With Jenny out of town, I had sent a mail to Karl to see if he wanted to come out to the north end and hit some sales. Then I logged off my email and hit some yard sales on Friday. Nothing blog-worthy, with the exception of the sale that was selling a used Speed Stick. I am okay with some questionable stuff at sales, but deodorant? G-R-O-S-S.

Later on in the day I received a phone message from Karl saying he wanted to come to sales, but only if his friend Krista could come too. We decided to meet at 8:30 and I said I would organize a plan.

In the morning Karl was running late and we really didn’t start hitting anything until around 9:00. I had written a list of sales that Karl seemed unable to follow and even Krista at one point said, “Karl you’re a really bad navigator.” It didn’t really matter, since there were so many signs up all over the place.

At one of our very first sales I saw an older woman buying a Night Kings 7″ and I made a comment about it right away. Turns out she was the wife of a record squirrel. He had sent her over to buy records for him while he was digging in a box of LP’s across the street. She started acting like she had found this prize. I tried to explain to her that it’s pretty specialized and 1) she probably wouldn’t like it, and 2) it wasn’t worth much to someone that doesn’t like that style of music.

In typical Karl “get in the car” style, Krista and I had to wait while he was chatting with someone at the sale. After a moment a car pulled up, the folks got out and went to the yard sale. All of the sudden this friggin’ huge Great Dane popped out of the sun roof and started to whine.

We hit a few unremarkable sales, then a pretty large block sale. Jenny and I had been to this block sale a few years ago and it was great. This time around was a little more “eh.”

After grabbing a snack we saw a sale that looked pretty good. Karl came up to me and quietly said “hey, that guy was working the ‘collectables/vintage’ sale a few weeks ago.” To be honest I hadn’t really noticed him at first. I looked around for his wife, but didn’t see her. Now, Jenny and I have had a couple of talks about that sale. We made a choice to not blog about it, since we didn’t want to say anything negative — even if it sometimes seems like that is the purpose of this blog. Let’s just say there have been some things about her sales that were not cool, and leave it at that.

So, I asked him the price for clothing. Make an offer. I ignored him and kept looking through the sale. I then found a little girls ’50s sewing machine in the original box. I was very point blank about pricing with him. “What do you want for the sewing machine? And do I really have to make you an offer on the clothes?” He looked at me and said “Well, you know who my wife is” — um, yeah. So, I said “Yeah, I know your wife, but I am only going to offer you $2 each on the clothing” — LAST TIME I CHECKED THIS WAS A YARD SALE.

Of course I spent the next hour randomly saying “Well, you know who my wife is.”

One thing that always gets me about sales is how you remember bad (and good) sales from years before. As we drove by a sale, I could remember that it was a woman that had priced everything at her sale like it was an antique store. I didn’t want to go, but Karl wanted to check it out. I was right on the money. Tons of overpriced crap. She did have this huge ass Zippo lighter that I would have wanted to own about 15 years ago.

We decided to hit a new area. Overall that was a bust, but one sale had the best books. The guy that was selling them was a hoot and he told funny stories about some of the books (in a non-annoying way). The books seemed like a mix of pinko, liberal, and high brow intellectual selections. Considering how late in the day it was he still had good stuff.

We started to wind our way back home, hitting a super junky sale. Everything looked this messy.

It would have been great if I had wanted to stock up on knives … for 2$ each (or is that $2.00 each?)

After that another block sale that was making everyone free lattes out of a vending machine! I spotted these two choice videos there.

We knocked off around 1:00. All in all it turned out to be a decent day.