Monday, January 24th, 2022 – Safeway
Well, this did not start our week out well, at least for Chuck. He got the following text.
This sounds like a threat, like this is the final notice before we will foreclose on your home. Or on Chuck. Hopefully this is not the case. Chuck is fully vaccinated with both doses and the booster. Chuck got his first shots at the VA hospital, and while they are supposed to be synchronized, the state still thinks his booster was his first shot.
We found a carton for a Morning After “emergency contraceptive”.
First off, isn’t “Morning After contraceptive” kind of like shutting the barn doors after the horses have bolted? But we digress. Included in the box was a set of instructions: “If you are sexually active, …” Really? She purchased a morning after pill. Duh!
This is weird. As you may recall, last week we found an evil rubber duckling.
Today, we found another, less threatening duckling.
It was found on a different street a few miles from the first, and much less evil. However, according to the stamp on the bottom, they were both born in the same factory in Jinhua, China. We are getting a bad feeling about China. Okay, an even badder feeling. The second duckling is now starting to look evil to us.
At Safeway, someone left some food at the parking lot entrance.
Three cans of tuna and two cans of green peas. We hauled them home and took them to the food bank. As an afterthought, we checked for online recipes. Dang, we should have thought of that, but we are not pea-brained.
Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 – Park-and-Ride
Well now, this is more like it. We found some real money today.
Three one-dollar bills. We haven’t found any folding money in months. On the minus side, we did need to remove a roadkill opossum from the street. It was about as flat as the dollar bills.
We found a small knife.
Yes, well run over. The blade is about an inch-and-a-quarter long, not something you would bring to a knife fight, or gun fight for that matter. As a joke, we gave it to a friend, who is a knife aficionado. He looked at it and said knife manufacturers provide replacement screws for knives and put it in his backpack. Obviously, he does not get a good joke when he sees it.
A tale of two gloves. Last week, we saw two gloves on Riverside Drive while running some errands. They were about a quarter mile apart and we figured on Saturday we would collect them and have a good pair of gloves. However, on Saturday, we only found one glove, which was very unsatisfying. It was a nice glove and we washed it. The next day, we were driving up the Norway Hill and saw the missing glove. We stopped and got it.
A perfect match. They are only worth about twelve dollars at Home Depot, but finding a pair of good gloves is so satisfying. And they fit us like a glove.
Wednesday, January 26th, 2022 – Safeway and 100th Ave NE
It was a cold walk today, near freezing, but it was dry. Overall, it was a mundane walk, though we got another enthusiastic honk from schoolteacher Erin. And we did find more money.
Only a penny, this time, but it was hardly run over at all.
At the beer can bus stop, only five bud cans.
The beer-drinking bus rider is slowing down. We normally find six or seven cans. Maybe he got canned from his job and is no longer employed and not riding the bus. We will see next week.
Nine-Inch Nails? No, we did them one better.
A ten-inch nail designed to not be pulled out. Anybody getting a flat with this nail would be screwed. Literally.
Thursday, January 27th, 2022 – 160th to 124th Street
No money and no roadkill, but we did get a honk from schoolteacher Erin.
Someone did leave us two unopened bottles of water at the bus stop.
Then, on 116th Street, they left two, unopened mini bottles of vodka.
We didn’t think vodka and water would make a good mixed drink, so we hauled them home. Now if they had left orange juice at the bus stop…
A lost sign.
What’s an Attention Hitter? Google didn’t find much, but then we noticed the @30MINUTEHIT. Sure enough, we found that it is a Boxing / Kickboxing Circuit for Women. “Punch, Kick, Sweat and Smile your way to amazing results!” Maybe we’ll put the sign back where we found it.
Friday, January 28th, 2022 – 100th Ave NE
The temperature this morning dropped to 29°F (-1.7°C) which made our walk a little painful. We bundle up, but we cannot wear warm gloves under our latex gloves because it would be difficult to pick up many items.
We have been finding two or three Mikes Hard Lemonade cans each day this week but found none today. However, we found two Truly Hard Seltzer cans. Maybe the Mike’s guy is trying something different?
We removed a roadkill raccoon today and found another penny.
It’s been a pretty good week for us. Not for the raccoon.
Someone left a cup of coffee on a guard rail on 112th Ave NE.
It had a little iceberg floating in it. You can see it in the middle, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Across from 7-Eleven, a box of buns.
Eight unopened bags of twelve Costco Cheese Buns. Chuck had no idea there were buns with cheese in them, but he is not a cheese whiz. They were heavy, so we left them on the sidewalk. If we happen this way with the car, we will retrieve them.
We found a golf ball.
It was in the middle of five plant stems. Maybe the plants grew up around it, but if someone tossed it there, it would be equivalent to a hole in one. And why would someone toss out a perfectly good golf ball?
On top of Norway Hill, we came to a hole in the road with paint spewing out of it.
Well, it could be, but someone dropped a can of white paint. This will be here a long time. Perhaps we will drop a can of black paint on top of it.
On our way over the hill, we kept finding scattered eggshells and yolk.
The notorious Bothell Egg Gang must have been marking their turf. Whoever did this seemed to be targeting the trash bins. There were some cars parked along the way and they appeared to be unscathed. The Egg Gang hates trash bins. As we neared home, we found three empty egg trays.
Each tray holds thirty eggs. It’s hard to think what type of people would spend money on ninety eggs just to throw them at trash cans. It scrambles one’s mind.
It’s time to check what has accumulated in Chuck’s vest pocket.
Two pieces of paper with what looks like “I can do it” and” I am enough”, probably laminated by a teacher for the parents of the young student. Parent: “What? The ‘d’ is missing. My kid is smarter than this!” and tosses it out the window for us to pick up. A bristle from the street sweeper. Yes, we know it’s sad, but we collect these. An almost full package of Marlboros. No, we do not smoke, but at ten bucks a pack, we can’t just toss them.
Finally, two credit cards. The black one had a common, untraceable name and we shredded it. The WaFdBank card had the name of a company on it, and we were able to track the person down. We made contact and mailed the credit card back. They probably won’t notice the $67.53 charge from Amazon.
Saturday, January 29th, 2022 – Riverside Drive
The temperature this morning was about 32°F (0°C), not too bad. Our Saturday route takes us down Norway Hill to Riverside Drive. There was a lot of trash along the way, mainly beer cans.
One of the first things we encountered on our way down was an unbroken egg.
Then, a few hundred yards farther, another carton of eggs, no doubt more work of Bothell Egg Gang (BEG). Yes, they have earned their own acronym.
We found some clothing.
It is hard to tell, but the item on the left is a sleeveless tee-shirt. Is a sleeveless tee-shirt an i-shirt? It was frozen, but we were able to stuff it into our recycle bag. When we got it home, we discovered it was covered with paint and not worth cleaning and got recycled. We also found a cap that folks wear under their bicycle helmet. Off to Goodwill.
“Testing in Progress. Do not ship”
Oops. This probably fell off a shipping truck. Someone ignored the sign.
We found another plastic bag with unused masks.
But it also contained a set of glasses with some weird, folded lenses. After some Google searching, the glasses are children’s safety glasses that had been run over and folded.
In front of the apartments on NE Woodinville Drive, a carton of Modelo beer cans.
Two of them were unopened, so that adds to this week’s profits. But when we got home, we found that one of the unopened cans was leaking and had to be recycled, so that reduced our profits somewhat. What does a can of Modelo fetch on eBay?
In the park-and-ride lot, we found a key fob with no keys.
However, the buttons were labelled “H M L Power.” That did not look like a fob to unlock a car and turned out to be for heated insoles. Some skier is going to be very unhappy after paying $130 for some insoles. Guess you could say he got cold feet.
That wraps up the walking week. We didn’t find any money today, so our total money for the week remains at $3.02. Our take for the week is,
- $3.02
- 96 Costco Cheese Buns
- Ten Mike’s Lemonade cans plus two Truly Hard Seltzer cans on Norway Hill.
- One-hundred-and-two raw eggs.
Remember the old adage, “You can’t make a mess without breaking 100 eggs.”
Trash Walking 