I have been off a lot lately, trying to get ourselves settled after a quick December move, and also trying (emphasis on the effort without natures help) to get a large garden going, raising chickens and rabbits for meat, and laying hens for eggs, well needless to say we have been busy.

The news has been no fun to watch lately, a real drag on the soul. So I sat down and decided to peruse our local Craigslist, listed as "Portland" (although we live far outside of it). To help you understand, people in Portland drive around with bumper stickers saying "Keep Portland Weird", fine, but keep "it" in Portland please..

Something I have noticed in the oh-so earth friendly city of Portland, is people have an awful habit of wanting to give away stuff that just should not be. Is it being too cheap to pay dumping fees? Is it a hoarding mentallity? Is it a skewed perception of what is valuable? Or, is it just that people in Portland think EVERYTHING needs to be reused? We'll never know, but here are some finds I have seen recently, thought it would lighten the mood.

Is that a body in that?
http://portland.craigslist.org/wsc/zip/2529052236.html

One day someone was trying to get rid of a pick-up backend made into a trailer, which did not have good tires on it, full of their actual household garbage (free trailer if you haul ALL away, btw, the tires need replacing...)! Someone was doing a remodel of an old house and had a free toilet on there, although you see this a lot, it was "full" and had not been disconected from the floor and the house had no running water, which meant they expected the lucky claimant to come and undo it, take it off the floor and manage it when it had been used by probably numerous homeless people, or meth heads, and never flushed! One person offered up 500 square feet of bricks, admittedly most cracked, a non mortared brick patio, but needed to be loosened up out of the ground, essentially they were wanting free labor to undo this 500 square foot patio of broken bricks, and your prize was the broken bricks, yay.....

Lets see....broken smelly mini fridge.....non-working gas heater (lets keep the meth heads supplied with scrap metal to support those habits), free firewood, if you take down two 200 foot tall cottonwood trees, but you must be professional they requested.....old rotten fence boards to re-use, old rotten wood from old house for burning (um, lead paint?), mattresses they admit could have bugs, couches that had been sitting out on their deck all winter (they even looked moldy), 8 culvert pipes from an old sewer project, boats that have holes in them, broken small kitchen appliances (like cheap toaster and coffee makers)......

Free pallets (well these can garner some cash), free cardboard boxes, because you know there is never enough of those. Free yard debris (they claimed it was for mulching), their leftover food from their fridge, moldy bread, and of course here in Oregon, plenty of offers for free rocks and free dirt. Broken cement pieces, stacks of paper that had one side written on, men and womens old undergarments, adult videos, FREE hideabed for $30.00...ummm......

Dang, this city needs to just buck up and pay for garbage hauling, they are not saving the planet by passing on their garbage!