Adventures in bin-raking

I'm staying at my parents house for a couple of days.  I haven't been out here since Christmase so it's noce to catch up with them a bit.  I've also been tidying out my old room at their house and getting rid of some of the crap that's still cluttering the place.

I went to the local dump with my mother this afternoon.  My mother likes a bargin and keeps her eyes open for useful things whenever she goes to the dump.  We were fairly lucky today.  At the top of the dump was a pile of about 30 CDs and DVDs.  It looked as if somebody had thrown out someone elses possessions.  The collection looked rather female in origin and contained a lot of stuff by the likes of Michael Buble and Jess Stone.  There was also a few Beatles CDs and stuff by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Miles Davis and BoB Dylan.  Randomly there was also a copy of 'the last time I did acid I went insane' by Jeffrey Lewis.  I promptly jumped into the dump and salvaged all this booty.  As a family we are not proud.  I even found a copy of Johnny Cash 'American 5' for my Dad (I own this one already but my Dad is a Cash fan too).  We also picked up the first series of the Wire and a couple of books.

At the end of the day we figured out that the collection of stuff was probably worth about £150.  Not bad for stuff that was due to be landfill.  The stuff that we don't want for ourselves will be donated to charity shops with some of the other stuff we were getting rid of.

My parents and I are not poor.  I have a good job and they have decent pensions.  However it does sicken me to see useful stuff condemed to landfill when it could be used by someone else.  My Dad will enjoy watching Finding Nemo and the Wire and my Mum will enjoy listening to Elton John (hopefully when I'm out of earshot).  I'm happy with my free stuff too.

So, if you go to the dump - keep your eyes open.  And if you are going to dump stuff maybe think if someone else could use it.  We suspect that all this stuff was thrown out by an idiot in a fit of anger which is sort of sad but hopefully the charity shop may be able to do something useful with it.