yard sales…a while back.

This post is about stuff I bought a couple of weeks ago, rather than what I bought yesterday.  Holidays and three-day weekends make for crappy yard sales. 

A while back, Josh bought some old recording equipment from a lady who was old, confused, and loathe to part with anything.  It was a little sad for us, but also frustrating for her adult granddaughter, who was trying to clean out the basement.  Anyway, I found some old tapes, new and clean, at a yard sale last week.  I was a little afraid to ask about the price.  You can never tell whether people are going to think something is junky or valuable.  This is especially true of anything technology related.  Luckily, the lady sold all four of these tapes to me for a dollar. 

I wasn’t willing to spend much, since I wasn’t even sure if they were what Josh needed.   That’s the trouble of yard saling without him.  If I see something that I suspect that he would buy if he were there, I feel obligated to get it.  But sometimes I’m just not sure if it is the right thing at all.  This time, it was the right thing after all, and I came home looking like a champion girlfriend. 

“And the gold medal for buying excellent random old audio recording technology at a yard sale is…SANDRA!!!”

Speaking of old audio equipment, I also bought a metronome.  It’s a bit broken, in that it’s missing the top piece and also the little piece that changes the tempo.  But it does work for exactly one beat, so I guess all of Josh’s new songs will be very fast toe-tapping numbers.  But I still like it very much.  I feel as if I had wanted a metronome for a long time, though I didn’t know it.  Maybe there are things that you want and have wanted for a long time, but don’t even know about it.

Bowls!  The three on the left are all Pyrex, while the one on the right is not vintage at all, but it sure is shiny!

I bought this little tin despite the fact that I am not much into tins, nor do I often buy other people’s souvenirs.  By the way, if you do have a real hankering for tins, then you should be checking out the secondhand market.  Some of them are ugly Christmas cookie tins that you give to your mail carrier, but others are very nice. 

Anyway, I am not a tin person, and I’ve never even been to Niagara Falls.  I just really like the artwork on this tin.  They don’t make souvenir art like this anymore, or if they do it is trying to imitate this style.  Or maybe all souvenir art has always been imitating something else.

Okay, I didn’t buy this tiny helmet at a yard sale (nor did I get the bottle of rum at a yard sale).  I bought it at the Durham Rescue Mission thrift store.  What the Rescue Mission store lacks in organization, it makes up for in random stuff.  You might call it a digger’s store, because there is so much stuff there that you have to get your hands a little dirty to get to what is in the back or on the bottom.  Sometimes I don’t have the energy for it, but sometimes I do, and I find things like this.

It’s a pourer for a liquor bottle or any kind of bottle, I guess.  When I told my mom about it, she told me that if I ever saw another one, she might be interested.  I wasn’t sure how to convey to her that this was not the kind of thing I see very often.  You can find them on eBay, though not for the sweet price of a dollar that I paid.

That’s it for this week.  Or last week?  Whenever it was.