Garden humor thread..

[Pulsegleaner]

My house is constantly messy. You know how in the old days the inscription on a woman's headstone may have read 'She Kept a Clean House'? I told a friend that I wouldn't mind having that on my headstone. To which my friend replied, 'You can put whatever you want on it. No one fact checks head stones!'

You can take comfort in the fact that you're house CAN'T be messier than my room. Between those times when I buckle down and take a few days to clean it, I usually can't see my FLOOR for all of the stuff on the ground (and I mean over pretty much the WHOLE room.)

In one or two places, until I clean, I actually have to leave some of that covering in place since (due to the sounds I heard at the time). I know I have stepped on and broken some of the glass vials I use for seed storage, and need a barrier between the shards and my feet until I can get in with a scuttle and brush. That's actually how the two corns I planted got mixed, their vials broke and the seed spilled out onto the floor and mixed (I had originally planned to keep the two discrete, and plant one on each side or in two different years.)

And, to top it all off, even when my room is CLEAN, it still is super cluttered, since I have WAY more stuff in it than there is room for. There's always a massive pile of books at the foot of my bed due to the fact that the bookcases can't hold any more (and the room can't hold another bookcase, there's no room) The piles of books and other things on the long case are so heavy they've actually cause the case to pop off its back side and bow down to the ground (and it's a solid wood bookcase). My book collecting has gotten terminally out of hand. (The fact that 90% of the books are in languages I can't read makes it even a bit more sickly funny.)

 

[flowerbug]

...My book collecting has gotten terminally out of hand. (The fact that 90% of the books are in languages I can't read makes it even a bit more sickly funny.)

the sad thing is that while i do love my books and have a hard time getting rid of any of them eventually someone will probably come along and just throw most of them out.

they won't know about the Nietzsche forgery (maybe? talk about rabbit holes... that one is deeper than i care to go these days) called My Sister and I or any of the other interesting tidbits.

My Sister and I (Nietzsche) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Pulsegleaner]

The sad (or, at least annoying) part for me is that even when I DO want to get rid of books, I usually can't. I can't donate them to the library (or any other group), because they don't want books that aren't in English (or Spanish, occasionally.) I can't send them to recycling, because recycling books here is prohibited (since you are supposed to donate then to the library instead). I can't throw them out in the trash, because you aren't allowed to throw out paper (you're supposed to recycle it.) It's the blue bottle problem times ten.

Trying to sell them doesn't help much either. The fact that I am not living in the country where the books came from cuts out a large part of my potential market, and the fact I don't speak the language, and so can't write the description in it (using an internet translator doesn't work for things like this, it makes too many mistakes,) cuts out even more. That leaves me mostly with either people who are learning the language or people who have children who speak the language and want books for them (most of the books I sell are for children.) In the BEST case, I tend to get people in this category who are only interested in such books if they are selling for next to nothing. Far more often, what I get are messages from such people saying that they fact they are learning a foreign language (or have children who they are making sure still keep it) is such an inherently noble goal that I should be only too happy to give them whatever books they want for free (including paying for all of the shipping myself.) AND agree to go out and buy then whatever other books they may want and give them those as well.

The one or two other collectors I know are now help, they are actually now so brazen that they literally SAY they want additional 90% discounts on what they want to buy so they can make an even bigger profit on them when they re-sell them (and they are already making 5-10x what I charge them when they re-sell.)

And it isn't just books, this kind of shenanigans seems to happen with EVERYTHING I try to sell (I've already learned to not even MENTION the existence of any other related bits I know of, or I kept for my own use/collection, or they will demand I find/give them that (not sell them, GIVE them) that as well).

 

[flowerbug]

The sad (or, at least annoying) part for me is that even when I DO want to get rid of books, I usually can't. I can't donate them to the library (or any other group), because they don't want books that aren't in English (or Spanish, occasionally.) I can't send them to recycling, because recycling books here is prohibited (since you are supposed to donate then to the library instead). I can't throw them out in the trash, because you aren't allowed to throw out paper (you're supposed to recycle it.) It's the blue bottle problem times ten.

i have some books which are old technical manuals and useless to anyone as plenty of copies of these manuals already exist and there's no use so what i do when i can get around to it is shred the books and then feed the shreddings to the worms or bury them in a garden. i have to cut them apart to get the bindings and plastics in the glues thrown away but that is not too bad to do once you get it down (using a utility knife and a chunk of wood and being careful not to cut myself).

i don't try to sell them or give them away. they're the definition of useless and taking up space that i could be using for the bean collection or other books but since i've not been buying too many books lately i've not had the remove any. i do have to stick to the rules of "incoming must be less that outgoing" to make a net gain on decluttering. the bottle collection would be a good one to do next as that takes up the top of one large bookcase and i can get that downsized to just one small box of the few bottles i don't want to get rid of. right now it's nothing more than a dust collection.

but to get back to garden humor, perhaps by reading shredded books the worms could take over the world? [makes a note in my short-stories file which i never seem to actually do anything with]...

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Might work in the short term, but not in the long. The recyclers already check to make sure no loose book pages are in the bins. Since, pretty soon, it sounds like they are going to start collecting food scraps separately for public composting (which could also mean banning people from having their own compost piles) so they'll probably tell them to check there as well.

Shredding a thick book takes a long time, and trying to run the shredder that long is asking for it to overheat (though, now that I have gone paperless on my bills, there really isn't all that much other shred able paper I produce, so I may have space.

That, of course, assumes they will continue to let us leave out shredded paper to be picked up. Now that they have contracted a public mass shredder, they are heavily pressuring people to use that and basically DROP OFF their sensitive documents to be shredded at the cities leisure (after, of course any and everyone has had a chance to read them and copy down any information they might be able to use to steal from you.)

I have no problem with recycling, but there are some times when I think someone needs to sit down and look at when the rules they draw up just don't make any sense ( they contemplated making it required all trash bags be transparent so they could check them for recyclables, without realizing this would make a lot of OTHER things people do not want to see visible, like the corpses of trapped mice (not everyone likes the idea of handling then to toss them in their mulch pile for "browns". Around here, you put dead meat out, all you are going to get is a big hole in your pile and an increase in the number of coyotes hanging around.)

 

[Pulsegleaner]

 

[digitS']

 

[canesisters]

My folks had DECADES worth of Readers Digest Condensed Books... do any of yall remember those? They came monthly and had very pretty 'library worthy' hard covers with 3 or 4 condensed currently popular novels in each one.
They tried for years to find somewhere they could donate them.. NO ONE wanted them.
I suggested trying to sell them as materials for craft furniture projects:

 

[Dahlia]

My folks had DECADES worth of Readers Digest Condensed Books... do any of yall remember those? They came monthly and had very pretty 'library worthy' hard covers with 3 or 4 condensed currently popular novels in each one.
They tried for years to find somewhere they could donate them.. NO ONE wanted them.
I suggested trying to sell them as materials for craft furniture projects:
View attachment 59049

My dad used to love those books!

 

[Zeedman]

but to get back to garden humor, perhaps by reading shredded books the worms could take over the world?

They already have... we are all just highly evolved worms with legs.