Turn your trash into... more trash!

I love clever stuff. Not novelty furniture (except for those chairs that look like giant hands...THOSE are awesome) or kitchen utensils that look like fish (even though we have some). I'm talking about those guys who take a metal coat-hanger and bend it and cut it and make something out of it. Well, I'm not talking about the guys who make those things, I'm talking about the actual things. Let's not get confused. But those guys are pretty cool, too. Mostly.

I have trouble throwing things away because I'm convinced that there is a cool use for just about everything and someday I'll figure out what that use is. I have a box full of broken toys and stuff in the garage that I refuse to throw out. Someday I might get that rare tumor thing that John Travolta had in Phenomenon and then I'll get super smart and I'll actually build some cool stuff. Then I'll die, like in the movie. It would probably be a better use of my new-found intelligence to figure out a way to not die.

Anyway, I found this website, Instructables.com, and there are all of these people who post ideas for making your own stuff out of trash and other spare parts. Like, this one guy built a tiny barbecue from an Altoids tin. Awesome? Yep. There were clocks made from Altoids tins, survival kits made from Altoids tins, guitars made from Altoids tins, an Altoid dispenser made from an old iPod... I just typed in "Altoids" and clicked "search." I'm sure there's tons more cool stuff on there.

I also love origami. I really do. I used to work as a machine operator in an ice cream factory and there were often large lapses in the actual work. So, standing around, leaning on pallets of raw materials, I got bored. So I found a scrap of paper and folded it into a frog. I would make about three dozen a night and just leave them wherever. Pretty soon people from other shifts started complaining about the paper frog infestation. I just love the idea of taking something plain and ordinary and giving it new life as something beautiful or useful or just plain fun.

And what's with the weather today, huh? Frickin' amazing, right?