Oh, well

Well, this morning's project was a bust. Channel 9 was advertising a free electronics recycle at several locations around the metro area, one of them Aurora Town Center (previously known as the Aurora Mall). I staged several items into the garage which could best be described as antique and/or no-op -- two turntables, an old portable black and white TV, and a crapped out AT&T princess telephone. Today I loaded up the car and made a final sweep of the computer room and found a couple PCI circuit boards, some old ribbon cables for the TRS-80, a joystick and a handful of memory sticks.

Our neighbor Vel asked if I could help her with her stuff. There I found an early word processing box (keyboard, small screen and built-in printer), two computers, a monitor and an old TV. Somehow we squeezed it into the car and off we went.

We didn't have a good idea where exactly on the grounds the event would be held, so we drove in from the south and began driving the perimeter road. We found ourselves in a line which was joined by the east entrance and continued up and around to some point on the north side of the mall. Progress was very slow owing to the merging from the east entrance road. A teen in a Channel 9 jacket was coming down the line talking to each driver. When she got to us we got the bad news -- we were three and a half hours away from the drop-off point. Granted, my time is worth nothing these days but losing that much time to just sitting around in an intermittently idling car didn't make sense. She also informed us that a local recycling company would be taking the stuff off our hands for free, with a small fee for items containing glass. We bailed.

It looks like we'll be heading up to the recycling company on Tuesday sometime before lunch hour. Tuesday may be good; snow is predicted which should scare some people away. Fingers are crossed.