My mom recently ordered herself a new bed, she put some wear on her first one with all that flouncing her weight onto it over just the past year since she purchased it. It ended up on my nice big screened porch, taking up more room than I expected it would, and I found it getting in my way…I did NOT want to drive my foot into the frame in the dark, not 180 pounds of me plus the chair’s 160 pounds. That’d be a good way to crush a foot.

We tried calling my yard guy but he never got back to us. My housekeeping help lady didn’t know anyone who needed a bed and that put us fresh out of options.

I tell you, this MS addling my brain is so inconvenient…this morning the very very obvious finally occurred to me: CRAIGSLIST! The phone got to ringing after the listing for the freebie had been up for five minutes or so, and I actually had to take it down after the first hour since there was no way to keep track of all those folks responding to it.

Needless to say that bed was gone by mid afternoon!

I do love Craigslist; in the later months of my impoverishment when the Feds were telling me there was nothing wrong with me and disapproving my disability income repeatedly, my home’s hot water heater died.

In January.

Hoping against hope, I yelled for help on Craigslist, and within a couple of days a contractor let me know that the owner of his company had obtained an almost new water heater bigger than my dead one, and another fellow, a plumber, offered his services to install it. This great guy and his apprentice spent almost a whole day in my cellar cutting and brazing copper pipe to get it installed and I had hot water again.

Now that’s what I call a truly caring community.

Craigslist has netted me some great finds just in bartering and sales over the past several years too. Sure, like any other venue there are some flakes and unsavory sorts to be found there, but if you take the usual precautions I doubt you’ll ever have a real problem.

To paraphrase Garret Morris’ ‘Chico Escuela’ character from SNL, Craigslist been berry berry good to me!

Sure is nice to have my porch back.