It’s been cold and drizzly. Not as cold as the East Coast, but enough to make you re-think going to yard sales. Unless you are a diehard or just really dumb, you are probably staying warm in your bed on a Saturday or maybe you are hitting some thrift stores. Not us –- we hit a whopping four rainy-day sales.

Karl and Jenny both came over and we pretty much just talked about what the sales might be like, trying to figure out which ones happened on Friday and whether Karl had hit them the day before. In the end we decided to hit our usual cafe for a baked good first. This led to a 10-minute conversation about them “phoning it in” these days, as far as the pastries go. Long story short -– we had very little faith in the sales even being half good.

Well, the first sale was intense. I don’t really know another way to put it. It was an estate sale in the garage and basement, filled with really old, really weird stuff.

By the time I went back to take photos people had really started to clean it out, but you can still sort of get the idea.

There was also a huge free pile out front.

I don’t feel like I really can do the sale justice, but I picked up five 1920s vintage dresses, 3 1930s purses (2 arts and crafts style and one crocodile) and a ton of odds and ends. Karl picked up a large Le Creuset paella pan for $10, some other dishes, some vintage t-shirts, and a large stuffed crow (fake, but looks real). Jenny grabbed this crazy anatomy fold-out booklet poster thing from like the 1940s. I wasn’t paying that much attention because honestly, I really just needed to deal with what I had grabbed, Jenny even had to help me carry it all out. One woman told me she had filled her entire car with stuff. In the end I had spent $130. Ouch! I never spend that much at one sale.

The next sale we hit was what was advertised as a “mini estate sale” – whatever the hell that is.

They had all right stuff, but it felt like grandma had been sent to a home, so why not just dump everything on the floor and don’t price anything. That just made it feel really messy and like a yard sale tornado had hit it.

The kitchen was a little less chaotic, since they had just left most things on the shelves.

For some reason they had about five of this item — a dog dish? It was very strange.

I kept thinking I would find something, but it just seemed like a huge dud. Then I spotted a nice black medium Le Creuset cast iron pot with a lid, a frying pan, and then another smaller non-marked frying pan. I picked them all up and went to pay for them. The high school aged daughter said $7 for all. WTF, REALLY? I had a $10 bill in her hand before she could change her mind. Karl was standing behind me trying to purchase a walkman from the ’80s and this is when things started to get strange. All of a sudden I have a woman pretty aggressively telling me that those are her pans. Um, what?

Her: Those are my pans.
Me: I just purchased them.
Her: But those are mine.
Me: But I just paid for them. I saw them on the floor, I picked them up and now I have purchased them.
Her: I told your husband that those are MY PANS.
Me: Um, that is not my husband.
Her: Those are my pans!!!

I never raised my voice even when the woman was getting really loud about “her pans” — I explained what happened and even said “this isn’t worth getting so upset over and there is no need to yell at me.” Then the mother of the girl who sold me the pans comes up and wants to know what is going on. The woman was still getting upset, “I guess you have to hold onto whatever you want at this sale and I guess you can’t just leave stuff on the floor that you plan to buy” – well, yeah. That is every single sale I have ever been to, if you want something hold onto it or it probably won’t be there. The mother then asked her daughter how much she had charged me for the pans and started yelling at her that she should have charged me at least $5 each. Still a steal as far as I’m concerned, so I gave her the rest of the $15 and high-tailed it out of there. Jenny was outside and missed the whole thing, but Karl explained that he had tried to grab them a few moments earlier, and was told that she was buying them. I never heard any of that, but I guess it explains why she felt that she “told my husband.” It was one of the most aggressive conversations I have had at a sale and I can’t remember the last time someone yelled at me at a sale. But as far as I’m concerned, $5 Le Creuset is worth getting into a squabble over.

Our next stop was a country club sale. I have been to a few sales here, but it’s a mixed bag and this woman didn’t know what the heck she was doing and she wanted to have a long conversation every time we asked her about a price. She had nice stuff, but nothing amazing.

Then we hit one last sale on the way home that I honestly don’t remember.

Nearly everything in the trunk was from that first estate sale …