It really doesn’t bode well when your Saturday starts off with this.

And this.

And this.

It gets even worse when the seller tries to engage you in a conversation about how you might really need that Christmas sweater. (Or is that “seater”?)

Are sales ever good in October? I guess I could look through our archives to find out. Then again, I’m not sure I really want to know, with a few weekends still to go in the month … In any case, last Saturday was mostly full of duds.

One of the few decent sales we hit was listed as “Two Gay Men with Good Taste Clean out the Closets.” They did have an interesting spread, although I would strongly argue that not all of it represented “good” taste.

I did love how this isn’t “As Seen On TV”, but “Similar to items seen on TV.” At least they’re being honest!

We started talking to one of the guys and it turned out that a lot of the items had belonged to an elderly neighbor who’d recently passed away after living alone all his life. Among the things they’d helped to clean out from his garage were several pairs of unworn vintage men’s shoes. Some of them had newspaper ads for the same shoes cut out and stuck into them. There were also shirts, furniture, and a three-foot-high fridge that was apparently the only one in the house — the guy didn’t cook at all and ate every meal at a restaurant. I did buy something here which I declared was definitely in the “Top Five Most Boring Items Purchased At A Sale”: furnace filters! Totally mundane, but I was about to have to go buy them new, so I was happy to snag a bunch for $1 each.

While we were talking this annoying woman came up chirping “Is this the two fabulous gay guys sale? Two fabulous gay guys?” The seller muttered something about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Then as we left he asked if we had gotten our free squishy house toy. He ran over to a box and handed us each a little foam house, promo items from some window company or something, saying we could use them for stress relief. As we drove away Meghan said “What is wrong with me that I am actually taking unwanted items people give me?” She proceeded to leave her house at the next sale we hit.

We decided to head to the estate sale that Meghan and Karl had hit on Thursday to see what was still there. On the way we encountered this setup.

Everything was suuuuuuuuuuuper crusty, like it had been in those boxes for at least a couple of decades. Meghan managed to fish out a couple of clothing items that she thought could be Oxy-Cleaned into shape. They also had a number of owl items.

I decided my foam house could keep one of them company.

Then we were off to the estate sale, which was lots of fun and still had a ton left (including a musical Last Supper Clock hanging on the wall — two in one day!). We each ended up buying a few things there.

I think the most that can be said for this day is that it wasn’t a total bust.