy is really teed off.
A whole bag full.
And this tees us off.
Not only do we pick up lots of marijuana trash, now there are signature pot lighters to litter.
There was quite a mess at the park-and-ride.
There was a tee-shirt and briefcase. The tee-shirt was a Duck Dynasty, like a Boss shirt. It would have been interesting to take home, however, it was smeared with some brown matter that we did not want to deal with. The briefcase was empty except for more of the brown matter. We put the shirt back into the briefcase and left it and the brown matter at the parking space used by the metro workers.
Also, at the park-and-ride, another mess.
Random trash with a bad odor. We left this for the Metro guys to handle.
We found a painted rock.
We find painted rocks periodically, but most are either unlabeled or are tagged with BothellRocks, a local rock painting group. This one had, “Share your art! Tell you story! www.msmvthac.com/ripples-to-waves-giovanna.” The website seems to be more about stories than art, though.
Ack!
Second day in a row!
Wednesday, July 14th, 2021 – Safeway
Today was a nice walk, but boring. No money, no roadkill and the normal amount of mundane trash. Nothing much interesting.
Well, there was this.
Okay, it doesn’t sound very famous to us. “Give me liberty or give me death,” we get. But “Dungeons?” After some researching, Gary Gygax was designer of the role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. He died in 2008. If he had lived, perhaps his next quote would be “Dragons.”
Someone did leave us a Dick’s Drive-In meal.
An uneaten hamburger and fries. Thanks, but that is not our idea for breakfast.
We found a rare sake bottle. Not rare sake, but rare in that we seldom find sake bottles.
It was empty, but even if it were full, we would not have it with our hamburger meal. Warning: Educational material follows.
“Junmai is the Japanese word meaning “pure rice.” This is an important term in the world of sake, as it separates pure rice sake from non-pure rice sake. Junmai is brewed using only rice, water, yeast, and koji — there are no other additives, such as sugar or alcohol.”
That is all very interesting, but it still doesn’t interest us in drinking it with hamburgers. But what is koji? “Koji is cooked rice and/or soya beans that have been inoculated with a fermentation culture, Aspergillus oryzae.”
Okay, we are definitely not drinking sake with hamburgers.
Thursday, July 15th, 2021 – 160th to 124th Street
Okay, on to Thursday. Again, no roadkill to pick up. However, we did find money.
A well run-over nickel. We’ll take it. But wait, as in the Ginsu Knife commercials, there’s much more!
A twenty-dollar bill. For found money, we have only found one better, two twenties many moons ago. We do not count gift cards and the like that the kind folks give us. This is real found money going into our money jar.
We found two dime bags with some residual powder in them.
Nope, straight into the garbage, we weren’t interested. And dime bags do not count as money.
Another lug nut.
No, we will not go down that rathole again. Loose lug nuts seldom lead to good outcomes.
We did find a tool.
A very badly beat-up tape measure at the freeway onramp. We have found several of these on our walks, mostly serviceable. This one was not.
No biggie, did we mention we found $20 today?
Friday, July 16th, 2021 – 100th Ave NE
This morning was cool and overcast and we needed to use our flashlights for the first thirty minutes or so. It’s downhill from here.
We found a cell phone in the middle of the Juanita-Woodinville Way.
We have found several cell phones on our walks, but this was by far in the best condition of them. It was fully charged and apparently not password protected. The language was set to Spanish, and we were not familiar with the phone operating system, or we would have tried to find out who the owner was. Later in the day, we dropped it off at the carrier’s store to let them deal with it.
Another Mariner’s baseball cap to add to our collection.
We have found twenty-seven baseball caps worth keeping and many that were not. This one is in good condition and makes twenty-eight. We need to open a bungee cord and baseball cap store: Cords & Caps R Us.
People tossing out unsmoked cigarettes. We really don’t understand this.
Well, we don’t understand why people start smoking to start with, but tossing out unsmoked cigarettes is beyond us. At the cost of cigarettes in Washington State, these are worth about three dollars. Next time, just leave the money. We’d be much happier.
We found another drill screwdriver bit.
We seem to have fallen into a rut of sockets and screwdriver bits with the occasional utility knife tossed into the mix. What we need is a good crescent wrench or something. Nothing too heavy, though.
A new shop is opening up on our Friday route.
“Pottery & Ceramics, Garden Décor, House Plants and an Espresso Bar.” An Espresso Bar in a Ceramics shop? What do you bet the ceramics shop will serve their drinks in paper cups?
We came upon a large, knotted plastic bag on the street.
We could tell from the weight that there was something in the bag and from our TrashWalking experience that the bag contained a dead animal. It was a rabbit. We emptied the rabbit and placed it behind some bushes.
Chuck wondered if this counts as roadkill and made a note to ask the rules committee to see what she thought.
Saturday, July 17th, 2021 – Riverside Drive & Brickyard Road
Today was cool and overcast again. We removed a roadkill opossum and weasel from the road. It could have been a ferret. If you set a weasel and a ferret in front of us, we probably couldn’t identify which was which. Especially if they had been run over like this critter. We did find more money today.
A bright, new quarter, only slightly runover. It has been a good money week at $20.52. Even without the twenty-dollar bill, it would have been the best week in the last ten.
Saturday is our longest walk of the week at about 7.7 miles. We were out longer than normal because we got delayed by a few things. First, earlier this week, we saw that a car had crashed into a ditch coming up the road from Riverside Drive. As we passed the spot this morning, we noticed a bunch of car pieces scattered in the ditch. We did not have the capability to carry it with us, so we spent some time piling the pieces up by the side of the road.
Later in the day, we stopped with our car, bagged it up and brought it home.
Then, as we crossed the bridge into downtown Bothell, we were stopped by two young women asking for directions.
They were trying to find the Tolt Pipeline Trail, the west entrance on 104th Ave NE. There is a 104th Ave NE in downtown Bothell, but there is continuation on Norway Hill. After some confusion, we determined that they were looking for the Tolt Pipeline trail we pass on our weekday walks. We gave them verbal directions of how to get to the top of Norway Hill. As we passed the bottom of the Tolt Pipeline trail later this morning on our way home, we didn’t see them. We hope they were not still driving around trying to follow our directions.
Then, not long after, we saw two boxes near the Senior Center.
They were filled with toiletries and other bathroom supplies, some opened and some not. We closed them up and carried the boxes to the Senior Center entrance hoping they would take care of them once they opened for the day.
We have been complaining about finding only sockets and drill bits. So, today, we found a combination socket and drill bit.
But we did find another tool. We know you do not believe us, but we are on the level.
We found an Axxess+ key.
According to this article, Axxess+ keys are much more accurate to duplicate than regular keys. So, we can take this to Home Depot and get a good duplicate, but we would still not know what it is used for.
Another baseball cap.
This one was grimy/oily and was kind of boring. Boring won out. We tossed it.
Someone dumped paint cans in front of our favorite trailer park.
The guy who dumped these probably thinks, “I can do anything I want. The world is my oyster.” Well, we hope you choke on it.
We picked up a valid debit card on the freeway onramp.
We used to try to notify the issuing bank, but normally ended up in an automated call ladder that wanted our account number and wouldn’t let you proceed without a valid one. When we could get through to a person, we were thanked and asked to destroy it. Now we just destroy them.
We have never found one of these on our walks.
Who would wear a bowtie?
Oh, looks good on you though.
Ok, time for a rant. We have always picked up cigarette butts and now that has progressed to picking up disposable e-cigarettes/vaping devices too. We have been tossing them into the trash but then decided to see how they work.
We found two of the devices today and opened them up when we got home. Besides the very intense scent of peaches and “candy floss”, whatever that is, they each contained a battery. These companies are selling items with batteries intended to be disposed of in landfills. And these users didn’t even do that. They just tossed them out the car window. Ruin your lungs, not the environment. If someone wanted to disassemble and recycle the batteries and other parts, these two required a pair of pliers and wire cutters, not exactly easy to recycle. Great job, guys.
Trash Walking 