Trash Vulture Etiquette

Last weekend, I excavated two of This Old House's closets. This Old House was built without closets around the 1920s, so at some point someone had the bright idea to wall off parts of the house and call them "closets."  For this reason, it's damn near impossible to install a clothes rod anywhere, because there are no appropriately placed studs.  The closets are big, but in most cases long and narrow with sloping roofs and built-in drawers that you must climb under clothes rods to reach.  Terribly inefficient. Oh, and there is a window in every closet.  We don't have windows treatments in there, so if you drive past my house, you can see anything from my beloved's tie collection to my yellow feather boa to a blanket tacked up to the little angel's winter coat, depending on which direction you are driving and how hard you look. Am I classy or what?

Anyway, I pulled out six garbage bags of crap, moved a ton of stuff into even more plastic tubs in our basement (even though we are currently convinced we are through procreating, we are keeping this junk - break glass in case of emergency, oh, and to loan to needy friends), and dragged a few choice items out to the curb.  Not for the garbage man, silly, for the neighborhood vultures.

Since I live in the city and in the last "okay" neighborhood before you get into hard-core South K.C., home of liquor stores with bars on the windows and good BBQ, I have a wide variety of bizarre individuals driving around my neighborhood on any given day.  They have cell phones. There is a Trash Vulture Network.  Sure enough, not ten minutes after I dragged: a box full of old pillows and cushions to furniture we no longer have in the house; a Reebok step (1992, anyone?); an old birdhouse (white); a laundry bag full of stained and bleached towels and an ugly set of sheets with matching bed skirt; a cool pewter-looking magazine rack; and a box of broken picture frames out to the curb, there was a pick-up truck pulling up. 

I watched through the sun porch windows.  After the pick-up, a late '80s model sedan with kickin' rims slid by the street.  It parked and out popped someone to grab the picture frames.  While that person was picking through the pile, another pick-up pulled up and stopped about twenty feet away. I slowly realized that this was Trash Vulture Etiquette, kind of like waiting twenty feet back while someone else uses the ATM.  Who knew?

Within twelve hours, it was picked clean.  Anyone need to illegally dump something at my house?