Through our extensive years of yard-saling we have determined that the Saturdays of holiday weekends (Memorial Day/Labor Day) generally don’t have a ton of sales. Furthermore, the sales that are there are often lame. But did this keep us from heading out? Of course not! And though it was indeed true that there weren’t a lot of sales, and many of them sucked, we ended up with some good scores just the same.

The first sale we went to we found by accident. The woman quickly pissed us off by mentioning that there had just been a rush of buyers. “They bought the weirdest stuff,” she said. “All of the really old stuff.” Yeah, that’s really weird. Then as I started flipping through the books, she mentioned that those had been cleaned out too. I have never figured out why people think it’s a good idea to tell you about all of the stuff you missed out on at their sales.

We went to a few really bad sales with the most boring things. There was also this one where they had signs up, but when we got there all we found was this:

I guess they hadn’t opened up yet, but this really didn’t make us want to come back later to check it out.

There were a few sales that started at 10:00 that sounded more promising. One of them was a fundraising sale. In the ad, they’d said “No haggling allowed!” so of course we had to make numerous fake attempts to haggle, probably not entertaining anyone but ourselves. They had a few good things, including some crazy polyester disco shirts – I got one with a label that has the Saturday Night Fever logo on it.

Another late-starting sale was a moving sale advertising lots of vintage. It was in an apartment building and as we pulled up we realized we’d been to one of her sales last year where we both got some great things. We were just about the first people there and there wasn’t a ton of stuff out, but it was all interesting. I picked up a bunch of things including couple of men’s vintage shirts, some barkcloth and vintage fabric, a black vinyl ’60s jacket (that I thought would be cute, but I didn’t like when I put it on at home), and one of the weirdest things I’ve bought at a sale in some time: about eight little packets of vintage hairnets from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. I have no interest in the hairnets themselves, but the packaging is pretty great. I was also fascinated to see that a couple of the packages proudly proclaimed they were made out of real human hair! Meghan also amassed a pile at this sale – some vintage clothes and I’ve already forgotten what else. The prices were good, but we both ended up spending a little more than we expected here.

We went to one sale in an alley where I bought some wacky ’60s curtains. These people also annoyed me by mentioning that as they were setting up last night, someone came by and spent $300 on various items. Some of the stuff was in their garage, and at one point someone tried to purchase a box full of fifty-year-old letters from some relative that wasn’t actually part of the sale, which caused a bit of consternation.

Despite the low good-to-bad sale ratio and the preponderance of annoying sellers, I had a great time, probably because it had been almost a month since Meghan and I have made the yard sale rounds together. And we ended up doing pretty well. Some of the other things I got were a ’60s American flag motif sweater (that Meghan has threatened to wear along with her wacky “Vote” jacket for Halloween if we can find some appropriately star-spangled pants), a few cute kids’ clothes items, some brand-new Levi’s that actually fit, and a couple of interesting books. Meghan picked up a Le Creuset stockpot for $5 (!!!), an alligator purse, a white decorated box that says “Smoker,” and other assorted odds and ends. The trunk was filled at the end of the day — which shouldn’t really surprise anyone …