many years ago and several blogs ago i used to bullshit about all the scavenging i would do. i would get up at 4:00 am and head to the park with ruby. the youths and thugs would be out partying the night before and leave huge amounts of empty liquor bottles/cans and what ever else they lost while getting shit faced drunk. normal people wouldn't venture into the park infested with thugs in the dark but i had ruby. thugs and bikers like pitbulls.
i still pick up any empty beer cans i come across, maybe $5 a month, but i don't do it with the gusto of yesteryear. but last week i found a pair of converse chuck taylors in the park and today i came across an old stove in the lane behind some apartments. (i was on my way back from the supermarket where i had sampled several lindt chocolate balls) the converse sneakers just happen to fit me perfectly, an act of god if i ever witnessed one.
i've been on the lookout for old stove burners for a long time and finally got lucky. our stove has one burner that is on its last legs and the hardware store wanted $35 for a new one. i plugged a replacement burner in and it quickly went red hot. so i got that going for me too.
previously i've mentioned the bean soup mental happiness evaluation technique. the more often i make home made bean soup, the better my state of mind. so far i've made 2 pots of bean this fall and now some world class scavenging. the bean soup index is far more reliable than any diagnosis from an over paid psychiatrist. brain be happy.
141 days until baseball season begins, i'll need about 10 big pots of bean soup.
billy loves you sons of bitches.
I think I you might have a book in your future, Mr. Rosewater. You can make the rounds touting the success of your bean soup mental happiness evaluation technique. I will be looking for you on Dr. Phil.
ReplyDeletethank you for your continued support mr shife. i'd pay $6 to kick dr phil in the nuts.
DeleteSo is this like what us American call dumpster diving.
ReplyDeleteCoffee is on
we have lots of dumpster divers downtown. it's becoming pretty common for people to try and pull stuff out of the clothing donation bins.
DeleteI collected way too much up north, more careful about it here.
ReplyDeletei think moving a few times cooled my enthusiasm for collecting junk. i'm just being more selective now, only grabbing junk that i can use.
DeleteSeriously Elliot, that was a lucky day. Bean soup sounds good. What’s in it? Besides the obvious.
ReplyDeletethe core ingredients are grated carrots, navy beans, barley, garlic, onions. then it's whatever meat and veggies are lurking in the fridge. usually i cut cubes of round roast.
DeleteBean soup sounds good!
ReplyDeletehealthy too!
DeleteSounds delicious! We have a variety of soups we like. In fact it’s soup around four nights a week. Casseroles are too heavy on carbs. The man isn’t a veggie fan, but he will eat them in soup. I like it because it makes 2 to 3 dinners that we can freeze for the next week or two.
ReplyDeletehomer simpson said it best, you can't make friends with salad.
DeleteI too am a bean soup man, it and bread being the only things I really enjoy cooking/baking (my bread consists of biscuits, loaf breads, cornbreads, and crackers, and--like you no doubt--I put a lot of things in it along with the beans. Do you make your soup from recipes, or is it more of a Mulligan's Stew type of endeavor. While I don't pick up cans (which are now worth a dime here), I do get stuff from free boxes on the side of the road, have been known to stop my car and pick up lost baseball caps (and other things), and to scavenge from dumpsters. I don't need to do any of these things financially, but the fact is that I enjoy something that I pick up from the side of the road more than something I buy in a store (I have 50-100 baseball caps, and I doubt that more than eight of them came from a store, and they would have been on clearance). I've taken heat from getting things from free boxes instead of leaving them for the poor, but I view a free box as a free box rather than a charity box. If someone put a sign on their free box saying the contents were for the poor only, I would honor that, but otherwise, hell no. The kinds of things in free boxes are easy to get for little or nothing, so I feel no need to leave them for the next without having reason to believe that the next person was poor.
ReplyDeleteWhy were you down to one stove burner? Was it for financial reasons or because you just don't like to buy things new? I'm just trying to form a picture of your life.
By the way, have you ever considered getting a metal detector?
i have 4 working burners but one of them was slow to get red hot so it was time to get a replacement.
Deletemy dad had a metal detector. i tried it a few times but it wasn't my cup of tea.
Happy Friday, Mr. Rosewater.
ReplyDeletehappy tuesday mr shife.
Delete