Why I Oughta...

I've been known to garbage pick.  At the curb.  Not in dumpsters and other what-have-yous.  You know the move:  people put stuff out on the curb on their garbage day (or very often...on Saturdays or Sundays when they've just done a clean-up project) and if someone doesn't grab whatever the thing is, it goes into the truck on pickup day.  I posted about an organ late last year and when we lived back in Elmhurst, they had this wonderful, annual all-city-wide amnesty day.  You could put anything you wanted on the curb and the garbage guys would take it; no stickers needed.  That was always a fun hour of driving around seeing what people were tossing.   Mostly, you find junk.  And, this time, I think that's what I found:  junk.  It is metal.  So, the most likely picker is one of those guys in the pickup trucks with wood boards that extend the height of the bed and have all sorts of metal objects tossed in there.  I call them the "metal guys".  They only focus on

I was going through some of my draft posts from earlier this Summer and I  noticed a draft post about a Japanese-inspired concrete garden object that I saw in a garden on the border of McCollum park in downers.  I thought I'd bring it up-to-date and publish it here as a marker towards some garden object-inspiration.  Here's what I saw in a garden in Downers Grove below - a short, stout object that looks like a lantern.  They are called a toro .   I've posted about being drawn toward Japanese-inspired gardening and even have a visit to Gotenyama Garden in Tokyo as inspiration where they have a large Toro (or at least that's what I *think* it is).  From that post : I also went to the Chicago Botanic Garden late this Summer to visit with a friend and colleague and while there, we tool'd around the Japanese Garden .  It was really lovely.   Here, below, is a photo I took with my phone as we walked towards the Japanese Garden section from the main entrance.  In that sam