It's just one creek. One trickle of water among millions. But people decided to care about that creek. A bunch of people, volunteers, got together and they cleaned several tons of trash out of the creek.

They got to work removing non-native plants from the creek banks and planting native trees.

They got a nearby water treatment plant to upgrade and stop polluting the creek.

They educate people and tell them about the fish and invertebrates that live in creeks and why they should care.

I think that it matters. I think that making sure your community has clean water matters. I think making sure one specific old lady's house doesn't flood matters. I think one stream where fish can live again matters. I think one patch of green space in a downtown area matters. If nothing else, it makes people's lives less shitty, and that's worthwhile in itself.

so if you weren’t aware, lately i’ve been buying and reselling used stuff for fun and profit, mostly furniture. i’m still experimenting, but based on my experiences so far, the real money in my local market is in dressers. people here fucking love dressers. they’re easy to sell and have good profit margins. what’s not to love

one of my best flips so far was a 5 drawer wooden dresser that i bought for twenty dollars and sold for a hundred a couple days later. so when i saw this dresser posted on Facebook Marketplace “eight minutes ago,” i was so fucking hyped

(they took the listing with the real photos down so now this is all I’ve got lol)

i end up going back and forth with the owner about the logistics of picking it up and haggling and all. she mentions a lot of people are interested if i don’t pick it up, so i’m anxious to get to it before someone else does. and so i forget to ask a couple of apparently crucial questions

we work it out eventually, and she wants to do a contactless exchange, which is no problem. it’s all honor system – she leaves it on her porch, i leave the money in her mailbox, and we never have to make awkward small talk while i try and haul a dresser out to my car. it’s very fine by me

so i get there and there’s something clearly not quite right. but i feel bad ghosting her after all the trouble, so i panic and shove my $25 into the mailbox and walk away with. fucking. this

(Noodle for scale.)

this thing is the exact shape and dimensions of a normal five drawer dresser, but it’s less than three feet tall and only a foot deep. it’s like a real dresser got shrink-rayed. like a regular dresser had a child.

it’s too big to be doll furniture, but too small for any kind of meaningful clothes storage. she really just let me buy this, the baby dresser god abandoned, without warning me how big it was. or wasn’t, as the case may be

in my bewildered panic, i also forgot to check to see if the drawers worked. and they do! but also. they scream when you open them

for half the night i was kicking myself for not just walking away, and then i couldn’t fall asleep, and around 2 in the morning i realized that this thing is so fucking funny to me that i can’t let it go.

and it turns out that useless bottom drawer is exactly the right size for pint-sized containers of paint and finish and stain, and i have so much sandpaper and so many paint brushes and face masks and paint stirrers to go in the other drawers

which admittedly still scream at me

and then some shade of pink for the drawers

probably the middle one

no drawer pulls because i’m too lazy to put them back on for photos just to have to take them off again but she’s looking kind of nice!! not sure that i’m keeping the drawers like this though 🤔

for anyone who’s curious, this is the current state of the baby dresser.

i fucked up two of the drawers and therefore blew the deadline for the contest and i’m too annoyed to fix them just yet. so i need to redo those and topcoat everything before it’s actually finished.

“That’s a very overwhelming thing ‘cause I’ve watched you grow up. We’ve watched each other grow up. We grew up together. We don’t need to see eachー oh, my God. Even though we don’t see each other all the time.”