For anyone considering a fishpond: boy is it a lot of work!! They’re really cool and provide many intangible rewards, but as far as I can tell, a lot more headaches unless you can afford to pay someone to help you anytime you go away, have a generator to make sure the filtration/aeration keeps working if the power goes out for any length of time, and don’t mind spending as much on koi food as on your own food. Not to mention veiling the pond in netting to avoid finding them stabbed to death by a great blue heron that couldn’t possibly swallow them, but will kill them anyway.

I don’t know koi from poi, so the four-figure-value-to-koi-cognoscenti is completely lost on me. But as you say Freecycle Is Really Not That Kind of Place. And I agree — and was half-thinking about but sent this suggestion anyway — that Yahoo groups can leave your flaps open a little too much.

Glad there’s a Wilmington craigslist and making a mental note to Go There more often — forums and bike forks, etc.

I wasn’t sure whether craigslist would be a good idea, but so far the people who have responded have been entirely legitimate. Nonetheless, I’m still glad for the anonymizing available there and not available on yahoo, as far as I could tell, at least. If someone doesn’t provide the requested info so that we can tell they know what they’re talking about, they just won’t hear back from us – and neither of our phone numbers will ever have been involved, avoiding future problems. Paranoid, perhaps, but better safe than sorry! I’ve known too many people who had problems with classified-ad responders, from outright larceny to attempted scams to just uneasy feelings about their character.

Finally, I am not a yahoo member and have no plans to be for reasons fairly petty, related to my own peculiar preferences, so it’s not an option for me, anyway.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wilmington-free/,