Monday, September 18th, 2023 – Safeway
The new TrashWalking week started a little wet, but still relatively warm at 55°F (12.8°C). We came across no roadkill and found money.
Janet found a penny at the drive-through and another at the gas station. Near the end of our walk at the Tolt Pipeline Chuck was thinking about the two cents and was wondering if we should use the “that’s our two cents worth” again when he looked down and saw the dime. Okay! A dime a dozen it is.
We found a lost dog collar today.
Who names a dog after a fish anyway. It’s no wonder he jimmied the collar and ran. “Here, Guppy, Guppy. Here Guppy, Guppy.” It’s probably in the witness protection program by now. We’ll call the number on the tag and let them know we found the collar. We just want to give the dog a head start.
Another pair of glasses making a spectacle of themselves.
And no, we are not above using the same line over and over. If you don’t like it, we’ll just fail to see eye-to-eye.
We found what looked like a discarded bag of trash.
Which it was. Mostly empty food containers, except it did have a pair of Hanes underwear. We don’t know what the story is, but the whole lot went into a bus stop trash container. Yes, the underwear too. If you are interested, we can let you know which trashcan they are in.
An idle property on Juanita-Woodinville Way not quite to Safeway has been for sale off and on for a few years. Today, there was a new sign, in Chinese that we let Google translate.
So, the EB5 Immigration Program appears to be a federal program that “allows green card holders to provide a significant financial stake in the project to allow them to advance their green card to applying for citizenship.” This sounds like buying one’s way into U.S. but what do we know?
At the bus stop by Safeway, a bottle with two pieces of fruit in it.
After researching, Choya is a plum-based a Japanese Liqueur. Thanks, but we’ll pass. Anything with plums in it is a bit far away from a Martini, stirred, not shaken. OO7 had it all wrong: “Martini, shaken not stirred, with a plum.” Absolutely wrong.
Urine bottles.
A twin-pack and yes, we wear gloves.
And another bottle.
It was sealed and unlabeled. We haven’t seen any pink urine bottles but given the sophistication of the current technology and AI, we decided to play it safe and dump it.
As we turned up to Norway Hill, Janet was about a hundred feet ahead of Chuck when a coyote ran across the street between us.
We see these critters off and on and they have never approached us and have been more interested in getting out of our way, which is fine with us. We do wear yellow vests, safety lights and have flashlights and they probably think we are coyote ugly.
Tuesday, September 19th, 2023 – Park-and-Ride
What a downer. We didn’t find any money which broke our two-week streak. And even the tool we found was lacking.
Half a bungee cord. There’s no way we could sneak it past the judges.
This is not a tool, but related. A bag of washers.
An unopened bag of 25, 1/4th-inch washers. We might be able to call this another tool, but it would probably be a wash, so to speak.
We picked up an unopened bottle of Gatorade.
We’ve heard that Gatorade is called synthesized sweat. But what if it’s synthesized urine? That would make it three urine bottles this week.
As we were crossing the freeway, we saw a police officer pulling over a vehicle.
We continued across the bridge and looked back hoping to see a scene from the TV show, “COPS”, but no such luck. By the time we reached the other side of the overpass, we only saw the perpetrator by the side of the road. No cuffs, K9 units or anything. The patrol officer probably accidently pulled over the Chief of Police. The Chief was sitting there writing the cop’s next-year performance review.
On 145th Street, a piece of office furniture.
Choose your caption: Amazon is trying to get workers to return to the office,
- block by block.
- the worker is giving in, so he didn’t need the chair anymore.
- the worker said hell no, but I need a more comfortable chair.
- None of the above.
Bonus question: For answers 2 and 3, does the worker still have a job at Amazon?
We picked up a discarded package for a Personal Alarm device.
It claims an alarm sound level of 125dB. For reference, here are some sound levels.
- Threshold of pain: 120-130 dB
- Jet engine at takeoff (at 100 feet away): 130 dB
- Rock concerts: 110-140 dB
- Thunderclap: 120 dB
- Chainsaw: 110-120 dB
Also, here are the instructions:
Second bonus question: You are in a dark movie theater watching a light-hearted comedy, say “The Titanic” and you reach into your purse for your keys to leave before the sad scene and accidently trigger the 125dB alarm. How long would it take to put it back in again?
Wednesday, September 20th, 2023 – Safeway and 100th Ave NE
After the disappointing end of our money streak yesterday, of course we found a dime today.
And that was it, no roadkill and little else of interest.
Well, we thought we’d found another cell phone.
But it was on old Panasonic cordless phone handset. Pretty soon when people see these, they will say, “I remember those cordless phones.” Like we say, “We remember rotary-dial phones” and, “We remember named exchanges like Frontier 5-5852.” Or is that just us?
Whoa, what’s this?
The sign from Monday was down. Hopefully it was not knocked down on purpose. But if it was poorly erected, do you trust them to build houses?
We did find a ball.
A Nerf football that we tossed back into the yard. But this seems to be false advertising to us. With a Nerf ball you yell, “Go long!” which means about twenty feet. But this one is hard rubber and probably means fifty feet. We need to check, but it’s probably not a regulation Nerf football.
It’s time to check out what’s in Chuck’s vest pocket.
Not too much this week. We found someone’s work ID card. There was no indication of the company, so there was no way to return it. Half of Ian’s Alaska Airlines credit card which expires in 2027, and Robert’s Bothell High School Alumni Association membership card expires in 2024. Sorry, but we expired both of them early.
A sticker from a local hockey league and a spider. We are walking in the dark these days with flashlights and Chuck came up upon a spider. It took a few seconds to determine if it was real and dead or alive. We could have spun a web of lies and deceit, but we know one lie leads to another. It was alive and bit Chuck on the hand, it just looks plastic.
A small bow tie, probably belonging to a dog. But it appears to have avocados on it which are toxic to dogs. “Fido! Bad dog, no digging in the garbage. For that, you must wear the Avocado Collar of Death. It’s just a matter of time and you’ll never know when.”
A small hubcap, and a match like, “Got a match?” “Yes, my butt and your face.” An old family joke, a very old family joke. Finally, a single lost key. Well, it’s not lost, we found it. It’s the owner who’s lost.
Thursday, September 21st, 2023 – 160th to 124th Street
Today We removed a roadkill rabbit and rat from the road and removed a lot of pop tabs from cans.
At the Tolt Pipeline Trail across the freeway, some good citizen dumped a bunch of cans and trash. We removed the pop tabs, crushed the cans, and picked up the other trash. Job well done.
Then we continued about thirty feet around some bushes to the trailhead and found another bag.
This was a large plastic bag with four more shopping bags in it containing even more cans. It was too much for us to carry so we came back for it with the car. In all, we counted a total of ninety-eight pop tabs which blew through our previous record of 58. In case you were wondering, we normally do not count our pop tabs, only when we have a significant amount.
We found another lost wheel cover.
And though it looks to be in good shape, underneath that cheap veneer, was shattered disc no longer to have meaningful relationships with wheels. And we don’t think therapy will help.
Friday, September 22nd, 2023 – 100th Ave NE
The construction project on 100th Ave is putting a dent in our Friday walks and again, we found very little of interest. We removed a roadkill squirrel and found two pennies.
One blurry and one sharp. One of us needs to work on her photography skills.
The construction crew uncovered a shoe and, of course, left it for us to pick up.
It had been buried for a while and was deteriorating. It had no sole and got tossed in the garbage.
As we approached the end of the work zone, we noticed a car parked with the blinkers on.
As we got closer, a man came out of a construction porta-potty, got into the car, and left. He must have thought it was a highway rest area.
Saturday, September 23rd, 2023 – Riverside Drive
As we came out of our cul-de-sac, we were met by our neighbor, Misty, a ninety-pound Alaskan Malamute and her food guy, Dave.
Misty was taking Dave for an early 4:45am walk. Misty wanted to go with us, but she probably figured her food guy wouldn’t be able to handle it. So, after some pleasantries, we went on our way and Misty took Dave up the hill.
We didn’t find any money today. How can we find money every day for two weeks then only three days the next? Only twenty-four cents, pathetic. We remove roadkill: two rabbits, a snake, a squirrel, and a crow.
Smoking kills.
Some reading glasses were found in the Bothell parking lot.
Foster Grant +3.0 horn-rimmed glasses in good condition. It’s hard to see why someone tossed them.
While running errands this week, we kept seeing something orange in the weeds down the hill.
We found it was a flag for a bicycle kid trailer.
We hope they were more careful with the kids than they were with the flag.
We found an unopened safety light stick.
We can use this on our walks now that it’s getting dark, but it lasts over twelve hours. Our walks last two or three hours, so that would waste ten hours of glow time. We found that you can stop the reaction by freezing the glow stick. We could bring it home, toss it in the freezer and remove it the next day. But in a month or so, we will be walking in freezing weather which means the glow stick will stop working. We’ll just give it to our grandchildren.
On the freeway offramp, we found a page of a book with paintings of airplanes.
One page had the header, “The Daredevils,” and one of the paintings had the artist’s signature. After some searching, we found it was a page from a 2003 book, “Wild About Flying: The Dreamers, Doers and Daredevils.” It’s out of print, but there is a used copy on Amazon for $2.25 in case you are interested.
An aptly labeled piece of litter for us.
We found another neck gaiter to add to our collection, but we probably won’t wear it.
You want to advertise your services by making your customer look like a turkey? The company, Intermex, provides ways to securely transfer money to South America. Gee, wonder who their big customers are? We bet they don’t make them wear a turkey mask.
And that ends a rather mundane walking week. Our take:
- 98 Pop tabs in one day.
- 24 Cents, measly.
- 8 Roadkill, including five species.
- 8 Mike’s Hard Lemonade cans, fewer than normal but the same as last week.
- 5 Balls.
- 2 Dog collars, one for a misnamed fish dog and one poisonous.
- 2 Bottles, urine.
- 2 Unopened bottles, probably not urine.
- 2 Hubcaps.
- 1 Japanese liqueur, unsuitable for a martini, either shaken or stirred.
- 1 Glow stick, green, 12-hours.
- 1 Neck gaiter, turkey.
Have a great week and remember, a martini is properly made stirred, NOT shaken. And a drink of vodka and vermouth is called a kangaroo. Stop calling it a vodka martini, damn it.
Trash Walking 