Waiste Not

It was the annual rubbish pick-up weekend in our little nook of Brisbane last week. This is a tradition whereby those who don't have the facility to take large pieces of rubbish to the tip can leave them by the side of the road and the Council will collect them.

Perhaps it's an unintended consequence, but what in fact transpires is a mass recycling activity, with people cruising the streets inspecting the stacks of stuff to see if there's anything worth salvaging.

Eloise got a hula hoop, and wasn't afraid to use it.

We took a ride up the street and bagged ourselves an old but functional stereo stack, record player, cassette player and all.

The irritating thing was that some dastardly dastards of debris redistribution thought it would be a profitable enterprise to extract the oh-so-valuable copper from anything electrical. They achieved this by chopping the mains lead off everything they could, thus rendering the appliance practically useless to anyone else.

So we had to forego what may or may not have been a working whipper-snipper and any number of other things that had been crudely emasculated.