2008-04-19 Radiator

A chunky and not so inelegant cast iron radiator for use with steam or water. Pretty fine, about 27x27x7 inches.

2008-04-19 Lamp

A lamp thingy that seems to be for photo studio use. It is very bright and seem to have uses beyond those it was intended for.

2008-04-19 Dell Laptop

A Dell Pentium 4 1.4GHz laptop with 256M RAM, 20G HD in fine condition. When powered on it turned out to have a BIOS password, which is hard to get around. After consulting the interwebs we found the chip on the motherboard containing said password and flashed it with a paper clip as instructed. This involved a moderate amount of dismantlement and a painful period of reading chip IDs. Once flashed we were able to boot the installed XP then a more useful knoppix CD for the purposes of investigation. Machine works fine, though the fan is both loud and often on. Salient points on HD (which was not obviously not encrypted):

• Previous owner a female lawyer. Evidence of prolongued job search, wedding plans, details.
• Lots of evidence of shopping on Amazon for offspring related products. Also lots of handbag shopping.
• A bunch of pics scanned in with a Kodak Film Scanner, some more pics documenting arrival of previously mentioned offspring.
• 195 MP3s, mixed artists.
• 696 iTunes, the major contributing artists being:

      311 Compilations
      119 Dave Matthews Band
       62 The Beatles
       28 Pearl Jam
       25 Led Zeppelin
       18 U2
       16 James Taylor
       14 Weezer
       14 Dave Matthews
       13 Alanis Morissette
       12 Billy Joel
       11 Sarah McLachlan
        9 Janet Jackson
        8 Metallica
        8 Jessica Simpson
        8 Fiona Apple
        7 TLC
        7 Phish
        7 Mariah Carey
        6 Vanessa Carlton 

• TurboTax and stuff.

2008-04-19 Cast Iron Pans

A scrap yard full of cast iron pans of various types. One super nice Griswold with italic logo and heat ring, some nice Wagners and some no-names. All in all some good functional stuff. Some already promised but siome still available.

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2008-04-14 iMac

An iMac 800Mhz in fine shape, obviously used by the offspring of a household. Disk contains:

• Evidence of import of OS 9 stuff from the old machine.
• 3452 mp3s, substantially acquired with Limewire. Lots of them untagged and ill organized, of those that are organized here are some big contributors:

      342 Compilations
       97 Blink-182
       64 Unknown Artist
       34 The Ataris
       33 David Tao
       32 Jock Jams
       29 the get up kids
       29 Counting Crows
       28 Original Broadway Cast Recording
       28 Less Than Jake
       25 Orishas
       24 Elephant Man
       23 Hall & Oates
       23 Good Charlotte
       22 James Taylor
       22 Green Day
       21 Red Hot Chili Peppers
       21 Queen
       21 Living Colour
       21 John Mayer 

• 339 iTunes, including

      114 Compilations
       26 Pink Floyd
       20 James Taylor
       20 Frank Sinatra
       18 Queen
       18 Elvis Presley
       16 Red Hot Chili Peppers
       15 Jimi Hendrix
       13 Van Halen
       11 Led Zeppelin
       11 Guess Who
       10 Lynyrd Skynyrd
  

• Lots of digital pics of teenage girls doing what they do.
• Lots of AIM chat logs and huge buddy lists.
• No discernable porn.
• A nice shiny Morgan Stanley investment report that shows their portfolio to have gone from 1,693,444 to 1,440,059 in one month. Ooops.
• Several documents related to making wills, assessing potential estates for such, SSNs, amounts and other details all included.
• Lots of Sunday school documents.

2008-04-12 Wood

Knowing we have more framing and stuff to fiddle with, these seems to be most handy. Four 2x4 planks that are seemingly quite new.

2008-04-12 Tool Case

A tool case, specifically the case for a Ryobi circular saw. This seems to house a stray router quite nicely so it will be pressed into service.

2008-04-12 Radio Flyer

A couple of pristine Radio Flyer wheeled offspring amusement devices. First the little truck thingy:

Also a classic trike with tassels. Certain nearby offspring found these quite attractive.

2008-04-12 Legs

8 legs for a common and useful shelving system, we took the best four. They had some fancy castors on them but no sign of the shelves or the little collets you need to hang the shlves on the legs. These are for a friend with storage needs.

2008-04-12 Cast Iron

A cast iron thingy that allows one to bake things in the shapes of various animals. Wow! It has seemingly never been used. This will be donated to somebody who might have a use for it.

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2008-03-29 Switch Plates

A bunch of brass switch covers, mostly of them OK and one ornately ugly. These are for a neighbour who may have need for such.

2008-03-29 Pipe Wrench

This is a cheapo junky pipe wrench but will be handy to keep in a car or some such place where it might provie of crucial usefullness one day.

2008-03-29 Mac Tower

A Mac G4 tower missing HD but full of memory. THis will be invesitgated for its usefuless but we suspect it is getting a bit old to be anything but fanboy fodder.

2008-03-29 Bag

A random travelling bag that has a couple of rips but is otherwise in very usable shape. This will be stored for the next visiting European to use to take all their swag home with. Now the US really does have monopoly money we expect more surgical shopping strikes to pass through and require extra bags for homeward transportation.

2008-03-26 Tie down

A tie down that presumably literally fell off the back of a lorry. It will come in handy for our trailor. Note this is genuine "stuff" because even though the owner lost it they threw it away by not coming back for it.

2008-03-26 Schwinn

We got a modern Schwinn racing style bike a while ago and recently found the parts to fix it up. The handlebars were rusty and drop style, not popular and not nice. We put on some straight bars and old schwinn sparkly grips and gave the thing a clean up and voila. This may already have a home waiting for it.

2008-03-25 Cookware

A Griswold No9 skillet in excellent condition. This one is nicer than ours in certain details so we will use this and pass our existing Griswold No9 on. Shown here after cleaning and a light cure at 450F.

An anonymous cast iron skillet marked only "8" on the handle and "8-" underneath". It has a nicely shaped handle, very nice interior and a heat ring so this will displace our prior skillet of this size, a Wagner. Again the Wagner will find a home with a worthy kitchen, after all we have been breaking it in for a few years now.....

A Griswold baster dutch oven with wire handle. The lid has the handle broken off, such a shame. This is a possible donation as we are not sure we need this. Pic shows it in gloriously unrestored state, though note that the previous two looked like this a short while before their pictures were taken. Most of the appearance problems stem from a weird dusty coating. The lid on this is a beautiful casting.

2008-03-25 Bike Stuff

Some bike stuff, we need to replenish stock to that we can sell to the hipsters for the spring bike awakening. No pics yet.

2008-03-22 Kelty Jogging Stroller

A Kelty Jogging Stroller in fine condition. This is an interesting artifact in that is a full jogging stroller, with better standard features than most but it folds like a Maclaren stroller. It is way superior on features to almost every other jogger out there. Surplus to our requirements but it will make a blazing appearance on craigslist.

2008-03-22 DVD Player

Small form-factor DVD player that also plays endless other alphabet soup formats. Complete with manual and remote. This is of course pretty useless to us but is a standing request from somebody in need of one. (Yours Russ, just get it out of our house!).