FLUIDS.

So what does a girl like me do when she's suddenly thrust into this new life where she has weekends off from work and disposable income? She goes to yard sales. Regular readers (as well as some of the irregular ones) should know by now that I love yard sales. Call it low-class, call it backwards, call it distasteful, but my stuff is cooler than yours and it cost less, too.

The Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools put on a yard sale last weekend, and they advertised it in the paper. I see the advertisement, and I am intrigued: "Desks, Chairs, other Furniture, Musical Instruments." The idea of a school system putting on a yard sale was probably enough to convince me to go, but if Casey had found out that I passed on going to a sale with instruments, he would consider that grounds for relationship termination. So I Googled the location, because I still don't know my way around this town, and I set out.

The sale was in a big warehouse on a sketchy side of town. I walked in, and it was like I was in some sort of store house of my grade school memories. Desks, tables, magazine racks, cubbies, everything I ever remember from school exactly the way I remember it, down to the old colored gum stuck to the bottoms. There were kid-sized desks, desks with the chairs attached, teacher-sided desks, principal-sized desks, all with accompanying chairs. There were file cabinets, classroom cabinets, and one green metal cabinet marked "FLUIDS" that had unfortunately already been sold before I got there (It would have made a fabulous liquor cabinet). There were wooden chairs, plastic chairs (a quarter apiece), blue metal cafeteria chairs, and I remembered sitting in them all at some point in my public school career. They had those old plastic couches that gave away their age by being orange or green, the kind that were in the teachers' lounge. I saw the office chairs that visitors sat in, the simple swivel jobs that the secretary used, and even the imposing high-backed dark blue kind of chair that the principal sat in. All the furniture was just lined up in sections, like little armies of school furniture.

There were pianos and kilns for $25 apiece. Sewing machines for ten bucks. Everything was in working order; the schools were just upgrading to new items. It's probably best that the kilns had all sold by the time of my arrival, because I would've wanted one, even given the arguments that I had no room for one, no idea how to use one, and no way of getting it to the home where there was no room for it in the first place. I did buy a sewing machine. Not that I know how to sew, but it was more practical than a kiln.

It was awesome. There are no words to describe how great this yard sale was, despite all the ones you just read. I've been to a lot of yard sales, but never one like this. And the best part? The school system is going to start having these sales every couple of months. There's still hope to get me a "FLUIDS" cabinet yet.