There were not a ton of sales last Saturday, but we were itching to go out after nearly a month’s hiatus. Karl even joined us, for the first time in ages – first regaling us with tales of an estate sale he hit on Friday, where he had to wait in line next to some douchebag wearing two pairs of sunglasses on his head and shadow-boxing. As we set out, he asked if we had seen the “sale lady” signs nearby – uh, what? They must have just been put up this morning – we followed them to a sale just a few blocks away.

We didn’t have a very good feeling when we pulled up.

Inside was not much better. Although they did have the Smooth Jazz cable music channel playing to set the mood.

We made an early snack run and then hit an outdoor sale where I don’t think anyone bought a thing.

Next was an estate sale. As soon as we walked in, there was Furniture Guy! Great. We moved into the back and there was Annoying Jewelry Guy. Both of them at one sale is really too much. Jewelry Guy was asking the seller questions and looked crestfallen when she mentioned she had kept the real gold pieces for herself. Meghan and I took a look through what he’d left behind and when she pointed out a charm that claimed to be from the “Olympic Sleeping Team” I had to grab it. (Later I noticed that there’s an extra “I” in OLYMIPIC. Not sure if that is incompetence or a half-hearted attempt at copyright avoidance.)

In another room, Meghan spotted another item with apparent Olympic credentials – this “Deep Heat Massager” had the Olympic Committee official selection seal of approval.

I am sure that Olympic athletes use this all the time. (Maybe just the competitive sleepers.)

The sale was pretty bad. Here is a representative sampling.

Meghan started looking through some record and asked the guy how much. He said fifteen dollars each! My neck craned around to see if he was actually high. We all sort of laughed at this and he tried to explain that if you went to a local record store they would charge more than that — you can imagine how well that went over. I thought he might charge me extra for my Sleeping Team charm just for snarking on his crazy prices, but he only asked for fifty cents. As we drove away, Meghan ranted about their crazy record prices, finally summing up the situation with this: “You are not a store. Stores don’t have olive green shag carpeting from the ’70s.”

Our next stop was something Meghan had seen signs for earlier in the week: a sale in the Whole Foods parking lot. I guess some employees had collected stuff to be sold as some kind of benefit. I kept making stupid comments about whether it was going to be getting real – Meghan did not have any idea what the hell I was talking about and I had to try and explain this video to her.

I would not exactly say that anything was getting real at this sale, but they did have a pretty decent spread.

Sure, some of it was promotional t-shirts for stuff like Amy’s Yogurt and Dave’s Killer Bread, but there was actually a lot of good stuff, and it was priced to move. Meghan filled up a bag, and we all ended up buying stuff. (Then we went inside to use their bathroom and get something to drink.)

We had debated going to a huge school rummage sale that happens every year – none of us really wanted to deal with what was probably going to be crowded and not all that fruitful (like the last time I went to that sale). Instead, we headed toward an estate sale that had started on Friday – usually we pass on these, but it sounded like it might still be worthy, or at least might be interesting for blogging purposes. It turned out that this was the same sale Karl had hit the day before, but he said it was probably worth a stop since it was a pretty schmancy spread.

We hit one yard sale first, where Karl purchased a $6 Le Creuset pan, and then headed to the estate sale – passing this truck covered in giant dayglo Legos on the way.

The house itself was super cute.

Inside, the first thing I noticed were these amazing portraits! They seemed to be looking at each other from across the room …

Here’s a close-up of the lady, plus a few others – there were tons of fancily-framed paintings (and repros) throughout the house.

They had a massive amount of stuff, even for being the second day. The spread really ranged from the very fancy, to the not-at-all fancy.

That last item was in a basement bathroom which had a working phone in it … I only know this because Karl used it to call me.

And last but not least: a musical Christmas tie. Meghan came rushing downstairs to show us this video — yes, she took a video of this insane thing.

They did have some great old magazines – 1930’s copies of Sunset and more – but like most things at this sale, they were super expensive. The prices were seriously deranged for the most part. I guess maybe on Sunday if things went half-price, some stuff might be worth it. Maybe. Meghan did pick up a few items but I left empty-handed.

A couple more quick stops with nothing too thrilling to report, and we were done for the day.