Beautiful day in Ballard on Saturday with TONS of sales. I had put together a printout listing four pages of sales, and after four hours I don’t think we even got to any of the sales on the 3rd and 4th pages.

We met at my house at 8:30, had a quick bank run and started hitting some sales. This week we had not one but two guest stars — Karl and a new addition, Cathy. I hope that Cathy guest blogs, but this is questionable, since she was insanely hungover/still drunk from the night before.

I have to say that with the amount of sales, it wasn’t spectacular overall. I am not saying it was bad, but it just wasn’t AMAZING.

The first sale we hit was sort of “Mommy gets rid of her vintage.” They had some good stuff, but it didn’t really fit the folks selling it (like a Schlitz beer vest!). These folks seemed way too straightlaced to own anything not made by Baby Gap. As we got in the car to leave, one woman started hanging an old alphabet teacher’s aid in a tree. It looked cool and I yelled “I’m buying that” out the window of the car. One of the salers said “I just beat you to it!” Thwarted by a pregnant lady!

The next sale was way too hippie, and I don’t mind going to older hippie sales (aka REAL HIPPIES) but not hippies that like Phish — if you are even remotely close to my age and hippie, I know you aren’t going to have good stuff.

We went to a horrible rummage sale for the Ballard High Beavers Basketball team. It was the WORST!

Not even worth wasting time talking about how bad it was, because that is time that I can’t get back. In fact that team owes me 10 minutes and about 50 cents’ worth of unleaded.

A friend of Cathy’s was having a sale and this is when I sort of lost all reasoning and purchased an entire set of dishes. As I sit here looking at the four unopened boxes, I’m still not sure what happened. Let’s start by saying, I have absolutely no space for dishes. We don’t even have space for an extra coffee cup let alone a full set of dishes. I already have what I would call “Christmas dishes” or “fancy family dishes,” plus a full set of Fiestaware and a full set of Pomegranate Eclipse dishes.

So, I start asking questions about the dishes and the friend of Cathy’s is telling me how nice they are and how much money they are worth. I look at the back and I know that Limoges is good, so I talked her down from $50 to $45 and we filled the entire trunk in a matter of five minutes. When I called my boyfriend to tell him that “I might have purchased some dishes” his only response was “aw, fuck.” The dishes are Haviland Albany Limoges and I think I scored a really great deal.

Barry M. Later was having a yard sale. We have been to a few of his sales over the last three years and we usually don’t end up buying anything, but they are highly entertaining.

We hit a TON of sales over the course of the next two hours. I rarely ever grab stuff out of free boxes, but I found a crazy sea shell education toy, some scary sunglasses and some white ’50s pumps in different free boxes around Ballard. We also went to one sale which had a crazy amount of kewpie dolls, accompanied by the saddest looking seal ever.

It was a fun day, and we all ended up getting some good stuff.