Free the Furniture!

We have a slight problem. Dennis has called Brockenhaus after Brockenhaus, and not a single one of these thrift stores is interested in our cheap and flimsy fine Ikea furniture.  Well, actually, there was one thrift store that agreed to haul everything away, for a fee of 30 CHF per employee per hour that it took to load and pack. We actually would have used them as a hauling service, and gladly, but their workers were completely busy on the two days next week that we're able to move.

We posted everything since, well,
why not.  Dennis labeled this shot
"One beehive, no bees."

One of the thrift stores, Dennis was amused to learn, had the phone number 055 555 55 55. They, apparently, are among the cream of Zürich's second-hand shops, and dismissed us out of hand.  Another, somewhat humbler, thrift store asked careful questions about what, exactly, we were looking to unload, since we were offering an all-or-nothing deal.  They weren't interested in our sofas; our wardrobe held no charm. "Do you, perhaps, have anything smaller," they asked. Dennis told them that we had kitchen appliances and dishes, but that wasn't exactly what they meant. "Do you, perhaps, have any... candlesticks?"

If only we had candlesticks.

So it's on to Plan B.  Dennis and I spent a portion of the day running around and taking pictures of all our largish stuff, and we're starting to send our list around to our friends and Dennis's coworkers. We do have the reassurance that anything we can't give away, our cleaners will haul to the dump. But hopefully we'll not have to throw too much away, especially the things that could be used.

Of course this is our preference: we love our earth, and we reuse shamelessly ourselves.  I've heard that there's a bit of a stigma attached to being seen at second-hand shops in Switzerland, but, as you know, I've shown my face at our neighborhood Brockenhaus regularly.  And it's quite possible that the nicest piece of furniture that we have in our whole house is the desk that we salvaged from the sidewalk last spring.

Why is it, again, that no one wants our things?

Children, of course, learn by watching, and so ours also raid the trash with abandon.  Just this morning, Dennis and I exchanged a smile over Ella's bent head: she was digging through the recycling box, muttering "Support, support, support, I need some support."

The support was for a tiny cardboard an airport, which she built because she folded some paper airplanes out of origami paper and had no place to put them. Of course.

Somewhere in our bins she found the support she was looking for, so her airport features, among other things, a ramp that can support matchbox cars, an elevator that neatly dumps the cars onto the upper parking lot, and a gas pump with removable nozzle.  Her brothers were keenly impressed.

When she wasn't busy building the world's most adorable Flughafen, we gave our daughter yet another super-useful skill for her future career in espionage.  Now she knows how to play poker.

Playing for peanuts:  Dennis probably would have done
a lot better if he hadn't eaten the profits.

All you need to know in life.

Of course we taught her poker. What else, I ask you, are you going to do if you have an enormous bowl holding the peanuty contents of three times three Samichlaus Sackli?

So, how did it go? Well, Ella may have had beginner's luck on her side,

But I had teammate Alex Geels, who, most helpfully, assessed my cards quite loudly every single hand. "Ugh! Those cards are awful!"  Eventually he got tired of me giving away our precious peanuts to his sister, and put himself in charge of our account, encircling our wealth protectively with his arms,and forbidding with a shake of his head any bet over five nuts.

Even when I drew the Jack for my inside straight. Oh, Alex, it could have been glorious.