Saturday was a busy day for me. I had to round up all of my large and bulky items to haul to the landfill. That in itself took several hours, inasmuch as I never throw anything away until I absolutely must.

Therefore, whenever I do decide to take the plunge, I argue with myself bitterly over each and every item and suffer greatly in the end as a result of playing the "what if I need that later" game.

I knew that time had come when I started trying to clean up my building. Many things were stacked in there so tight that a cleaning up required somewhat of a cleaning out. Don't think that I got rid of everything that I needed to get rid of in order to really fix the problem long term, but I at least got rid of a good portion and made a nice short-term fix.

I had lots of things that even I couldn't find a use for, like a cardboard wire spool, a broken clay fireplace, a half bucket filled with dried grout, rotten rope, bent and rusty nails, a broken microwave, rusted small engine parts to mystery equipment I don't remember, empty boxes with weak bottoms, frayed electrical cords, non-functioning kitchen appliances (that I was supposed to fix 'one day') and other items too numerous to list.

Like I said, it was stuff that even a junk monger like myself had trouble finding a place for.

Like I said before, I always find myself wondering if I might need an object at some point in the future, if a particular set of circumstances were to come to pass. "If I lose my job, run out of money and my toilet gets broken all at once, I might need that old valve set there." Or I might think, "If my mixer cord gets caught by the beaters and jerked out of the back, I could use my old mixer to fix it."

Others take the 'devil may care' approach and toss out not only marginally useful items, but items they genuinely need - usually to make room for more things they just went and wasted money on.

I suppose there must be some happy medium somewhere, but I have yet to find it. Either you collect junk or you throw it away for others to collect, that's the way I see it. Sometimes those who throw things away end up buying the same item again at a retail price, while I got the item they discarded for free.

If that makes me cheap, so be it. At least I can afford to do what I need to do. For instance, I once took in a whole set of discarded curtain rods and later saw the person who tossed them out buying new ones at a department store.

Most of the old rods were in fine condition, so I cleaned them, straightened them and put them up at my place and saved a few dollars. If you were raised like I was, you figure we were put here to be good stewards of what God gives us. I always figure that I can do better about saving money if I don't spend it to start with. Obviously, there are many times I don't have it to spend.

I did keep some of the 'questionable' items that I (kind of) wish I had tossed now, like a gas grill that quit working two years ago because the burner finally turned into a pile of rusty ash and a potato bin with a warped lid, but those will have to wait for my next trip. Besides, I may need to use that grill again one day. Here we go again.

Just a few weeks ago I 'converted' it to regular charcoal use by drilling a couple holes along the sides and filling the bottom with lava rocks. I usually forget to pick up charcoal and there you go. Besides, a hole in the ground with charcoal in it works as well or better than a rusty old grill.

As for the potato bin, it was converted to a garbage can some time ago, but doesn't do all that well for that purpose. My main complaint is its appearance, which is hideous - peeling veneer covering a warped lid made of primarily chip-board.

However, it also has other anger provoking characteristics, like its penchant to be top heavy, a lip inside the top edge that always catches bags just as the protruding hinge on the back rips them open and a bottom that is made of a perforated material, making it leak underneath.

Perhaps I should have left it alone as a tater bin, but it is the size of a kitchen garbage can. I can't see me having that many potatoes in the house. It seems apparent that I will have some trouble throwing that away as well. After all, there must be some viable use for it, right? Maybe I'll need a giant rabbit gum some day.

I also have a dishwasher that only leaks if you use it. It does a fine job on the dishes, you just can't use it in the house without mopping the floor. It is currently doing double duty as a storage cabinet for plasticware.

I used to just save my dishes up until whenever I decided to mop, therefore I would have plenty of water on hand for the purpose and could save running mop water. It became more of a problem when I needed to do dishes much more often than I cared to mop. It would seem that many things are better in thought than in deed, wouldn't you agree? When faced with a leaky dishwasher as an alternative, a bottle of dish washing liquid and a rag look pretty good.

Earlier, I cleared out a good deal of my unwanted items through individual sales and now I am back to a reasonable amount of 'stock,' I guess you could say. I still have about three kitchen tables of varying degrees of possible use, including a former restaurant table with plastic chairs and an old glass table with rusty legs. I just can't seem to make myself part with them for some odd reason. They are so useful, you know.

Good steward or trashy neighbor? I guess that depends on where you live. I can say that I keep my outward appearance fairly nice, mainly due to the thick screen of laurels that I have around my property and the neat looking outbuilding with the bulging walls. That's something both the neighbors and I can appreciate.

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