More interesting donations

Recently:

A partial skull from someone's anatomy class

A xylophone

A wedding ring - okay, that one was accidental

Not a jackpot

This turned up last week in a conated Spanish-language book (dictionary, I think).    

We thought we'd hit the jackpot - 25,000 pesos has to be worth something, right?

Nope, not so much.  Colombian pesos, so grand total just over $6, not counting the exchange fees.  So now they're going to be fancy bookmarks.

Jackpot!

Found in a "daily devotional" book for teenagers (girls, based on the color scheme:  a nice $50 bill, which went promptly into the Friends' emergency fund, with a note in case someone calls looking for their mistakenly-donated book.

We have a theory on this one:  Someone is gifted a nice daily devotional book from a grandparent or aunt, who inserts $50 as the main part of the gift.  The gift-ee, not being the daily devotional type (most people don't seem to be - these types of books don't re-sell well at all), tosses the book in the donation pile without opening it, thus missing the rest of the gift.  And somewhere, an aunt is waiting for a thank-you card mentioning the lovely cash.

Another interesting donation

We get some unusual donations now and then, usually (we assume) from people cleaning out their house or their parents' house, who don't look through the whole box.  Things like old alarm clocks, handsets to portable phones, old pictures, etc.  Last week, we got a brick, but the winner so far has to be the urn of pet ashes.

Bookmarks

Neat bookmarks from the "Free bookmarks" box.  We do a quick flip through most books to  make sure pages aren't loose, etc. and come up with a lot of bookmarks.  (And other odd things.

 

This one may be my favorite, it's a couple of layers of papercrafting. 

Treasure: Pop-up Banjo Paterson

I found this little treasure in the donations yesterday:

 A pop-up "Waltzing Matilda" by Banjo Paterson.  Circa 1980s, and oddly it claims to have been printed in Columbia, which I assume is a misprint of Colombia.

Odd bookmarks

Today's odd bookmark: 

In a copy of Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets (HB, no dust jacket), someone was using a brochure for endoscopy services as a bookmark. 

Wish I'd taken a picture of it before I tossed it in the recycle bin, and the new bin was too deep for me to grab it back out.  Oh well.