Yesterday was kind of a bust. While those days are always disappointing, they seem to be part of the natural ebb and flow of yard saling. Some days you have crazy good luck, and some days every sale you hit is all baby clothes and Danielle Steele.
Some day, I will want to buy baby stuff at a yard sale. It will be a momentous occasion, I’m sure. I will feel like years of yard saling had prepared me for that moment, when I finally wanted to come away with a giant bag full of onesies. Right now, however, it’s a little annoying. People who have baby stuff always seem to have A LOT. You wonder how one baby could have possibly used so much. Was the kid wearing five or six onesies at a time? We passed one lady yesterday that had so many tiny clothes for sale that it looked like she had just gotten rid of her baby altogether. You can tell when someone has decided to get out of hamster ownership, because they are trying to sell every hamster accessory known to man as a set. Instant hamster kit, right here! That’s sort of what this woman looked like. She had decided that babies were too much trouble, they smelled bad, and after that last time it got loose in the house and they could only find its droppings for three days, she was done. There was even a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting along with it, a book that was apparently so popular that no one cared that the word play no longer worked for the sequels, What to Expect During the First Year, What to Expect When Your Wife is Expanding, and What to Expect At Your Post-Baby Yard Sale. Just so you know, only one of those titles is a joke.
But anyway. I’m still in the point in my life where I can walk up to a sale, look around, say “I don’t have kids” with a shrug and turn around and walk away without anyone feeling insulted about the quick way I rejected their stuff. People seem to recognize that there are others out there who have no need for a Pack n’ Play, if they don’t realize the same applies to stirrup pants and brass candle holders.
Enough about what I did not buy yesterday, let’s move on to what did come home with me. First, a box of quart-sized canning jars that I will give to my mother. As she read that sentence, she hoped to herself that they were wide-mouthed. The answer is that one-third of them are. We dug through three boxes of jars to find the four wide-mouth jars. They were all a dime apiece. Yes, I could have gotten more, and my mother would probably have appreciated them. But sometimes there are only so many dirty jars you want to deal with, and twelve was my limit yesterday. Besides, that was all that fit in the box. I mean, I could have gotten another box, but…I’M STILL A GOOD DAUGHTER, DANGIT.
We also picked up this lovely 70s yellow-orange ironing board for $2. Josh mentioned getting one after he got his job and started having to wear a black buttoned-down shirt every day. When I waited tables, my solution to a wrinkle-free work uniform was to buy polyester shirts that couldn’t hold a wrinkle if they tried. But I guess he wants to look neat and clean without having giant collars. I cannot recall having seen an ironing board at a yard sale before, but I’m sure they’ve been there. I just haven’t been looking for them. This one was pretty serendipitous, though. We will have to buy a new pad, although I could feasibly make one. Oh, and if anyone is keeping track of such things, go ahead and add “ironing board” to the list of things which fit in my new car, no sweat.
To say that yesterday was kind of a bust is unfair to these exciting red ski boots. Josh’s dad likes to take us skiing every winter. I’m cool with that, but paying $30+ a day to rent equipment hurts my frugal heart. Josh’s dad recommended I go buy new stuff at the end of the season, where I could probably get away with spending only a few hundred dollars! And I thought, hmm, let’s try it another way. So I’ve been picking up stuff as I find it. Last year, I found some ancient James Bond skis. They seriously look exactly like what Roger Moore’s double wore in…that one Bond movie where he went skiing. No, the other one. However, I realized that there is a reason so few people wear skis from the 70s. Ski technology has come a long way. I was able to ski in them, but it was a lot more work to not end up face-first in the snow, and I didn’t enjoy myself. I’m not interested in handicapping myself. I just want to have fun and not fall down too much. I didn’t want to admit that, of course, because that would be disloyal to my whole secondhand lifestyle. Earlier this year, I found a pair of skis that were actually made this century. And now I have new boots. The ones I had before seemed to have trouble snapping, like something was caught in the mechanism. These are in better shape, are a better brand, and were only $2. Maybe I should have been suspicious when the woman acted relieved to be getting rid of them. Perhaps they are cursed. Those were Sonny Bono’s boots! I prefer to think that they were her husbands and they just had a messy divorce. Yup, that’s me. Wishing messy divorces on complete strangers.
And finally, well, I guess I had better go ahead and come clean. Josh and I have gotten ourselves hooked on Star Trek. It started a few months ago when my company took everyone out to see the new movie in the theatre (on opening day, no less). The movie is actually quite good. I’d never seen any Trek at all, so I was surprised that I enjoyed it. We went home and started watching The Original Series on Netflix and CBS.com. And now we’ve gotten through them all and are ready to proceed to The Next Generation. We found the first six movies on VHS for fifty cents apiece. We’ve already watched two of them. I know, I know. I am doing no favors to the reputation of programmers everywhere, but I can’t help it. I like Star Trek. I like William Shatner’s dramatic pauses and Leonard Nimoy’s eyebrows, and I don’t care who knows it.
Oh, and Josh bought some books. See? Not much of a day. Nothing to blog about, but if I didn’t blog about it, then how else would I get the opportunity to take a picture of a cardboard box full of empty jars?
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