Hey, Steve, I know that Cabela's and Bass Pro carry a product called a Luggable Loo that is basically a toilet seat mounted to a bucket or just the seat that you can put on your own bucket. I got one to use when we camp instead of walking to the latrines in the middle of the night. It's far more comfortable than hovering over the bucket. You could put one in your indoor restroom and request that the ladies use it instead of the throne. They can either put the used TP in the bucket to compost along with the urine or into a separate receptacle for other disposal.

You water your weeds during a drought, because to you they are just another crop - food for the compost heap!

Your neighbors bring you their lawn clippings.

(and you thank them profusely!)

When you clean out your car, you use 2 bags:
one for the stuff you actually have to throw away,
one for the paper napkins, expired coupons, newspaper clippings, & used envelopes destined for the compost heap.

When you go out to eat (chicken fast food place) and bring home the bones, left over fries, bread, napkins, etc. to run througn the shredder and feed the "micro herd".

Actually its, When you buy that $25,000 pick-up truck so that you can go get the free compost at the town compost facility and then you put a dump under it to dump the mulch to go get more quicker!

When you finially let you daughter get A guinea pig so you can collect the poo. OK so I also have my daughter in law bringing me her guinea pig's poop too!
Cindy

... you stop feeling guilty about not going to church because there's more "die and rise" messages right here in the compost pile.

... you regret that you are leaving for a month's vacation in Paris because your pile really will need to be turned in two days

... you carry bags of compost 500 miles up I-95 from your winter home to your summer home.

I've turned into a leaf bandit lately. I've started taking a different route to and from my house every day to look for black trash bags full of leaves and grass clippings set by the street. I'm shocked at how much can be found this way. Don't they know what they are throwing away?
So far my wife hasn't noticed that I have come home every day for the last week with the truck full of 'trash'. She will, she has to, the pile out back is just getting too big.
I know I'm a junkie because our trash can is over half full of other people's empty black trash bags.

People just don't understand.

You're taking the banana peels out of the garbage at work!!

...you can scarf an entire jar of Tostitos Chili con Queso cheese dip in one sitting, but decide to not put the dregs in the compost because it's not healthy enough for your microherd.

A new neighbor moves in, and while out in the yard he asks if the trashman pickup bagged leaves, you say in a hesitant voice, "yes, they do, but if you have bagged leaves, I'll take them, just toss them over the fence". It worked, I've now got 7 big bags of leaves out there waiting to be shredded.
Alberta

You contemplate whether to visit an ex gf that is as crazy and kind of in a split personality schizophrenic way, to say you miss her and was thinking of her, and meanwhile I am thinking of her 3 rabbits bedding and wastes.

Patty4150,,,so been there! Too funny.

When you save the lemons from the water you and your 12 guests at a fancy restraunt drank.

When you ALWAYS have a plastic baggy in your purse in case of compost findings.

When you return home and find bags of compost food in your driveway

When a 7 year old explains that their class is doing a project about worms and you reply with, "I have a bunch of pet worms!"

When you go for a walk with your dog the day after haloween and bring along a shovel and bucket incase you see smashed pumpkins.

When you have a dream about a giant earthworm eating your garden.

...when you haul 11 pumpkins across town to get to your pile
...when you drag you sister away from her college midterm paper that shes been trying hard to finish for the last 4 hours, so she your pile blow off steam.."Look...Its Hot!!"
...when you actually know what "Ridin' Dirty" means

it takes you an hour to get home from work; when home is only five minute away from work and you generally have between 9 and 20 garbage bags(33, 45, and/or 55 Gallon size) full of OPL and OPG and OPF as well as the daily produce discards from 2 grocery stores:0 for the last 2 weeks and you have a growing stack (roughly 150 bags) of said materials in a corner of your property as well as an unlimited supply of horse manure and chicken/gamebird manure that you still need to clean out of the pens.

*note opl season still going strong and with many trees that still have leaves on them

as well as a compost pile that has hit a high of 165 F and stayed there except for when you turn the pile and add more goodies to it at the same time every 3 or 4 days.

I dont know you tell me am I a compost junkie? I've only been composting for 2 weeks and just recently (last week)
found this forum.

...when a friend says,
"I saw something that reminded me of you today.
I'm a little embarrassed to say so, but it was a sign at the side of the road that said 'Free Horse Manure'."

jamming, I think you deserve a Certificate already!

ROFLMAO!! I can SO relate to so many of these, it's scaring me! Thank God I'm not the only one like this!

I haven't laughed this hard in awhile.... :-)

We need to plan some sort of national compost junkie weekend meeting where compost junkies from the four corners of the US come together, swap stories, and share pictures of our piles and our worms! I would love to actually meet live people who are as nutty as I am!

Okay, here's one of mine (one of many): last Friday I was explaining to my hairdresser how there are hundreds of different types of earthworms, and the ones in my bin are composting worms that don't burrow deep, etc etc etc. And how cute the babies are. And they go crazy for pumpkin.

Ya think she thought I was just a little bit looneytunes???

Deanna

You wish you hadn't taken your dog with you to town so you could pack bagged leaves in the space she takes--and she's a big dog!

...when you find a kindred spirit at Starbucks
& you tell her to check out gardenweb's SCM Forum & to look for "wacko",
& then when you get home & you can't find the good wacko threads
but you do find a really good "junkie" thread,
& you bring it up to the top
so the kindred spirit can find it easily.

Your husband asks you what you want for your birthday, and you tell him you want him to get you a pick up truck load of horse manure from the local horse farm.

And you know that YOUR HUSBAND KNOWS you're a compost junkie when, instead of being surprised at your answer, he calmly asks "And what color bow should I get to put on top of the heap after I'm finished offloading the pile?"

...when you realize that you're down to your last *little bit* of shredded tree trimmings (probably equivalent to about 5 bags at the store), & you panic & start looking for those orange trucks!

I've only been collecting stuff for two days, I'm tearing cardboard into little pieces while watching tv, and worried about how to get enough green to go with all this brown! And so thankful I'm not the only OCD person in the world, this post proves it.
Shelley

...the best compliment you can give to a person is, "they really know how to manage a hot pile."

Steve

When you take pictures of the things that you put in your compost bin and post them on your blog which just happens to be called The CompostBin Blog.

Anthony

Here is a link that might be useful: Pictures Of Compost

You read 28 pages of messages on this forum, soaking up all the knowledge you can. And then you bump up a 2 year old topic that's been dead for 6 months....

no such thing as letting sleeping dogs or compost topics lie on this website!

You know you're a compost junkie...

when the people at Starbucks call you a "hardcore composter"

when it *bothers* you to see paper goods & food scraps in a dumpster

when you get all your important errands done & you cruise down a few alleys looking for lawn clippings or autumn leaves "to make the trip worthwhile"

when you never ever leave any grocery, liquor, or dollar store without at least a little cardboard.

Here's one...

You know you're a compost junkie when after stirring/checking-on your compost tea you keep smelling your fingers because of the yummy earthy smell.

<ducks>

You choose to take a watermelon to the family get together because of the rinds you'll get to take home to your worms. The fact that you love watermelon is secondary.

While I was there, I was eyeing a banana my granddaughter didn't finish, hoping she wouldn't finish it, so I could take it to my worms too.

Deanna

... when you keep brown paper lunch bags in your desk at work & every day take home a full bag of leftover snack bits & ripped up paper.

Yep, I do...

its OK that the strawberries that you bought got furry overnight and you didnt get to EAT ANY of them.

when you bring two clean buckets to work each day. One goes under the counter that holds the coffee machine and you have volunteered to make coffee for the whole office crew of around 100 people to be sure all the grounds and filters go into that bucket. The other bucket goes home with a lovely lady from India whose family is vegetarian and she returns a third bucket with the previous day's veggie trimmings in it. For the record, I tried to train folks to leave their compostable lunch scraps in the coffee ground bucket but I wasn't above removing apple cores, etc., from the regular trash to put into the CG bucket either!

After memorial day you prowl the cemetaries and go after the faded flowers in the dumpsters.

When your family goes on a two week vacation at a cottage which doesn't have a compost. After three days of feeling guilt over sending compostables to the dump, and anxiety over all those wasted greens, you're thrilled when your partner suggests that compostables be stored in the freezer on the return trip.

After two weeks of saving greens, it's finally time to leave the cottage. The car was jam packed before you came to the cottage and you have no idea how you're going to get those three bags of compostables back to the city. The compostables eeek their way into the trunk while you leave a bunch of food and drinking water at the cottage and make the kids carry all of the toys on their laps for the 1.5 hour car ride home.

We went out for lunch yesterday, and I took an extra free refill on my root beer so I could treat my friends in the backyard.....

...you refer to microbes as "my friends in the backyard"...

LOL

Lloyd

My new shredder/chipper is here and I'm more excited than if I'd gotten a new diamond ring.

..you have a special place cleared in the driveway for your husband to run the chain saw as he cuts wood for the woodstove because then you won't miss sweeping up a single grain of sawdust...

You people are nuts!

But I was so excited when I got my chipper/shredder, that I put it together by myself rather than wait for hubby to do it.

Of course, a diamond ring would be nice too.....

Although you haven't gone fishing since your teenage years you suddenly become excited about it again when you realize that, while trout, bass, and other "good" fish have catch limits, you can catch all the squawfish and other invasive "bad" species you want, not only cleaning up your local streams and lakes, but also adding valuable micronutrients to your opus magnus....Oh yeah, and maybe you'll catch a trout or two for the dinner table, but that's secondary.

When one day while in public you see a teen walking aimlessly around holding a banana peel (think he was looking for a garbage can) and you SERIOUSLY consider going over and offering to taking it off his hands!

I had to stop myself so I guess I'm not too far gone;)

When you are in Alaska, which you flew to for vacation and decide the seaweed and kelp have less toxins than the ones in Lake Washington so gather them up and then freeze the bag so it won't drip on the plane.

My other half spends much of his time working out of town. I knew I had converted him when he actually confessed to thinking about bringing manure home in his suitcase on the plane.

As to the urine and women being allowed to flush it away!
It is way too easy to put a toilet seat over a 5 gallon bucket with sawdust and/or shredded paper. Now everyone can pee in comfort and contribute to the compost.

You invite people over to carve punkins so they'll stop at the farmstand on the way over and buy punkins to carve so you can compost the leftovers.
Had 3 people over, we had 3 punkins for my wife and I and the folks that came over brought 8! All 11 are still at our house... Thats what you call a good haul.

proof I'm not yet a complete junkie maniac - on vaca in DC this weekend & during the trip down & the 2day hotel stay there, I allowed the following to go into the garbage (rather than ziploc for the 5 hr trip back home to NJ):
2 banana peels
in-room coffee maker grounds
- but, I felt the tug, so I guess I'm making progress toward compost junkie-hood

On the way to Karate class yesterday, I saw a busted pumpkin on the side of the road, its a pretty busy street and noplace convenient to park. Im thinking about riding my bike over there to snag it.

You know you're a compost junkie when... you can tell if a black trash bag has grass ,leaves or leaves with sticks in it while you drive by.

You begin to appreciate compost acronyms such as:

HQC : high quality compost
BRF : bois rameaux fragmentes (French for fragmented wood and branches)

Or when you begin to make up acronyms on your own:

CNOW (Carbon Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water or "i want to *C* my compost *NOW*!)

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Grist

... when you smell your soil