Nope, no pets, other than the occasional mouse. Maybe one of the mice dragged it in from another apartment and decided it was too heavy to carry further.
That was a fascinating read! It’s possible the window was open, but it seems like you have to first feed the crows before they bring you gifts.
Congratulations, you are my new Doper Hero.
I grew up in a quiet NE Ohio suburb. I was 9 in 1972, walking to the store with my 8 y.o. cousin, and found what we thought was a geometric compass which was just lying in the street. I put it in my pocket, we continued to the store, and returned home. We were watching TV and I’d completely forgotten about the “compass” until my cousin asked me to show it his older sister. She said it wasn’t a compass, but had no clue what it might be, so she took it in the kitchen to show their dad. I went back to watching TV for a couple of minutes until we heard a very loud POP come from the kitchen, immediately followed by screams! I remember running into the kitchen and seeing blood spattered everywhere with bits of flesh stuck to the ceiling and kitchen cabinets! My uncle was hunched over and clutching his hand, while my aunt screamed for the car keys so she could rush him to the hospital.
Apparently, what I’d found was a live fuse and detonator from a hand grenade with the safety lever and pin still in place, but without the body and main explosive charge! FUZES FOR HAND GRENADES It was probably a “souvenir” a vet had brought home from Vietnam. My uncle had spent a few years in the navy in the late 50’s but had no experience with grenades, so he didn’t know that when he pulled the ring that he’d armed the thing. The detonator had enough explosive force that it blew off the pinky and ring finger of his left hand down to the palm.
Uncle Eddie never let the loss of those 2 fingers stop him from indulging in his passion for carpentry, and was still building things until he passed 3 years ago. And though some tried to blame me and my cousin for what happened my uncle was philosophical about it. He said that he was just thankful he’d pulled the pin and lost a couple of fingers, whereas if one of us kids had done it we may have lost a hand, an arm or maybe even our lives!
This kind of thing never happens to me. I’m at the big annual used book sale, and it’s crowded as heck (huge event) and I pick up a book that looks interesting. Trade paperback, I know the author’s name, and for $2.00, I’ll probably grab it. Flip through it; there’s a one of those “hooker cards” from Las Vegas in it. Heh, I think. Some bookmark. I keep flipping, and there’s 6 $100 American bills. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so I just slammed the book shut, and yes, I bought it.
(The books are all donated, and there were an estimated 400,000 of them at the sale, so there would be no practical way to know who’d donated the book with the bonus in it.)
Still trying to decide what to do with the cash–I want to spend some of it spreading some smiles around for other people, so I have a few ideas to work with.
I’ve heard of people finding strange things in used books, and heard anecdotes from the volunteers at the yearly sale, but it had never happened to me.
In one book, I found a newspaper clipping from the 1910’s giving local grain and fruit prices. The book may have been owned by a local farmer, merchandizer, or general store operator.
By coincidence, I also do environmental consulting and have done many of the same type of environmental assessments of commercial properties as the OP. The very first one I ever did was at an abandoned liquor store. There was, of course, no inventory still there… except for a single bottle of Rumple Minz peppermint schnapps. I don’t like schnapps at all, so I left it, but even so, I have no idea if Rumple Minz is like the Dom Perignon of schnapps, or more like the Thunderbird. The fact that this bottle was the only item left behind, however, makes me suspect the latter.
Some years back, I was part of a team doing a wide-spread water quality study that included several streams that had overrun their banks in an extended rainstorm a few months before. My team was collecting one set of data; there was another team doing something else, I don’t remember what. At one location we encountered the other team. My team got its samples, we all chatted for a bit, and my team headed back to our vehicle as the other team got back to their work. On the way back I saw, amid some detritus left from the flooding, a thong. A bunch of dried out sticks, a couple of pieces of plastic trash, and a thong, all piled at what had been the high-water mark during the flood.
We had little choice but to hang the thong from the gear shift of the other team’s truck for them to find when they returned.
