Aaah, dumpster diving.  There has been sadly little of it in my life lately, leaving me to live vicariously through the tales of others.  Like this one.  Frugal Vegan Mom wrote me recently to tell me about this crazy-ass toy that her Grandma-ma pulled out of the trash and that her baby loves.  She saw the damn thing a few days later in a store for 45 dollars!  Good job, Frugal Vegan Mom, good job.

I’ve mentioned the phenomenon before, but I’ll explain in a word for anyone who hasn’t been around for that long: bundles of blankets.  At least once every three months I would find one in the trash across the street from Haus Mainusch.  My theory has always been that international students who are moving out were the ones throwing them away.  Why else would you wrap all your bedding in a fitted sheet and toss in in the trash?  If the bedding had been defiled in some way I might understand.  But we’re talking sheets smelling of detergent.  And the universe continues in its absurdity.

Either way, the phenomenon has resulted in an excess of bedding in my life.  These are the latest finds, hung out to dry after a thorough washing.  Coincidentally, many of them were exactly the same color that I have just painted my Wagen.  I’m going to miss that trash corral, now that we’re in Frankfurt.

The weather is perfect.  I love the start of fall.  The outdoors are a’calling (as are a bajillion things that I need to do to my Wagen before winter), and I find little time for blogging.  Perhaps I should take a page from the speed dating book.  A few updates in fifteen minutes or less…

Umm, sorry about that hiccup where the website was suddenly gone.  Whoops. If you tried to come by Click Clack Gorilla the past two days and found scary ugly nothingness, I apologize.  I was a day late paying the renewal fees for my domain name.  This is the second time I have let this happen (though the first time I was traveling, and it took me a long time to notice and an even longer time to get things fixed), and thank frickin cod that nobody seems to be lurking around waiting to scoop up www.clickclackgorilla.com because I renewed and now things are working again.  Having to give that up would be incredibly sad.  Anyway.

We are finally fucking moving.  Like maybe tomorrow.  I had become completely unmotivated again, in all things related to the move.  Then this morning the Beard gets this text message: “We could move both Wägen tomorrow, the baby Wagen Thursday.”  Holy shit!  I felt like springing into action.  “Let’s do it!”  That was me.  “No frickin’ way!”  That was the Beard.  We are hoping to be able to settle on this weekend, if our moving guy can do it then too.  Could be that the next time I write to you, our wheels are settled firmly on Hessen soil.  Fucking finally.  This waiting and preparing has dragged on far too long already for my taste.

Baby Pickles just discovered that she has hair.  Now she is no longer limited to pulling on my hair or the Beard’s beard.  Stroke, grab, pull, stroke, grab, pull.  However, she doesn’t seem to mind when she pulls her own hair out, so I guess this won’t be a lesson in why not to pull my hair.  She also can sit pretty well.  And eat like eating is the same as sloppily putting on make-up.  Peach face! Peaches are by far her favorite.  Soon we’re going to need to get another sack of clothes.  Banana baby!

I did my first dumpster dive with baby!  I felt so proud.  On a walk to get Pickles settled one evening I happened upon a pile of wood that would be lovely for some trim I need to do on my Wagen exterior, and for building stairs.  The following evening I strapped Pickles on, put a little seat for her in a bike trailer, and walked over to get it.  While I pulled useful boards out of the pile, Pickles sat in her chair in the shade and watched.  The boards were a bit long for the trailer, which prevented me from taking as many as I could have used, but damn was I happy to get some decent scavenging done with the baby in tow. I’m going to be even happier to put them to use.

I finally read Dies the Fire. Which other PA (that’s “post-apocalypse” folks) lit fans have been recommending all over the internet for ages. While it is not literature, not even close, it is a great story, and I am obsessed.  Maybe even OBSESSED.  Good thing S.M. Stirling made it a trilogy, and then wrote a six book series in the same world that takes place a generation later. It is making me both want to write a really long review (coming once I finish the trilogy) and to take up archery. Oh my.

I kid you not.  Spotted by the lovely Frau Dietz in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Have you found anything good on the curb lately?

Way back in February, before Baby Pickles had arrived and when there was still snow on the ground, B brought a new Bauwagen back to the Platz. It looked like this.  He needed more space, and he had been planning on doing the inside up real nice.  But, whoops, no money.  So the trash collecting began, and bit by bit, he pieced together a patchwork floor that, in my humble opinion, looks much awesomer than any regular old orderly looking purchased flooring ever could have.  And it has a chess board!

Sheets and blankets and towels don’t make for good headlines.  But from them I built my comfy sleeping nest (well, not the towels), and my comfy sleeping nest is pretty much the most important place in my little house.  Because we live so tiny (our main dwelling being 7 meters by 2,20 meters for those of you just tuning in), our bed tends to serve as both bed, couch, and living room.  When I’m inside, I’m usually hanging out on the bed.

I’ve written about the bed in my Wagen before, about how I built it out of dumpstered materials, got a mattress from a friend, and then clothed it in dumpster-dived pillows, sheets, and blankets.  And the bed in our main Wagen is pretty much the same deal.  Though the main frame was in it when we moved in, the extension that we added to make it huge (so Baby Pickles could sleep in it with us) was largely dumpstered and the mattress extension was cut out of a bit of foam headed for the trash.

Though I haven’t been checking the trash across the street so often for booty (and the university changed the type of trash cans there, which makes for slightly more work for the diver), I still managed to find one of the recurrent “bed bundles” this season.  What is a bed bundle?  Well, it’s when a student, for no reason I can ascertain, takes the fitted sheet off of their bed, wraps all of the rest of their bed clothes in it (blankets pillows etc) and then tosses it as-is in the trash.  It blows my mind every time I find one, and over the years I’ve found quite a few, and it is the reason that all (with three exceptions, one from a flea market and two old fitted sheets from my mom) of my sheets, the sheets (and towels) that you see in that photo, are from the trash.

As usual, thanks to the wasteful students!  (But really?)  How ironic (is this actual irony?  I have never bothered to really hammer the true definition of that word into my head) that I profit from the same waste that frustrates me so.  Oh those twisted webs.

Oh plastic. The plastic that industrial cultures have been diligently filling the world with since Alexander Parkes created parkesine—the first man-made plastic—in 1862 isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Your average hard plastic thing-a-ma-bob could take up to 500 years to decompose. But as most plastics don’t actually decompose as we understand the term—instead just breaking into smaller and smaller pieces—they are even going to be with us after that. So we might as well find something useful to do with them, eh?

Take old tires. What the hell can you do with old tires? Well, you can build playground equipment out of them. (I loved me some tire swinging when I was a kid.) You can use them to make growing potatoes easier. You can make shoe soles. You can even build houses out of them. Luckily—if you can call it luck—creative recycling options for them are about as plentiful as discarded tires are.

Recently I came across a new tire-recycling idea. This tire basket belongs to Mama Beard, but as I only noticed it as we were leaving her house, I didn’t get a chance to ask for the story behind it. Still an inspiring idea for re-purposing old treads.

Have you seen any other resourceful ways to recycle old tires?

Postscript: I wanted to note that a high school student named Daniel Burd appears to have discovered that some types of bacteria, in the right circumstances, can biodegrade plastics. Fascinating stuff. But still not a good reason to keep making so much of the stuff.

And you thought I hated that color. Well, I do. But when I went out to take out the trash and found this baby tub and (umm, what do you call these things? ummm…) toilet trainer seat thingy, I shrugged and took them home. There are a number of baby tubs lying around the Wagenplatz that would have worked just fine as well, though many of them were a little on the big side, and none of them had a drain plug in the bottom. (Note to self: do not get cocky and use inside the trailer where it is bound to somehow come open and flood everything.)

What have you found in the trash recently?

Read about why I do a “dumpster find of the week” series here. Or check out some of the other treasures I’ve pulled out of the trash here.

I’ve posted this picture before, but when I came across it in my blog archives I thought: now there’s a story worth telling twice. So here goes. Once upon a time I took a long Sunday bike ride through some nearby fields. Those nearby fields are also near some big box stores. I had never checked out their dumpsters, so I biked behind them, finding nothing until I came to a huge high-security fenced in trash area. This is what was inside, and for a good thirty seconds, I actually thought it might be real.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in the trash?

Did I get this from Sperrmüll (that’s German for “big trash left out on the curb”) in Frankfurt or in Mainz? I can’t remember now, but I remember being excited to find it. And it’s in perfect condition except one tiny wooden bit that’s been broken off—probably the reason it was tossed in the first place. Well PISHAW. We know how to fix broken little wooden bits, and because we’re willing to do so, we now have a sweet old-school sled. Though I do remember the plastic saucer sleds being more unpredictable and speedy, which is always a plus when you’re a little kid with a quick healing time.

Have you been sledding yet this year?

Read about why I do a “dumpster find of the week” series here. Or check out some of the other treasures I’ve pulled out of the trash here.