It's trash days again this weekend. Two weekends a year, one for each half of town, residents can put out pretty much anything for trash and have it taken away. There are no quantity limits, and people only need to buy stickers for stuff like tires. We love these weekends. Curbside shopping at it's finest! Last weekend was time for our half of town, and we got so much out of the house. Some of it truly was trash, but we neatly put out (rather on display) all sorts of things that we might have saved for a garage sale if we'd chosen to do that this year, things that didn't go on freecycle or were just too small and random to freecycle (though having successfully freecycled an open bottle of Newman's Own salad dressing, minus one salad's worth of dressing, I can say that many small and random things will easily go on freecycle, LOL). Almost everything was gone by the time the trash trucks came around on Tuesday morning, picked up by other trash shoppers.

In exchange for our stuff, Luis came home with the following: a boatload of perfectly good large flower pots, some never used, which I wanted for the front porch; a running lawn mower; a large wooden clothes drying rack for the basement; a working computer with a better processor than ours; a trailer(!) for his atv; metal tiki torches; trays and pots for starting seeds indoors; and some smaller stuff. These weekends are the ultimate in finding your treasure in your neighbor's trash.

Our freecycle group has just branched off with a barter and exchange group as well. I hope it takes off. We love to barter, and there are some things I have really been wanting to barter for.