It was pretty nice out last Saturday, and there were tons of sales listed! Naturally our first stop had to be the neighborhood sale that I had steered Meghan towards last time, not realizing that it was happening THIS weekend. Sure enough, this time it was ON.

The first sale we hit looked really promising. I was dismayed to see a guy who’d already pulled out a huge stack of books. Did he snag all the good stuff?

I glanced at his pile and was kind of relieved to find nothing I wanted in there. I dug through the rest, and it seemed like there would be something, but yet … nothing tempted me. However, Meghan headed to the upper level and grabbed about six or seven hardcover design books for about a buck each. Nice! We kept meandering through the neighborhood.

Let me state that it was freakishly windy. At this sale a clothes rack almost blew over and knocked me down. Things were flying off the tables!

After hitting everything in that neighborhood, we moved on to a few sales nearby. The ad for this one had seemed promising, mentioning vintage items. They definitely had a lot of stuff.

Smaller items were set out in bins that were a complete mix of items. Vintage sectioned plate? Kewpie doll? White plastic football? Red Skelton VHS tapes?

The next bin was even more baffling: a stack of 8-track tapes labeled “parts only.”

While I was pondering whether there was some market for 8-track parts that I had been unaware of, Meghan pointed out this wacky item that looked like a burlap sack with a fluffy cat’s tail poking out of it. “Smack it on the table!” the seller called to us. We did so … and decided it was video time.

Neither of us brought that home, but Meghan grabbed some vintage dinerware with a Shriner motif. (Hey, that rhymes! Shriner-diner!)

We had two choices of where to go next. A cluster of sales in another neighborhood, or two sales that were closer, but in the opposite direction. We decided to hit the two sales, making our first stop at what was billed as a 7-room estate sale.

They had a list of rules posted prominently at the door, with a kid selling treats nearby. (I purchased a donut-hole-on-a-stick for a quarter.)

Once inside, the first thing we saw was what Meghan referred to as the “Instant Bauer collection.” If you wanted to spend some money, that is.

There was a decent amount of stuff there. Some of it was kind of classy and antique-y …

… and some of it was not.

We both felt like there might be some good clothes somewhere in the closet, but it was a bust.

And this huge vintage poster was awesome, but $1100? Who’s going to walk into a sale and drop that?

The second sale on this street had a ton of new clothes, some with tags still on. Most of it was sportswear, or at least sporty.

By this time the wind was really picking up. After Meghan asked the price of a jacket and it was $35, I decided to go wait in the car, thinking to myself that $35 is not an acceptable answer when asking the price of a jacket at a yard sale … only to have Meghan come over a few minutes later asking to borrow some cash. She was purchasing the jacket, which turned out to be some super high end thing I’d never heard of, and a pair of compression pants, which is also something I’ve never heard of but apparently they are really expensive.

Meghan was talking excitedly about her purchases as she got back into the car and tried to start it up … only to have it do nothing. Which had happened to us last time we were making the rounds! Apparently, her car doesn’t always feel like starting up, but only when we are going to yard sales; it had been fine all week. After several attempts and curse words, the car finally managed to start, and off we went. We spotted a sign for a sale in what we usually refer to as “No-Sidewalk-Land” (or occasionally just “scary”) but for some reason, we decided to go. Little did we realize that we were headed to a sale across from a cemetery. Yes, the cemetery that we accidentally drove into while hitting sales a couple years back. Let’s revisit that magic moment:

On the way to the next sale we had something happen that I can seriously tell you has never happened before: I accidentally drove into a cemetery. I know what you are thinking — “HOW???” This cemetery is very small and older, so there are no huge signs out front. It also has a small street that runs along one side, so when I whipped into the cemetery I thought I was on that street. Both of started cracking up at how absurd this was. I do some pretty crazy driving on occasion, but this took the cake.

This time we managed not to drive into the cemetery, but when we saw the actual sale … we were still frightened.

We decided we had to venture in, just for blogging purposes. But since it wasn’t really a place you’d want to be stuck if the car really crapped out, we did so while leaving the car running. Classy, right?

This sale … I’m not sure I can convey how strange it really was. We walked through a gate, alongside that tarp-covered trailer, between tables laid out with all manner of items that seemed to have spent several decades boxed up in a damp garage. There were cats lying around on the astroturf-like material that covered the walkway. I sort of felt like I didn’t want to touch anything and there was definitely a bit of meth-head vibe going on. Just when I was getting ready to turn around and leave, Meghan nudged me. “Did you see that leg?”

What? A leg? Yes, a prosthetic leg, propped up on a table. It looked like it had seen better days. Meghan asked about it and the woman said, “That’s my daughter’s old leg! She outgrew it.” The daughter, who was sitting behind a cashbox, nodded at us. The woman added that ten percent of all sales would be used to buy her new shoes.

We pretended to look around a bit more and I knew Meghan was going through the same thought process that I was: trying to figure out how to take a picture without it being too strange, but eventually accepting the fact that there was no way and regretfully giving up. On the way out I spotted some colored paper signs, cut in little starburst shapes and taped up to the trailer like little advertisements and notices. Again, I could not manage a picture, but the ones that I remember said: “Used Broken Computers — ASK!” “10% of all proceeds used for orthopedic shoes!” and finally “SMILE, YOU’RE ON CAMERA!!!”

We jumped into the still-running car and sped away from that insanity. Meghan made a comment about how she needed some Purell, and I was confused since I didn’t think she had touched anything there, either … until she clarified that what she wanted was Purell for her soul.

We spotted a sign for a “G Sale” — I always find this entertaining.

When we got there, they’d boiled it down to one letter. NO MESSING AROUND.

We didn’t buy anything, and this being closer to home (AND NOT ACROSS FROM A FREAKIN’ CEMETERY) Meghan had actually turned her car off … when it again failed to start until six or seven tries in, we detoured back to Meghan’s house and switched to my car. Meghan is not a fan of reading while driving (and I’m not sure she could really decipher the handwriting on my scrawled list) so I let her drive. Our next stop Meghan immediately recognized as the house where, at a sale long ago, a kid had done card tricks for us.

Thanks to the magic of having blogged for so long, I can tell you that this was nearly five years ago (and that we’d been at yet another sale there before that).

Our next stop was a house where I’d been to a sale years before and picked up a working ’70s Technics turntable for $5. Unfortunately, there was nothing I wanted to buy this time around, but there was a grade-school boy who shouted, “Card tricks! Twenty-five cents!” I made Karl give him a quarter and he proceeded to do a very long trick in which he repeatedly asked, “Um … is this your card?” We felt bad that he seemed to be screwing it up, but it turned out to be an elaborate setup for a grand finale where the right card was revealed.

The kid was nowhere in sight (probably a surly teen by now) but Meghan mentioned this to the guy having the sale, who didn’t seem to remember the particular incident but said he knew who the kid must have been. Just as we were about to leave empty-handed, Meghan spotted this odd but sort of cool brown ceramic thing — like a square plank with a grid pattern. It was marked “Carmel Kiln Company” and the seller said he didn’t know what it was for, but his mother used to have it hanging on the wall. She decided to purchase it and by the time she got in the car I’d searched on my phone and discovered that it was for meant for baking bread on, the squares meant for measuring out rolls. Who knew?

We headed across town to a basement sale. This was in a building I’ve driven past many times, which is partially covered with an aquatic animal mural. I had never been inside, or planned to, but I guess it was my lucky day.

The seller had thoughtfully provided entertainment by means of a TV that was playing West Side Story. She told us that some earlier shoppers had hung out watching it for a while.

I spotted this item, which I had never before imagined existed … the Mr. Potato Head Massager.

Again, we left empty-handed. The day had started off so promising! Had the leg sale jinxed us? Or was it switching cars? Who knows, but we determinedly headed to the final sale on our list, another estate sale. The first thing I saw was an odd fake metal dog thing that plugged in … I couldn’t figure out what it actually did when you plugged it. There was a small area that might have been a light, but the people running the sale said they’d tried it and whatever it used to do, it didn’t do any more. Oh well. Meghan was laughing about this calendar, where the days and year had been altered in order to count down to the sale weekend.

Then we spotted these great Halloween masks! We agreed that they were cool, but not ten-dollars-cool (just take-a-picture cool).

These guys were also take-a-picture-cool, or maybe that should just be take-a-picture-weird.

I spotted the second oval-framed portrait of the day — this one wasn’t for sale.

We meandered through the house and all of a sudden were led into a blue-shag-carpeted, metallic-wallpapered nook, complete with bunny cut-out — it felt a bit David Lynchian.

On the other side of this was a bedroom which contained a selection of terrible clothes. We dubbed this “Grandma’s ’80s Closet.”

Many of them still had tags, or were wrapped in plastic. (See? David Lynch! Okay, that’s a stretch.)

What is “Haband!”? Does that mean “Unwanted Sweater!” in some foreign language?

Finally, we entered … the doll room.

I think that mirrored wall just adds to the insanity. Doll overload! Along with some stuffed animals and … hey, what’s this?

It looks like a little stuffed flasher guy, right? Dare I look and see what he’s packing under that trenchcoat? Um, you know it …

While I appreciated how awesomely demented this thing is, even more so after reading the label and discovering his name is “Mr. Flashmore Jr.”, I decided against actually bringing him home.

In the end, it wasn’t the most bountiful day, but it wasn’t bad.