In years past, Bonnie and I have ridden our bikes to the sale. Bikes are better in traffic, you can get closer to the sales to see if they’re worth stopping for, you don’t have to find a place to park, and getting off and on the bike is quicker than getting in and out of a car. The only downside, is that the neighborhood is super hilly, so riding is an exhausting bitch. Sadly, bike riding was not an option this year, so we had to drive.

In addition to the big neighborhood sale, there were countless other garage sales, estate sales, and the junk sale was back today. I saw several things that I was interested in, but nothing that I wanted to spend money on. I really wasn’t in the mood to spend money, though I would have had I seen something I couldn’t live without. Bonnie filled a milk crate, so I got a free milk crate.

I also got a free Par-64 can light that was sitting on the curb at the neighborhood sale. It was with four or five other can lights, but a woman beat me to them. If I had just been there a few seconds sooner, I could have scored them all. Oh, well, that’s just four or five fewer things taking up space in my garage, now.

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So, I hitched up the ol’ trailer and headed on down there. The last time I went, I was the only one there. This time, there were a dozen people going through boxes with little wagons already full. Where were they last time?

I parked my bike at the end of one of the rows and started looking around. It didn’t take long to realize that they hadn’t had a sale this weekend. This was just the detritus of last month’s sale. As picked through as it had been the last time I was there, it was 90% more picked over. Most of the boxes had broken dishes and glassware in them. There was trash all over the ground and hardly anything of value.

Are We Really Discriminating The Trash With An Eskimo’s Nuance For Snow?

Two women were digging through a large box on a pallet, about four feet tall – the kind Amazon fills with returned items. The top was filled with packing paper, but there were items in the bottom. I heard one of the women say to the other, “They don’t want us digging through this,” but I pulled an old curtain rod out of the box and started pushing the paper around anyway. On my third stroke, a woman came up to me from behind and said, “Excuse me, that’s trash.” “Oh, sorry,” I said, “Isn’t it all trash?” I stopped digging and returned to my bike.

Watch Your Shit At The Free-For-All

I didn’t want to leave my bike unattended around so many vultures. Some moron validated my concern when he started poking around in my trailer. He knocked two film reels onto the ground and sheepishly said, “Oh, is this yours?” You fucking know it is, dumbass.

One of the women who had been digging through the big box had a basket set aside with all of her treasures in it. It looked like a pile of blankets with some crockery and dishes stacked on top. A man took a step back and bumped into her basket, knocking all of the dishes onto the ground and shattering them. I’m not sure if you can get mad in that situation.

I found a few things, but nothing worth making a video about. Mostly, it was just garbage, but it was free garbage, so why not save it from the landfill… at least a while longer, anyway? I found a hippo made out of some sort of rubber. It’s all squished, but it feels too delicate to try to reshape. In the same box were a lion and a giraffe, but they were crushed into bits. Bonnie loves hippos, so I thought she might like it.

Had I known it was all just a bunch of shit and there was nothing new, I would have stayed home. Once I was there, though, with my bike and trailer, I felt like returning home empty-handed would be a waste, so I felt obligated to load my little trailer up. It’s a lame excuse, I know, and now I have even more shit to deal with. When will it end?

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When I got home, I just parked my bike and trailer. I didn’t have time to unload it. Maybe tomorrow. I had other plans for today and spending an hour rooting through garbage wasn’t one of them. The outlets for the firepit arrived today, so I installed them this afternoon. Each of the four outlets got progressively harder than the previous until the final one shorted out on the box and I stripped one of the screw holes. It was well dark before I finally got them all installed.

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I found a whole section of old electronics. I found a rack mount patch panel, two old rack mount video selectors, and a rack mount power strip. I also found a large, hard case, with two metal power strips. I stopped looking for things when I was no longer able to carry everything. Bonnie found a few things too. She even found a little Manfrotto tripod for me.

When I carried all of this cool shit up to the front to check out, I was worried they were going to charge a premium for all of the electronics, but she just looked it over, asked me if there was anything in the case – I told her about the power strips – and then said, “How about $40 for everything?” That happened to be exactly how much cash I took out on the way to the sale. I had no problem handing both $20 bills over in exchange for all the cool shit I found. I can’t wait to play with all of it.

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The other reason I decided to check it out was because Friday sales are always the best. If you’ve got so much shit to sell that you don’t think one day will be enough time to sell it, and you choose a standard working day as one of your sale days, you’re probably going to make deals that benefit the buyer more than yourself.

So, I rode down there to see what it was about. All I took with me was a shopping bag because I wasn’t expecting to find anything of interest. When I saw the sale, I was certain I wouldn’t find anything if for no other reason than everything was in boxes and required a lot of digging. I hate that.

I’m not sure what their deal is, but everything they were selling looked like was estate sale leftovers. I suppose it could be storage auctions, too. The point is, the stuff wasn’t retail returns, it was old. The woman taking money said that tomorrow they would have new stuff, so I guess they have a continuous source of inventory.

When I arrived, there was an 18-wheeler attempting to back up to the loading dock, which was at an angle to the driveway. On any other day it might not have been any problem, but today the tables for the sale, and all of the customers were in the way. It took ages for him to back up. I heard a man say, “It’s time to go back to trucking school.” What a dick, I thought. Old men in this city are like that: Simultaneously, and equally ignorant and arrogant.

As I said before, I hate digging through boxes. If I see nothing but boxes at a garage sale, I won’t even stop. I did a lap through all of the aisles just to get a sense of the offerings, but nothing jumped out at me. Of course, my attention was split between the stuff in the boxes and the truck trying to squeeze by the tables with inches to spare. Once he finally made it to the loading dock, I was able to focus and that’s when I found some cassette tapes. I’ve been looking for some time, with no success, for jazz tapes. I didn’t find any today, but I did find some big band music, so I’m getting close.

Once I found those, I went back through to take a closer look through some of the boxes. I found some interesting things, but not interesting enough to buy. There were some old film slides, and 16mm film. There was also a box of porn on VHS. What I did find that was interesting enough to buy, though, was a 12′ stand for my green screen, and a VHS-C video camera that came in a nice bag and included an unopened VHS-C cassette tape and a used one. I hoped the used one might have home videos on it. It was a woman demonstrating a belly dance. The video camera doesn’t work, so that’s a bummer. Still, it was a good sale, and I might take Bonnie back tomorrow.

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