Trash Looting Etiquette.

Yesterday morning the boys and I were outside waiting for the school bus to arrive. Thursday is Trash/Recycling Day, and the recycling people come at about 6:30am, so the recycling bin was already empty, but the trash people hadn't come yet.

I asked Tito to please bring the recycling bin into the garage. He let out a heavy sigh and said, "Why do you always have to be such a MOM?"

Cuz that's my job. Duh. Why do YOU have to be such a six-year-old boy?

Anyway, I looked across the street and saw that our neighbors were throwing away what looked to be a dorm fridge. R and I are wanting to put a bar in our basement, and we've been looking for a fridge to put in it. Really, we'd like a bigger one than a dorm fridge, but I figured, Hey, for free? Why not?

So I looked both ways (more to make sure nobody was watching than to set the look-both-ways example for my kids), walked over and swiped the fridge from the neighbors' trash and brought it into my garage to check it out.




Notice what's missing? Certainly not the smell of stale beer.
A PLUG. The cord had been completely cut off.

(Ok, I realize this is probably fixable, but this was looking like it would be more trouble than it was worth.)

Crap. Now what? Put it back? No, that's tacky.

I thought that the nice thing to do was to put it with my own trash, so that's what I did. I even tried to obscure it a bit so if the neighbors looked out their window they wouldn't know that I was the loser who stole their trash and then realized it WAS trash and didn't want to put it back.

I left to run my errands for the morning. I put gas in the Odyssexy, took four bags of stuff to Goodwill, exchanged some stuff at Cacique and got some awesome new bra/panty combos (woo hoo!!), exchanged some other stuff at Target, and took the pantry organizer that we didn't need (since we threw 98% of Buffy's rancid moth-filled decaying crap away) back to Lowe's.

I returned home to find that the trash cans were empty, but the fridge was still sitting there by the curb. The trash people wouldn't take it.

Crap. Now what? Put it back?

Well, first I had to wait until my next-door neighbor finished mowing his lawn.

Look, I was fine with putting it with my trash, but once it becomes a bigger matter than just having the trash people pick it up from my front yard instead of theirs and I have to figure out a way to dispose of it? Yeah, I'm thinking that's more responsibility than I'm willing to take on in the name of proper Trash Looting Etiquette.

So I walked over and put the smelly fridge right back where it started, by their mailbox. No harm, no foul, the slate has been wiped clean, we're right back at square one, and hopefully nobody saw me do it. Would you guys please let me know if someone sends you a YouTube link entitled "Crazy Neighbor Steals Trash and Later Returns It"?

And a full 24 hours later, it's still there. Wouldn't it be funny if I reported them to the Homeowner's Association?



Nah, then they'd probably throw it through my kitchen window.