Another load of books gone

46/49 went

I'm up to 138 books taken from outside the door:-). I had thought we reached saturation point last week, bit was apparently because the sign said only "Bücher Zu Verschenken", not "Englische Zu Verschenken" and no Anglophones stopped to look.

 The coffe maker was left at a "Leave and Take" kiosk and went in 5 minutes (as we watched from the cafe across the street).

More books and magazines

After last weekend, more books went then I had thought- only 5 left. Today we added 17 to make 22, a bunch of German children's magazines (they went in 5 minutes) and old Ex-Berliners (they are a good resource for finding shops in Berlin).

Let's see how this goes. I'm also writing up an ad for next week-appliances and furniture.

Unwanted Media 18-19

• A cookbook which is so not to my taste (and barely usable in Germany): the recipes are meals made with ingredients such as already prepared soups. As everyone here knows, they don't exist (edible versions) here. I like my cookbooks to be from scratch, in almost all cases and in any event, the suggested boxes, mixes and pre-made ingredients are not available here. This goes in the box of books for recycling/donation, but first to be riffled through by a visiting friend at the end of the month. (18)
  

• Too old for any current OS- orange recycling bin.(19)
  

Shoes, books and beeswax 12-17

• A pair of house shoes too well-loved to donate:12
  

• Some beeswax and comb (really!) from an apiary that the children visited. 13
  

• Two large infant books to hand along (14,15)

• A DVD of a TV show I recorded long ago (and now own the season of)16 and although that may just seem like paper clutter, there are magazines (and toy catalogs) down there that I have winkled from the girls' bookshelves (as well as the Swiss Miss box that I finally cleared out- stocking the remaining packs in my tea box) 17.
  

Consumption

In my German class, our last theme was on Werbung, or advertising. As per usual, we discussed the topic in relation to our current lives and those in our home countries. My teacher felt that we consume more now than ever and specifically mentioned buying clothes and then giving them away or discarding them the next year to be fashionable.
I found that particularly humorous, as these three shirts, each more than 4 years old, awaited my returning from the US with new shirts to be discarded, although the color was washed out to a very noticeable extent, there were splotches of color loss, and two had (minor) holes. I am wearing a shirt today which has a hole minor enough that I will continue to wear it and, all in all, I shop for clothes only once a year (when visiting the US) and that shopping is primarily to replace clothing with noticeable holes or to buy for the children, who actively outgrow their clothes as well as physically wearing them out more quickly than the adults do.

Perhaps we are the anti-consumption family?

On the other hand, I sent 4 boxes of books back from the show (they were free! Although postage was not.) and I gratefully carried a hand-me-down computer from my mom back as well (does it count as consumption when it's a hand-me-down? I think not. And it replaces my blown up and recycled prior Dell computer.).

Passing things along

When I was at Discworldcon it looked as if someone (perhaps Sir Terry) was unloading piles of DW novels in just about every language they had ever been pubbed in. The English were long gone, as were the French, so I grabbed Deutsche for the German (started with 2, but as the con progressed and they languished I took one of each— he's now on the second) and Polish for a friend here in Berlin. I've just passed the bag over but I thought I would share the covers: they are pretty great (though the Estonian and Latvian ones were also pretty nifty!).