pic: Gearheads Recycling Project
 

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You guys are making a difference, impacting your community in a very positive way, Kara. That's no small thing. This is an impressive undertaking and appears to have been one that you all enjoyed as well.

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You're gonna need a bigger locker, man.

It's cool to see some effort being put in to 'green up' a place.

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Sort of unrelated, but are you by any chance a horn player? That looks just like the horn locker I had in 8th grade, after we got new ones...

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Ahahahaha! I think that's the first time she's heard that!!

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Yeah...normally people are telling me that my locker needs to be smaller XD

No, I"m not a horn player, but that IS a horn locker. I play flute, oboe (main), trumpet, english horn, and percussion, but not the horn o.O (that's next on the list, though). I always end up with an english horn, whose case is about the size of a sax case, and an oboe (or two...or most recently three) in my locker, and the two+ cases combined won't fit in any smaller lockers. So I snag a horn locker. [:

Thanks guys. It's a really great feeling to be doing so much for the community. I was digging through a trash can today, going after a pair of nice shoes that i had seen go in there, and a kid walked up to me and said "Wow, that's really gotta suck." I told him that this is what makes me love my life, and it really IS fun, but he still looked at me like I was crazy. It's so hard to realize how much fun making a huge impact is until you're actually helping.

And for the record...after today's locker clean out at one of the middle schools, the binders in the picture take up a fraction of what's now sitting in my garage. It's amazing.

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All those instruments, that's pretty impressive. Though I must say, as a horn player myself, I'm slightly disappointed there's no horn in there :rolleyes:

Anyway, that's pretty cool that you've collected that much stuff. I have to ask, though, what's with the blanket looking thing up top? And does someone just have dibs on it or are you donating it or what are you doing with it?

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People threw out tons of wacky things... I think that the blanket will be treated like all the clothes we got as well; They're going to be laundered and can be claimed by those who helped with the effort. Everything left unclaimed (which will likely be a lot, not a lot of it appealed to us when we looked) will be donated to St. Vincent de Paul or Goodwill or something of the like.

I found a cool par of black suede-like boots. I so call dibs ;)

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I think that quite a few people only heard the donate part (not the school supply bit). Today at one of the middle schools we found a full bottle of Fiji water, a pointer stick (the one with the little pointing hand on the end), and a Santa cookie plate!? Clay pots are also frequent (from art classes).

The middle school kids are either far more generous or far more wasteful than the highschoolers. We've covered two high schools and two middle schools and the middle schools have donated at least 2/3 of the stuff we've collected (might even be higher than that).

Well we've found a contributor to our collection ^_-
[Warning philosophical rant] But, really it's just a question of whether or not people are willing to consider new ideas. A lot of people think that helping others by doing something unorthadox is stupid or pointless and thus don't understand the immense satisfaction that comes with it. Many people simply accept social norms (like the principle that you throw things out when you don't need them anymore) as static and never conjure the willpower to even consider that there might be another way to do things (like recycling or donating stuff), much less try to apply their idea (like by salvaging stuff from trash cans). [Philosophical rant finished]

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We only really "collected" on the senior cleanout days, and the initial collection days for the underclassmen. A lot of people weren't quite done with all of their binders and such left. However, I have the feeling that we'll get a lot of things tomorrow, being the last day of school.

I found the blanket in the trash. Someone tried throwing out a perfectly good fleece blanket! It even had the quadratic formula on it! WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU THROW AWAY THE QUADRATIC FORMULA?? (I mean, come on, it's just so fabulous [: Sorry, I'm being a math geek. I'll get back to informing you all of our good works). As Millory said, that will be treated as with the clothes. Though I dunno...I might want dibs on that one [:

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D:
WAIT
I MISSED THIS...
not faiiir >.>
(kidding)

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Since everyone seems to be interested in this, I guess I"ll keep updating...today was the last day of school, so the last day of collection. Millory and I went around our high school with a giant rolling trash bin (lent to us by the very helpful custodians) and collected everything that we could find. By the time we got through two floors, we were forced to skip the first floor because we ran out of space in the bins. We then packed all of it into my mom's car (if you can imagine a Rendezvous...imagine that filled to the brim with school supplies...THAT'S how much we collected.). We're slowly running out of space in my garage to put all of it...and the stuff in my garage is only about half the supplies we have collected.

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Kara, your mom deserves kudos. So does your garage.

And to think, a lot of students are planning parties and celebrations on their last day of school and you guys are recycling trash. It's also neat that you got the janitors' support in this. Sounds like the school rallied around the team in this effort.

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The principal and one of the Assistant principals were very nice to us and compliant with our requests, and eager to know how they could help. I managed to get e-mail correspondence with them very early to make sure they knew the plan and so that we could get in contact with the custodians. Everyone was so nice and interested and welcoming, our school staff is so nice, and we wouldn't be around without them!

Another update: We might have mentioned that we got insane amounts of clothing from the clean-outs. I believe there were about eight or so garbage bags full of clothing, shoes, belts, etc. that were moved from Karibou's garage into my basement today. It's ridiculous how wasteful people are- a lot of the clothing had been thrown IN THE TRASH. We also got a hold of the entire lost-and-found inventory of one of the middle schools, because they knew no one would claim any of it. My basement smells... absolutely disgusting to say the least. I'm currently laundering all of it and then it'll be up for dibs. There's so much nice stuff that I just can't understand why people would let out of their sight.

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We got to have a sorting party today! That was honestly the most fun I've had in weeks! We were able to clean out Kara's entire garage in roughly four hours of sorting and still had time for a quick snack break! We still have to sort through a ton of other stuff, plus the janitors from one of the schools still have more supplies for us. It's unbelievable (but in a good way ^_^).

If they were the ones paying for the clothes and supplies they probably wouldn't let it out of their sight :rolleyes:. Unfortunately a lot of kids just figure that their parents are just going to buy them new stuff come the whether they save their supplies or not.