Monday, June 26th, 2023 – Safeway
Starting a new week, the weather is still holding nicely with the lows around 53°F (11.7°C) and highs around 77°F (25.0°C). We can live with that. We had a menagerie of roadkill today, a mole, a rat, and an opossum. And for all this roadkill, we found a lone penny.
Janet picked this up at her favorite gas station. Also, near the gas station was a lost gas cap.
It was obviously runover and got recycled.
This was free, so we picked it up.
Yes, we have used this line before, but after all, it is free.
For the second time in a month, we found a bunch of confetti litter.
Plus, the Litter Cannon it came from. We are sure this is from the “Party for Less” near Safeway. If it happens again, we will purchase a cannon and set it off in their store. See how they like it.
Uh oh. Last week we found this person in the street expelled from the KinderCare and we tossed her back.
Today, we again found her outside the KinderCare fence. This is beginning to look like a clear case of discrimination. We will contact the National Organization for Women. It is female, isn’t it?
A giant leaf.
If it’s a fig leaf, it’s from one well-endowed statue. We wouldn’t want to stand next to it for a few reasons.
Tuesday, June 27th, 2023 – Park-and-Ride
We removed a rat and a bird from the roadway. All we saw at first was some tail feathers sticking out of the ground. As we pulled on them with our pickers, we found it was stuck, bill first in a hole. We did get it out, but have no idea how it became stuck in there unless it was going after some small critter.
We found money.
Two shiny dimes, one at the freeway onramp bus stop and the other at the recently closed off park-and-ride lot. But more about that later.
Not only did we find money, we found tools.
A Stanley Pocket Knife with Rotating Blade. But, well, it had been run over so the knife did not rotate. We’ll see if we can fix that. Then a rusty drill bit and in a pile of trash at the blocked-off park-and-ride, a headlamp that still works! The fool. We can imagine him walking blindly in an attic with no headlamp and falling through the ceiling and breaking a leg. All the while he is thinking “did I leave my headlamp in that pile of trash I illegally dumped?” We can only hope.
Now onto the park-and-ride. As we mentioned, they closed off about half of the parking areas because it was being use as a dump and party location. In the open part of the park-and-ride, someone had a beer party. Scattered around the top part of the lot were part of a 12-pack of Coors Light.
They were scattered around so we gathered them together for a group portrait with the mothership. Two were unopened, but one of those was leaking. In the end, we carried the full one home. Then, at the bottom end of the parking lot, we found another one that made it about three-hundred feet down the lot. Winner!
Now on to the closed part of the lot. It was refreshing to be in the lot with no cars. It was not refreshing spending a lot of time here cleaning up some of the small stuff.
As an example, this was on one corner of the lot. We picked up some of the buts, but we will work on it over the coming weeks.
Near the back of the lot, we found these.
A pair of panties and a condom wrapper. Then in a nearby bush.
Okay, one last hurrah, so to speak. Okay, it’s not the park-and-ride, but there’s always the Motel 6, that should really impress her. Yes, but it does cost money.
Everyone knows that the name, Motel 6 came from charging six dollars per day. We found this article that “Motel 6 started out charging $6 per night in 1962 in Santa Barbara, California. Today, that same motel is charging upwards of $300 per night.” Also, in this article is the quote –
“This Jan. 3, 2018 file photo shows a Motel 6 in SeaTac, Wash. The national chain Motel 6 agreed Thursday, April 4, 2019, to pay $12 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Washington state claiming names of hotel guests were provided to immigration officials for two years, according to Attorney General Bob Ferguson.”
Thanks Bob, you make us proud, what else did you spend our money on? And yes, we are being cynical.
Wednesday, June 28th, 2023 – Safeway and 100th Ave NE
Well, this is weird. We found money but no roadkill. It shoots a hole in our theory about getting rewarded for roadkill. It’s not a problem as long as we find money.
A nickel and a penny in the road and a dime and penny in the 7Eleven parking lot. Seventeen cents. By the way, for you who are contributing to our income by scattering change, our Garmin activity tracker just notified us that we have surpassed the limit of six-hundred miles on our shoes, so we need to order more. Just an FYI in case you want to toss a little more dinero our way.
We note cars that appear to have been abandoned and often place a small rock on one of the tires to see if it has moved. This car has not moved for several months.
Today there was a parking violation sticker on it. Either the car will be moved a little and the sticker scraped off, or it will be towed. Normally these cars have expired license plates, but this car is valid until November of this year. We’ll see what happens.
Outside the KinderCare.
We found a mangled plastic slinky, but what the heck. We found the girl again expelled over the fence. This is the third time. At this point, she is probably totally traumatized, so we kept her and will provide her a nice home in our toy collection. As we’ve pointed out before, those KinderCare kids can be brutal.
We found a couple of tools on our walk. 
A nice 90-degree pick and a run over and rusty set of metric feeler guages. They both count as tools, but we don’t have much use for either, so you can take you’re pick depending on how you feel.
We picked up another lost key.
So yes, are you ready for this? It was our key takeaway from today’s walk.
Whoa!
The Tulalip Casino had a big winner. We hope this guy didn’t blow his winnings on something like a stick of gum.
Boy, someone got pissed off to toss these.
He must have had a short fuse.
Thursday, June 29th, 2023 – 160th to 124th Street
Today, we removed a roadkill rat, mole and a bird. For all that, we found only a dime.
And it was bent. We have found a lot of broken and bent pennies, but this is the first dime we can recall. It looks like someone stopped on a dime. Literally and “litter-ally”.
But we found a tool.
A pristine, three-inch socket extension. Five bucks at Grainger. We have other extensions we’ll sell you for cheaper, but this one’s a keeper. We may frame it for our TrashWalking museum.
Then we found a book.
“Every Little Thing,” 2023 Titan Odyssey. Wait, what? Not the Titanic Titan submersible? No, it was a yearbook from a local Middle School. After that, the kid probably tossed the book on purpose. We took it back to the school in case he wants it back. They might want to change their name to something less dynamic. The “Rubber Ducky” is probably available. And they seldom suddenly implode. But then again, we have not tested them at 5,500 psi.
Friday, June 30th, 2023 – 100th Ave NE
Friday, Janet’s big money day and she did not disappoint.
She easily found a quarter and a penny. Then she started some deep diving and came up with another quarter, a dime, and two pennies. A total of sixty-three cents. Whoop! But wait, she also found this.
A Dave and Buster rechargeable rewards card with a penny glued to each side. We are not sure why, but this is not how you recharge the card. But we’ll count that as two more pennies, so sixty-five cents today.
But we also removed roadkill, a bird, a squirrel, and another mole. What is it with moles this week? We’ve found three of them so far. Could it be they are on their way to La Mole Convention in Mexico City? It’s no wonder we’re finding all of them, they are blind, after all.
Speaking of roadkill, we found this today.
A duck’s skull. Checking our records, two years ago on May 4, 2021, we removed a roadkill duck from the street and placed it in the bushes. This could be that duck. And yes, it’s still a dead duck.
Then there was this.
A green iguana. Okay, we turned it over and found it was not made in China.
We could make out the “Made In Se”, but couldn’t make out anything else. So that kind of leaves us Serbia, Seychelles, or Senegal. We’ll go with Senegal, but at least it’s not China like we expected.
So, here’s an idea for us to earn some extra money. We found a lost magnetic sign.
Better yet, the yellow sticker can be replaced with whatever we want. So we can purchase some of these bars change the sticker and resell them for $5.00 making a lot of money. But wait, the magnetic sign would fall off our vest and we would just end up picking it up again but with the melted ice cream we’ve been carrying.
We had a share of Scatter-Shatter today including a wheel cover.
This is the biggest piece we found for about two-hundred feet.
It’s Friday, time to check out Chuck’s vest pocket.
Starting with the cards on the left, a Business Card from a nurse at the Longhouse Assisted Living Home. Why do they keep giving us these? A YoLo Massage Parlor rewards card with one square used. This is not a good sign for them. The person got a massage, accepted the return visit rewards card an tossed it. Don’t think they will be seeing him again. So, if we keep this and find nine more with one massage, will that count as a full card for a free massage?
A card for a 2-for-one tasting at the Laura Ashton Cellars. We might know someone who would use this. And Jose’s VISA Debit Card. We shredded it.
A “Keep Calm and Hike On” sticker from Crater Lake National Park and something for Young Adults, but probably not the hiking. Fortunately, no condoms were found in the vicinity.
A $1,021.94 check for Cory, probably cashed. A super Nerf bullet, possibly a mortar round, a Traxxas wrench, part of a toolset Traxxas RC toys. Judging from the quality of the wrench we found, we will pass on the tool set. A dial that goes from OFF to LO, then 1 through 9 to HI. So why not go from 0 (OFF) to 11 (HI)?
A sprung spring, an unknown “GH” label and Crocs Jibbitz Disney Jasmine shoe charm.
And it lights up when it is disturbed. Frankly, we find the whole idea disturbing.
A bunch of plastic jewelry, a small plastic present and the other half of the fox. Last week, we only had the back half, but now we have the full fox. Yes, we are the fox is half full type of people.
Then there is another Washington State Lottery scratch-and-lose scratch coin to add to our collection of fifteen we’ve found. Folks should get a new one of these coins each time by purchase a lottery ticket and keep them. At the end of a year, they can calculate the average cost of each coin.
Finally, a ribbon for Sixth Place in the girls’ breaststroke, ages 9 to 10 at a local swim club. Everybody’s a winner.
Pop tabs! As we collect beverage cans, we save the pop tabs and every six months or so, we weigh the pop tabs we’ve collected, wash and bag them up.
Today we had 24.17 ounces of pop tabs. Adding this to our current statistics, we have collected a total of 14.1 pounds of tabs which is approximately 17,800 beer/soda/other cans since we’ve been collecting them. The sad thing is when we donate the entire 14.1 pounds to the Ronald McDonald house, they are worth about six dollars and thirty cents. Really? We pick up eighteen thousand cans and it generates six dollars? But we cannot help ourselves. We will continue our pop tab plucking.
Saturday, July 1st, 2023 – Riverside Drive
The nice weather continued for our walk today. We removed a roadkill bird, a raccoon, and two more moles. Holy Moly! Someone is playing whack-a-mole for real. But we did find some money.
Chuck found one penny on Riverside Drive and Janet found one on Brickyard Road. Janet’s was stuck in a blob of gum. She claims she tried to remove the gum too but failed. Right, no problem getting the penny, but the gum? No way.
Okay, only two cents, but we found two different caches of unopened beer.
Four unopened bottles of Stella and three unopened cans of Steel Reserve. Okay, only Stella Artois and Steel Reserve, but still.
We picked up three tools.
A bicycle repair wrench. We found it on eBay, and it was called a “Vintage New NOS Bicycle Bike Repair Wrench Multi Tool.” Okay, since it had “Vintage” in the title, it must be worth the twelve-dollar asking price. In the middle, a pristine bungee cord and on the right a nice Milwaukee utility knife, thirteen dollars at Home Depot.
At the park-and-ride, a red, white, and blue striped polo shirt.
Just in time for the Fourth of July celebration.
We found two balls today, a baseball and this.
The city mowed the weeds along Riverside Drive uncovering a lot of trash and cans, both shredded and unshredded. This was uncovered. It’s a good thing it was not inflated at the time, or it would be shredded also. But it didn’t really matter, either way it would end up in our garbage.
Wow, we keyed in on another key.
The second key takeaway this week.
That wraps up our walking week. Or inventory this week:
- $1.15 The hard way, a little each day.
- 16 Roadkills including five moles and a half-buried bird.
- 13 Mike’s Hard Lemonade cans.
- 10 Tools including a vintage bicycle wrench.
- 8 unopened beers, three brands.
- 6 Balls.
- 4 Fuses, short.
- 2 Keys.
- 1 Condom, used.
- 1 Pair of panties, used.
- 1 Cannon, litter.
- 1 Student, expelled three times.
- 1 Fig leaf, gigantic.
- 1 Iguana, not made in China.
- 1/2 of a full fox.
Have a great week and remember that moles are as blind as a bat, so be careful at mole crossings. And bat crossings, for that matter.
Trash Walking 