Eideard

Steven Ortiz, 17, dreamed of one day owning a luxury sports car — a dream that became reality after he posted a used cell phone on Craigslist.

“My friend gave me a free phone and said, ‘Do what you want with it,’” … “So I put it on Craigslist on the barter section.”

After some serious patience, research and a lot of talking, his cell phone trade landed him an iPod touch, which he managed to barter up for a dirt bike and then to a Macbook Pro laptop computer. Before long, he was the proud owner of an 1987 Toyota 4Runner.

Eventually, he landed a classic Ford Bronco SUV — the golden ticket that would soon get him into the driver seat of a luxury sports car. “I just went for it,” he said. “I knew the Bronco was worth more at the end.”

So what’s his secret?

“It’s trying to catch people who want what you have,” Ortiz said. “The man that needed the laptop had an extra car,” so both parties got what they wanted, he added.

A story like this one comes along more often than you think. I wonder how often the horse-trading ends up a a disaster. It did for me – at least once.

OTOH, I have a classic AMP mountainbike and a Klein road bike I no longer ride, a fly rod or two and some tackle I don’t use anymore. Maybe I should check out placing a notice in Craigslist?

A cold wind whipped down the Texas plains on the night last month that Sharon Smith, 68, and her husband, Bill, 73, arrived here to be work-campers.

In the dark, they had trouble setting up their camper. But Ms. Smith, a former teacher’s aide from Sioux Falls, S.D., said she looked up at the starry sky, shook off a few of the burrs she had picked up lying on the ground working on their truck, and told herself it would get better.

It did.

The life of a work-camper, volunteering in places like Falcon State Park in deep South Texas in return for free rent, is not without its bumps. But as Ms. Smith also quickly discovered, the rewards can be deep as well — like making cinnamon rolls as part of her job at the camp recreation center, where she and Mr. Smith are working as hosts through the end of March.

“We’re here for three reasons,” she said, as she spread sugar on the dough. “No. 1, we like to travel. No. 2, we like people. And No. 3, we’re on a budget.”

An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.

Park and wildlife agencies say that retired volunteers have in turn become all the more crucial as budget cuts and new demands have made it harder to keep parks open.

RTFA. Reflect on the nation which to all intents and purposes invented national parks for the recreation and education of the people – now ruled by beancounters who care only for columns of profit and loss marching in obedient fashion through their budgets.

We have parks with no funds, retirees without adequate healthcare and a new generation left to fill out their American dreams with nonsense television and online myths.

Minnesota was looking for a bargain on the tiniest walleye fish, known as frylings, that the state stocks in some of its lakes. Wisconsin needed more of the longer fingerlings for its fishing lakes. So the neighbors have decided to share fish — Wisconsin’s frylings for Minnesota’s fingerlings — along with hundreds of other items: bullets for the police, menus for prisoners, trucks for bridge inspections and sign language interpreters.

Inmates in Minnesota may soon be pressing specialty license plates for Wisconsin drivers.

With governors from opposing political parties and residents who often share only sports rivalries, Minnesota and Wisconsin are being drawn into the unusual alliance by financial circumstance. The sharing, officials in the two states say, could save them $20 million over the next two years.

Lawmakers in at least nine other states, and countless cities and counties across the country, are also engaged in a kind of barter system, often allowing them to cut the size of government, split their costs and share services. Some of the makeovers might have made sense at any time, but the urgent political will to change — cut jobs, close offices and give up power — was absent before the recession.

“What you have is an economy that is forcing people to share,” said Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr., the county executive in Essex County, N.J., which (for $4 million a year) began accepting juvenile detainees this spring from neighboring Passaic County, which closed its own facility (to save $10 million a year).

RTFA. Many example of the Recession forcing people into perfectly sensible business practices instead of the usual sleazy eazy.

Too bad it takes a nationwide disaster to suggest forethought.

Donna Louise Greenwell – scary or what?
Daylife/AP Photo

Police in Louisiana said three people have been arrested after they allegedly planned to trade $175 cash and a $1,500 cockatoo for two children.

Brandy Romero, 27, and Paul Romero, 46, were each charged with one count of aggravated kidnapping after they allegedly agreed to give up the money and the bird in exchange for a 4-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, the (Opelousas, La.) Daily World reported.

The Romeros were each released after posting $95,000 bond.

Donna Louise Greenwell, 51, was charged with kidnapping and was being held in lieu of $100,000 bond in the Evangeline Parish Jail. Police said the children had been living with Greenwell for about a year, but she is not their biological mother.

“She (Greenwell) is a convicted pedophile. This case could have wider implications,” Fontenot said.

What is there to say? These people are demented and disgusting.