“Sometimes, You Eat the Bar…”

If nothing else, this post will inform our readers of our undying love of The Big Lebowski, which is especially important on the eve of our favorite cinema’s biggest event of the year, Lebowski Fest! This is the first year that we haven’t been able to attend, so pardon our cheesy film references and half-baked puns.

But back to the bar! We were fortunate to have Nathalie (whose name we’ve obscured for her privacy) follow through on her purchase with us, and she and her boyfriend came to pick up the bar this weekend. She was so excited to surprise him with it (and with the news that he’d have to load it into the truck they had rented!) and even told us to keep the change when she paid the balance she owed on the item. Sidenote: We’ve been using Venmo to invite folks to put down deposits on the items they want to buy to ensure that we hold them for up to a week. It’s been working out really well!

It was great to chat with Nathalie while Jason and her fella loaded the bar into their truck. She and I laughed in admitting to one another that we had been sleuthing around one another’s facebook pages while we coordinated their pick-up date, because she saw that Jason and I were planning to march in yesterday’s white-supremacy counter-protest and she happens to work in a similar part of the anti-violence field as I do. We both expressed appreciation for the unique ways in which we can meet great new people and feel a sense of solidarity even in these funny little interactions.

Nathalie jokingly asked what we planned to do with the cash she’d handed us, which got Jason and me thinking. We knew we intended to use at least a portion of the money we collect to be able to visit his mom in Florida this year (she hasn’t been feeling well and is a fierce, independent fire cracker of a lady who lives by herself). But we also are frequently scraping around for change to be able to support causes and communities that do so much to support us and the ones we love. These include the Southern Poverty Law Center, National Lawyers Guild, Victim Rights Law Center, and the Massachusetts Bail Fund.  We’ll continue to feature organizations we support, such as Planned Parenthood and Black and Pink, along with links to their websites to encourage you to scope ’em out!

This week, in the wake of what’s happened across the United States and especially in our home community of Boston, Jason suggested that we donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center, to thank them for their critical and inspiring work in addressing and eradicating white supremacy and poverty in the U.S. We followed through on that tonight, and we’re looking forward to further incorporating these efforts into our journey on Shed52!

So what’s up for sale this week on the blog? It might seem anticlimactic after a few banner weeks, but one thing I’ve been itching to get rid of is an oversized, underused stainless steel rice cooker we’ve had in our kitchen for about 2 years. It was one of those impulse purchases precipitated by a fleeting delusion in which you convince yourself that you eat roughly 7 cups of rice a day each and can’t possibly go another moment without this beauty occupying what little space in your kitchen was left for elbow-room and the occasional grease fire.

I’m the only person I know who can manage to burn rice in a device that was LITERALLY INVENTED TO MAKE THAT AN IMPOSSIBLE FEAT, but I always manage to achieve the impossible. The real spoiler of the moment is that I might already have a taker for this poor neglected little rice cooker, whom I’ve affectionately deemed R2D2*. A colleague of mine at work heard about Shed52 and our plans for unused appliances, and she claimed first dibs! We paid about $20 for R2 (yes, he even has a nickname) back in 2015 and I only destroyed cooked one batch of rice in it before realizing that whole grains are overrated and that I can probably just survive on cereal for the rest of my life.

My colleague promised that she’d give it a good home and offered to pay whatever I asked for it. She’s a favorite of mine, so we settled my suggestion $5.00 and that crisp Abe Lincoln will get us one step closer to booking flights to visit our favorite Floridian. Check back this week to see if she follows through, and if we’re 3 for 3 on Shed52!

Do you have a favorite organization or charity that you donate to? Who should be on our radar as we continue to explore worthy causes to connect with Shed52? Tell us more about how you incorporate justice and solidarity into your life in the comments below!

*R2D2 in this case roughly translates to “Twice as much rice as you intended, twice the time you wanted to spend on it, twice the devastation when it all comes out terrible.”