❤ I'm married to a Craigslist Junkie

This was one of the first items he found. It's not that he needs the computer desk, but we do need a tv stand and this one works just fine for that.

The tv set is old but it works. It fits nicely on the computer desk he brought home.

Although the microwave works, it works too much. It won't shut off unless you open the door or unplug it from the wall. I think it's a fire hazard. It's been sent out to the shed in our back yard.

The dishwasher marks the first time I went with him to pick up something. He needed help getting it into his car. The person we took it from had purchased a new dishwasher and was getting rid of this one. She said it didn't work all the time so she bought a new one. Then this one started working again but she had already committed to the new one. Plus she wasn't confident this one would work reliably.

We picked it up in the summer and it's sitting in our garage. My husband says he's waiting for cooler weather before he starts working on it. I think he will be able to figure out what's wrong and I also think he'll be able to fix it. Removing the old one and replacing it with this one...and have it work when he's done - for that we'll just have to wait and see.

The dishwasher is currently in our garage next to the laundry machines. That's its temporary home until my husband can install it in our kitchen.

Free Cycle
No membership fee. Free Cycle has 4,864 groups with 7,603,875 members around the world. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people).

Who says no one uses the VCR anymore? I know of at least one person who does....

Apparently one of our neighbors had gone to the trouble of erasing a bunch (about 20) VHS tapes for someone else's benefit. They could have just thrown them away but something told them that there might be someone out there who could use them. They posted it on Craigslist and somehow my husband saw it and realized it was only a few streets away.

He's tested the tapes - and used several already.

Let's just start by saying this bicycle is in our shed.

It's a junior's bike. First of all, my husband doesn't ride a bike. Second, we don't have any children, or know any children, who need a bike.

We both love coffee. Our current coffee maker has been repaired several times and one of these days, it will be beyond repair. Now, we have a cute little coffee maker just waiting to step up to the plate and take over. It's in the shed now but it does work and will someday make it to the kitchen counter.

Our doggie has the oldest hand-me-down dog house there could possibly be. It was made circa 1979 by an old boyfriend. It's lasted a long time but it's literally falling apart. Yet, our dog still uses it. We know that come this winter she'll need a better shelter from cold winds (yes, we get cold winds in Austin, Texas). I had looked at prices of new dog houses and thought they were way too high. We thought about making it ourselves but honestly, neither of us are woodworkers.

Then my husband comes home with this gigantic Igloo dog house. It's made of sturdy plastic and used to be white. It was sort of black when he brought it home so I got out the scrub brush and cleaned it up.

I've been trying to entice the dog to use it and have been somewhat successful. Because its floor and roof/walls are plastic, it doesn't have all the nice ventilation that the old, wooded, falling apart structure offers. . I think that when it gets colder she'll start to use it.

This one was cool. Some woman was giving away her husband's tool box...and it wasn't empty.

We found lots of goodies in there - nothing exceptionally valuable, just very practical.

Turns out the door he found was about an inch too short for our door.

There's a garbage disposal attached to the bottom of the sink and that's what he was really after.

And there's the garbage disposal after my husband removed it from the bottom of the kitchen sink he brought home. He installed it the next day and it works like a charm.

These are excerpts from an article I read in Success magazine

Doing Well by Doing Good. How Craigslist Continues to Thrive.

by Stephanie Smith
Newmark, 56, of San Fransisco, not only Facebooks, but blogs and tweets. He is all things to all of the new media. He also handles customer service for Craigslist, the online trading post giant he created where you can find anything from a free fridge to a date for Saturday night.

Today, the market value of the company is estimated at $1 billion. Yet the for profit company is not motivated by profit, Newmark says. "We just have a very odd business model. Our business model, in a sense, is we can do well in business by doing good for people. We don't run MBA style."

Newmark founded the company in 1995 as an e-mail list of San Francisco social events sent to his friends. Later that year, he launched the first community site for San Francisco.

Born in New Jersey, Newmark originally studied to be a physicist before switching to computer science. He went on to receive a master's degree in computer science from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and started his career at IBM, where he worked for 18 years. He also was a programmer for Charles Schwab, Bank of America and various consulting firms.

Craigslist is privately held and doesn't disclose financials, but one study, from the Classified Intelligence Report, estimates the site will conservatively generate $100 million this year, a 23 percent gain from last year's estimate.

To understand the significance of Craigslist's achievements, consider that the site is consistently ranked in the top 10 in page views for English language Web sites, with Google at No. 1, according to Alexa, a Web information company owned by another online giant, Amazon.com.

Then, consider that Craigslist has just 30-yes, 30-employees, working out of a Victorian house in San Francisco, managing more than 570 classified-ad sites in 50 countries. Google has nearly 20,000 employees; other companies in the top 10 have nearly as many as Google.

Craigslist can accomplish so much with so few employees because it operates under the Golden Rule, Newmark says. "We believe that we should treat people like we want to be treated, and that applies to employees as well as customers."

When Newmark says he's been working four hours every day on Craigslist's customer service and four to six hours on his volunteer or public service work, he means it. "Speaking as a nerd, part of the dysfunction is we're very literal. Every day is every day," he says. Seven days a week? "Yes," he says.

Because he is in customer service, Newmark doesn't hear too much of the good stuff, but knows the company he founded helps people find jobs, romance, furniture, lost pets-what have you. He knows of five kidney donations and a number of marriages brokered through Craigslist.

Its job listings typically get 51 replies, No. 2 after CareerBuilder.com, which gets 69 replies, according to a 2006 Yahoo Finance report.

Before Craigslist, Newmark was more skeptical of people, he says. Founding the company "eroded my cynicism. I see that people are overwhelmingly good. Our culture is self-policing."

A 61 foot TV? Really? Maybe he meant to write 61" ?

I took this screen shot on a Sunday morning around 7am. Notice that some people want you to take everything not pick through it.

Unique visitors in August, 2010
Source: http://siteanalytics.compete.com

google: 145,624,236
amazon: 71,337,973
ebay: 65,400,052
craigslist: 61,228,494
cnn: 25,518,199
godaddy: 12,399,928
hub pages: 11,286,307
Squidoo: 7,715,0730 (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/squidoo.com/)
angieslist: 1,239,923