The Dumpster Chronicles, Episode 5 / Beach Treasures!

Today Jamie came home from work dragging in a cardboard box of random crap he yanked out of the dumpster:

First of all, a purse for me -- how thoughtful!  :/

And Jamie's favorite -- a pile of random crap that he just had to save from the foul clutches of the dump:

(even Domino is like 'WTH is this $h*t?!?')

• Not one, but two 'knuckle-buster 3000' old-school (literally) pencil sharpeners,

• A newer model (electric) pencil sharpener.  And of course Jamie didn't know if it even worked or not when he saved it from the dump, so we plugged it in and tried it here at home, and it sounded like someone had previously rammed a California Redwood in it.  :/

• Another %^*#%^* plastic skull to go with the first one he dragged in months ago  >:{

• Some cheesy little wooden choo-choo train Christmas ornament thingie

• An old yellow Hot Wheels car from 1978 that's "in good shape" (according to Jamie)  :/

• A scuzzy old disgusting-looking, worn out, crappy (used to be red) Matchbox car from 1971 (Jamie had one of these when he was little, so of course he had to have this one, even though it looks like it had been ravaged and subsequently digested by a Sasquatch, and then crapped out in front of a speeding subway train)

• A weird old Matchbox hovercraft from 1972

• A crappy old red Tootsietoy motorcycle trailer from 1969  (again, that Jamie used to have when he was little, so he couldn't bear to pass it up)

• And 2 "really good" bungee cords

(and a Partridge In A Pear Tree)  O__o  Sheesh!  Where are we gonna put all this crap?!?  >:{

Anyway, I was naturally completely skeptical of the purse that Jamie salvaged for me from the dump.  My first instinct was like OH HAIL NO, but it looked clean, and of course I rummaged through it like everyone does just to make sure there's no money or anything good that had been left in it.  Nothing.  But as I rummaged, I realized that it really was clean, it was a decent size, it had all these awesome pockets that fit my junk just perfectly, and it even matched my bathing suit, to beat the band!  Sooooo...

SOLD!

The perfect beach-going purse!  Heh heh heh!

So then we all piled up in the car and went out to the beach AGAIN.  (I know, we go there a LOT).  When we were there yesterday, Lilly spotted one of those 'fun noodles' and it honestly did appear to have been abandoned there by somebody.  Nobody had touched it since we had been there, and it was laying way back from the shore, on a mulched bank in the shade, away from everybody.  Well, Lilly thought she could do the 'five-finger-discount' move and snag it to bring home with her, but when she tried, some old man and woman walked up, and the man told Lilly that the fun noodle belonged to his wife (who Lilly said "looked like she was 80, didn't even swim, and what would an old lady do with a fun noodle anyway").  So that was a bust, and kind of embarrassing.

So when we headed out to the beach today, I told Lilly "let's not take anything unless we're totally 100% sure that it's really been abandoned".  It was kind of hard to do, because Lilly likes to snag everything she can get her hands on.  When it was time to go, she tried to snag a little abandoned red plastic boat beach toy (just a simple one, like for an infant), and I told her NO; to just leave it for some other little kid.  After all, Lilly already snagged a yellow one from there the other day, and I know she will never play with it.  (She's just like her daddy -- she just likes to HAVE stuff, whether she needs it or not).

Then Lilly spotted a little plastic beach sand toy rake, and I had previously noticed that it had apparently been abandoned, and I told her that she could snag it.  So she was happy with that.

But best of all, when I stood up out of my beach lounge chair, getting ready to go tell Lilly that we were about to leave, something laying in the sand caught my eye just a few steps away.  It was a sterling silver ring, just my size!  It appears to have a turquoise stone in it, but I'm not sure if the turquoise is real or not (it's kinda pretty, anyway, even if it does turn out to be fake).  But I was so excited to find it!  Needless to say, I think we're going to borrow my dad's metal detector soon and use it to sweep that beach (and probably many more in the area) just to see what other 'treasures' we can find!  :D

Right after I found the ring today, not to be outdone, Jamie wanted to find 'treasure' of his own.  So he discovered a white plastic clothespin (ha ha), and then he found a quarter (whee)!  Here's the bounty of our impromptu treasure-hunt:

AWESOME!  I can't wait to see what we turn up with the metal detector!  Maybe an entire matching set of clothespins!  :D

LOL!

Tales From the Beach

Sunday we spent yet another day at the "beach".  We really only went again so soon because the day before that, there was a little girl from out-of-town named Ava that Lilly befriended whose grandfather promised to bring her back the next day at the same time so that she and Lilly could play together again.  But they ended up being a no-show.  >:/

Anyway, Lilly found another little friend there yesterday to play with that she knew from school & gymnastics class named Izzy (Isabella), and they had a great time.

While Lilly and Izzy were off playing, it gave me and Jamie the opportunity to secretly play mental Beach Blanket Bingo while we were lounging there together.  Let's just say we ended up saying "check!" to almost all of the squares!  ;)

As I was leisurely people-watching, I was a lucky witness to an amusing occurrence.  Just several yards away from us was a lady, probably in her 50s, reclining back slightly in a beach lounge chair, reading a magazine.  In the very instant that my eyes were scanning past her, she just so happened to sit up and began to re-adjust herself in her chair slightly.  The moment that she sat up all the way, it caught my eye.  I immediately told Jamie to "LOOK LOOK LOOK!  ON THAT LADY'S BACK!" and we both quietly snickered about it together.

Remember that the lady had been reading a magazine.  Well, somehow whenever she originally sat down in her beach chair, one of those pesky magazine subscription cards that invariably come snowing out happened to drop out of her magazine and land low on the back of her beach chair, close to where you would sit.  And she obviously was completely unaware that it had happened.  So when the lady rose up, the magazine subscription card was firmly adhered to her lower back.  It looked kind of like this:

The lady had no idea that the card was stuck back there for, like, at least 20 seconds, before she finally must have felt something going awry in her backyard, checked back there with her hand, discovered the large foreign object, and discreetly peeled it off.  It was hilarious!  It's like something that would happen to me (and probably will eventually)!

As it was getting a little closer to time for us to leave the beach, a small basketball quickly rolled onto my beach blanket, and came to an abrupt stop.  I looked behind me, expecting to see some kid briskly trotting up to retrieve it, but never saw one.  We sat there for a long time, and still, no kid ever retrieved their runaway ball.  So when we were packing up our stuff as we were getting ready to leave, I was like

and whisked the ball into my beach bag.  HEH HEH FREE MINI BASKETBALL FOR LILLY!  WHEEEEEEEEEE!  :D

And along those same lines (of snagging free abandoned stuff), after me and Jamie loaded all of our stuff back into the car, and we were both standing at the water's edge telling Lilly it was time to go, I saw that we were in close proximity to a nice-looking piece of clothing laying in the sand (which was almost actually in the water), that was soaking wet, and I had noticed that it had gotten trampled on all day long.  It intrigued me, so as Lilly was finally coming out of the water, I whispered to her to GET IT, and we would investigate it in the car.  Lilly nonchalantly grabbed it (like the good little acceptable-5-finger-discount expert that she is), and we all hurried up to the car, so we could inspect our discovery.  When we laid it on the vinyl floormat of the rear floorboard to examine it, I looked at the tag in it, and saw that it was just Lilly's size.  And then I saw that it was that popular Justice brand of clothing for girls!  The tag said 'Justice Swim' -- it was a really nice swim coverup!  Needless to say, me and Lilly were PUMPED about our find!  I washed it today, and hung it up on the clothesline to dry, and it's perfectly just as good as new!  HEH HEH FREE FANCY COVERUP FOR LILLY!  WHEEEEEEEEEE!  :D  Here's a little pic I found on the internet of what it looks like:

But prior to snagging the abandoned coverup, another hilarious thing happened.  I had decided to use the bathhouse restroom one last time before hitting the road.  So I walked in there, entered Stall 1, and pee'd.  When I busted back out of the stall and began to step over toward the sinks, however, there was a MAN standing there!  At first, in that split-second, I second-guessed myself, and even though I was 99.999999999% sure that I was in the ladies' room, it would just be my luck that the beach people would suddenly switch the genders of the restrooms for some inexplicable reason, and I would end up being the only one in the entire world that wasn't aware of it.  Well, in the next split-second, I looked at the man like:

and the man looked at me like:

and then he looked left and right and said "Is this the ladies' room?!?"  And I said "OH MY GOD, YES!"  And the man was all like "I'M SORRY!"  And as we both briskly exited the ladies' room together, he appeared to be slightly disoriented, and asked "Well, where is the men's room?!?"  Laughing, I said "I don't know; I think it's down that way" and pointed him down the proper direction.  It was so embarrassing and hilarious!  I'm glad it was him in the wrong restroom, and not me!  It was a little dopey on his part, though, because even though the ladies' room door was propped open, the front of it was still clearly labeled

Not to mention that at the entrance to the walkway to the ladies' room, there was another sign tacked up that said

So I guess the guy was just a bona fide dumb@$$.

What a dork!  LOL!  I love the beach!  :D

Domino Takes a Sudden Shine to Catnip!

Our silly old cat, Domino never gave a flip about catnip.
Until yesterday.

Take a look at the hilarity that ensued!:

Beach Blanket Bingo

Well, we ended up at the "beach" again today.  I have a feeling we're gonna be going there a lot this summer, since it's apparently one of Lilly's favorite places, since she begs to go there all the time.  It was just me and Lilly there today, since Jamie spent the day hanging out with his Uncle Roger and Aunt Sandy who just moved down here to Georgia from Illinois last year.

Today at the beach was pretty good, aside from my circa-1980s lounge chair collapsing, causing me to fall straight down onto my @$$ in the blink of an eye (and even though I was mortified, I just nonchalantly pretended as if nothing at all had happened, and stayed down there on the sand for several minutes, as if it was no big deal whatsoever, even though I was dying inside from embarrassment).  O__o

And once I finally got my beach umbrella and lounge chair situation straightened out, I was pretty famished, so I broke into a jar of pickles that I had flung into the cooler (they had been in the fridge forever, and since I haven't been to the grocery store yet this weekend, we were kind of hard-up for snacks, so I just flung a whole bunch of weird random stuff to snack on into the cooler -- including a sandwich I made for Lilly which had to be made using both heels of the loaf of bread, because that's all we had)!  Ha ha!  (She didn't care, so what the hey).

Anyway, the pickles were awesome, and I couldn't stop eating them.  (And NO I am NOT pregnant, so don't even go there).  >:|  I don't even know how many pickles I ended up eating -- probably about 6, if I had to guess.  I got strangled on the last one, however, and struggled to keep it together while hoping nobody noticed that I was gurgling to death on pickle juice from being a pickle glutton.  So after I finally got my throat clear, I switched off and ate a bunch of goldfish crackers instead, to soak up all that pickle juice in my throat.  Bleh!  *koff koff*!  :P

I love going to places like the beach, because it's a prime place for people-watching.  And if you've got a good pair of sunglasses (and you know how to be perfectly discreet), you can secretly gawk at all kinds of strange and interesting stuff without anybody knowing.  Going to the beach also usually even makes you feel better about your own looks and physique, because face it, most people are 'ugly' and 'flawed' (a/k/a normal, and totally unlike all the airbrushed & photoshopped supermodels you see on TV and in magazines).

Anyway, me & Lilly stayed at the beach for several hours, and I got to see a wide variety of humanity, so after a while, I was inspired to develop a game out of it.  Feel free to print it out and take it on your own next trip to the beach!

LOL!  Good Luck, and Happy Gawking!  ;)

Possum on the Trash Can!

When Jamie was about to leave for work this morning, he was met by this sight:

Warm Spot

So Lilly just asked me if we could go back to the beach again today.  I checked the weather report, and it said that it's supposed to be windy.  Lilly said "It's OK; it's warm in the water where people pee!"  And she went on to explain that "Anywhere in the lake that people pee, a while later, it gets all warm in that spot, and I swim through it all the time!"

I was like:


And Lilly said "It's OK; that's why baths exist, mama!"