dreamshark

I need to have a project or two in motion, and this year's master project is Getting Rid of Stuff. This also crosses over into sorting and keeping, a little bit of fixing and finishing, and sporadic episodes of deep cleaning. But some of that is really hard, so I don't really get through a lot of the side projects I start. The easiest source of instant gratification is giving away stuff that I don't want but hate to just throw away.

Periodically people recommend the Facebook Buy Nothing group to me, but I do not do Facebook, so... nope. But I just discovered that BN has branched out into a standalone phone app that works surprisingly well. You just take a picture of the offending object with your phone and quickly post it to the local group - no messing around with uploading the picture to the computer like I do with Freecycle. Just photograph and post, boom! Trying to navigate the responses is a bit challenging - I keep getting "comments" mixed up with "private messages" and have not found any way to display the full thread of both PMs and comments in one place - but I'm starting to get the hang of it. There are the usual annoyances of people who REALLY REALLY WANT the listed item and then can't be persuaded to come and pick it up off the front steps. But... in the past 2 weeks I have rehomed the following impressive list of household detritus:

A big brown wool blanket
A 1970's vintage home yogurt maker with a couple of pieces missing [perhaps the most surprising success]
A multi-colored spinning party ball [the most popular item so far]
A small Star Wars lamp that allegedly resembled R2D2, presumably for a child's room
Six matching plastic storage containers for nuts, cereal, grains, beans, etc.
A handful of canning jars
2 40-year-old books on bike repair
A small aquarium heater, never used

Still in process: a swirly-patterned glass serving plate and a Wok stand that had gotten separated from its wok

TODAY'S LISTINGS

a stainless steel replacement coffee pot for a 12-cup coffee maker
a mini-food processor that I got at a yard sale for $3 15 years ago and used 3 times
a small covered dish for roasting garlic cloves

If anybody local is interested in the new listings, let me know.