My recent post about leftovers as well as something Nathan said the other day reminded me that I needed to post on the subject of throwing stuff away.
When we recently moved, we got a dumpster and filled it up twice with stuff to throw out. In general, I have no hesitation about throwing stuff away - ruthlessly even. Selling it at a garage sale is sometimes an option, but there are a lot of things that just aren’t going to sell. Donating / giving it away is also an option, but for a lot of things you’re in the same boat - some stuff is just junk that no one wants.
Anyway, as I’ve been throwing stuff in the dumpster over the last couple weeks, and pondering the many loads of stuff I had to cart away from our new place, I remembered a story that I don’t think I blogged about yet. It was a while back, during another time we got a dumpster and I was working on cleaning up stuff from the yard. One item that was in special need of being thrown away was a rusted out old wood chipper that didn’t function anymore.
It was extremely heavy, so much so that I had to construct a make-shift ramp in order to push it up and over the edge of the dumpster, since it was too heavy and awkward to lift normally. All the while I’m doing this, the pack rat neighbor accross the street is watching me. I’m pretty sure he’s actually taken stuff that I’ve thrown away out of the dumpster before, and (once it was too late) I could tell he really had his eye on that wood chipper. He seems to be kind of a tinkerer that likes to collect stuff on the off chance that he might actually do something with it someday in the imaginary future.
Anyway, AFTER I exert a tremendous amount of energy heaving this thing into the dumpster, he comes over and starts asking me about it, and making not-so-subtle comments implying that it’s wasteful to throw things like that away, almost to the point where I thought he was going to ask me to take it back out so he could have it. I just explained that it hadn’t worked for quite a long time, but if he wanted it, he was welcome to it, but that I wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to get it out of the dumpster.
Just a little anecdote that I think of whenever I see people collecting stuff that they’re very unlikely to ever use; it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. I do have to confess that I have a healty stash of computer equipment, but I am always whittling it down and either using or getting rid of stuff when it has become obvious that I will probably never get around to using it.