Phinney Ridge Garage Sale Day started out with a drizzly dull thud, since many of its 100 signed-up participants didn’t even have a sale –- we wouldn’t have either. It was cruddy for the first 4 hours of the sale. Then again, it was the day of the rapture, so maybe some folks had some other ideas planned for their last day of earth.

Since we had been to this neighborhood sale in the snow one year I felt like it was sort of hard to bitch, since it wasn’t sleeting. Honestly, the idea of coming here with less sales was sort of good, since the streets are usually so packed. This year I was able to get my car down with the tiny streets in record time.

Hey, sellers! Let me go back to a 2008 post and give you this gentle reminder of items that you just shouldn’t sell at your sale:

Each time we go to sales we learn new (and sometimes “interesting”) things about people at sales. For instance, we identified the top 3 things not to have at a yard sale:

1. hair highlighting kit
2. chili
3. maxi-pads

Let me stress that all of these were at the same sale.

One of our first sales had chili, and a whole bag of hair highlighting kits. When I asked the woman if I could take a photo of her chili she opened the lid for a photo-op.

I yelled across the street to Jenny “hey, they have chili AND hair highlighting kits” — it seemed like she didn’t know what I was talking about for a moment, then my golden rule dawned on her. The woman asked me why this was funny and I made up some stupid story that made no sense, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Then at the next sale, what was one of the first things we saw?

Yeah, Kotex pads. Honestly ladies, what is wrong with you?!?!

This was an everything is free sale, or in this case please donate to build wells in Uganda.

It was pretty good if you wanted books and both Jenny and I lost all reasoning and I grabbed more books that have no space on any shelf. We both felt good about our donation.

After making the rounds here for so many years we ‘ve become pretty familiar with some of the regular sales. One woman always has a sale in her garage with a lot of vintage items — I think she must have had a store at some point.

Her prices are good and I almost always find something at her sales. I picked up a few pieces of clothing this time around.

We drove on and at one point Jenny pointed at the side of the road at something she thought might be a sale.

Um, yeah … what the hell?

Sadly, Karl wasn’t with us, since soon after that we found three crates of records, most of them ’60s and ’70s country records.

We both picked up a few things and also made fun of some of the more silly covers.

I did get a nice George Jones LP.

A few stops later we found an amazing embroidered Zodiac Clock – what’s not to love?!

At another sale I found two pairs of vintage mens’ cowboy boots priced at $2 each! I snagged those, but passed on their large troll collection.

Jenny looked a little closer and found this oddity.

We made some more rounds, but most of the stuff was just bad.

At a certain point I started to feel like we had been driving in circles, which we had been, but even more it seemed like we kept driving down the same block three or four times. Then when we hit the other side of Phinney we saw a total of five sales.

After that we headed into Ballard, passing this sign on the way — we had to laugh. Who is Hugh?

We hit an estate sale where the house really grossed me out, even though it wasn’t the worst sale we have been to. It had a lingering smell. I think the big pile of crap out back gives you a pretty good idea.

Once we left I told Jenny I needed a Unicorn Chaser STAT. That of course wasn’t in the cards… we did hit a few non-magical sales, one of which really seemed more like someone trying to run a vintage store out of their living room.

After a couple more sales we both thought it was time to go home. All in all, I think we did all right.