End-of-the-school-year Diving Tally

I promised to post the best of end-of-semester diving on here, so here we go. It takes about two hours for each time I troll the campus. The campus may be small, but I take the stairs to every floor of every dorm to look in all the trash cans and bins. I usually go twice a week, but I went about five times in the last week. It’s a good walk, lots of stairs, good exercise, very zen. Here are my best finds, most of which were in the trash area rather than the donation bins!

• Two flower pictures valued at $30 each

• Big wicker basket

• Two plastic drawer units: One is plain, but the other is pretty fancy with a black frame and a faux wooden top that matches my desk and boxes

• Pink, chenille scarf and magnetic hematite for Marcus butterfly key chain

• Plastic bin

• A wide variety of dishes

• Two sets of sheets without pillowcases, but I rarely match pillowcases anyway

• Lava lamp: Story with this one. I had to give away my lava lamp last year because I forgot to give it to my mom when she came to pick up half of my stuff at the end of the year, and because it was a floor lamp, it was too long for my car. I was reluctant to let it go. So I’m glad I have a new one. I hope it works clothes rack

• Black bookshelf that weighed a ton

• Bohemian clutch purse

• Lots of food products that I kept or put on the freebie table

I also do MyCoke Rewards and Pepsi Points (to a lesser degree because my university is primarily a Coke campus). I get much more yield from the recycle bins than trash bins during the majority of the year, and it’s been quite lucrative. I still have about 350 codes left. Here are things for which I’ve already redeemed my codes (total value over $150):

• Stuffed Coke polar bear for my mom’s Christmas gift (she loves those polar Silex maker: Sold for too little

• $50 Sephora.com eGift certificate: Sold for $40

• iPod docking station

• $75 gift certificate to Blockbuster: That was fantastic, a completely guilt-free DVD splurge. I’m a DVD junkie.

So the moral of this story is: I may look odd when I’m digging through stinky trash bins (and when I tell people that I dig through stinky trash cans), but I get the last laugh.

I’ve been doing a lot of lists lately, but that seems to be the way my brain is leaning, so forgive me. I’ll try and do profound paragraphs next week.

tag: match maker