YOU KNOW YOU’VE BEEN THRIFTING TOO MUCH WHEN…

So the other night I had this dream that involved much danger and leagues of assassins. I was trying to flee from a gigantic wolf, but my attempts were thwarted because I could not get my flying ottoman started.

That’s right, I could only be saved by a flying ottoman. And not just any ottoman. It was this one…
…the vintage handmade ottoman I bought last October for a buck. Which actually looks like this now, it got some new clothes.
I have no idea what if anything this dream means, unless my subconscious is trying to tell me to pay two bucks next time and get an ottoman that will take off when I need it to.

In other thrifty news, I stopped by Kohl’s today to use the $10 gift card they sent in the mail. They do these promotions every so often; $10 off anything that costs at least $10. It's the only time I go in their stores and my aim is to get as close to $10 as I can. I needed socks, so I picked up two packs that are normally priced $10 each, but were on sale.
Still had to shell out after the gift card was deducted. A whole 32 cents. That’s pretty darned good for six pairs of socks, even by my standards.

Hey, at that rate I could probably even afford to pay two bucks for the next ottoman!

THRIFTING CRITERIA—AND DOGS

Craigslist ads never let me down when I need a smile. Loved the yard sale ad that promised “etc. galore!”

I was looking for something the other day in a previous posting, and ran across a reminder to myself to ask two questions before I buy something: Is this excellent? Will I use it now? Figured this would curb any (or most...or some…) superfluous buying.

Dang. It works!

I went out Friday to a couple of nurseries, and found one or two sales along the way. Spent a buck on two of these hilarious hats.
Excellent, yes? Of their type! I figured they tie in with our water-themed Summer Reading Program, so I'll be giving these away next month.

Saturday morning I was hot to trot. Neighborhood sales are starting in earnest, and I mapped out three to hit. The ads promised hundreds of households would participate.

Yeah, right.

Dozens. I would agree there were dozens. Hundreds, probably not. Though I admit I wasn’t counting. I've tried that. I've always wondered just how many sales I go to on a good day. The highest I've ever remembered to count was three. After that I never give it another thought until I get home.

Three neighborhoods in a good part of town for sales. Everything I looked at I put to the excellent/use now test. And I spent a whole buck and a half on two items.

Now, you might decide that I must be using a sliding scale for the excellence test.
Taste is a highly individual thing. I think she is a hoot. Anything that makes me smile this much is excellent. And I'm getting ready to replant several pots; she’ll be wonderful hiding among my new maidenhair fern. So she passed the second test.

Of course, the third unspoken test is, is the price right? And it was.

My other big buy doesn’t look like much. Yet.
I had a small pond for several years. Plants, fish, and snails kept it balanced. I loved it. My goldfish all had names.
I never knew it was possible to become fond of fish, but evidently I can get fond of anything. (Almost anything. I will never become fond of any bug.) Then something went wrong, and while the plants were okay, all of the creatures died. I decided I didn’t have the heart to start over, and a few weeks ago I sold the pond and the plants. Went to a very nice lady, hope she is enjoying it. But I've started to miss it. So when I saw this tub I asked the price. The guy said, “Oh, anything, what would you think?” I never know what to say when they do that. You know me, what I think is fifty cents. I told him to give me a starting point. “How about a dollar?” he said. Starting point and ending point! He even delivered it to my car, half a block away, while I shopped the rest of his sale.

I figured I'd splurge on a water lily, so I stopped at Home Depot on the way home. I knew I'd seen water plants there recently. And they had marked them down to half price! So my tub has two water lilies and a miniature cattail nestled in its depths. That should satisfy my need for a water feature, and I'm going to keep it simple. I won’t put in any fish, and if mosquito larvae show up I'll just overfill the tub and wash them out.
I did meet some excellent dogs. This is Harley, showing me his good side.
Harley’s other ear is missing. He had a tumor on it and it had to be removed.

Gracie is a Lab/poodle cross.

Didn’t get this one’s name or antecedents.
There was another little dog there, same size, shape and ears but with black fur. I figured they were littermates, but they weren’t related. Just friends.

This elderly fellow was having a very nice nap.
His owners said they adopted him from the shelter two years ago and were told he was about nine at the time. I think maybe the shelter folks were being a little kind on his age estimate; he definitely struck me as older than eleven. But how wonderful that he found a home at that age—and with people who care enough to shade him with his own umbrella!

I love geriatric pets. One of our best cats was Puddy, who we adopted when he was at least 12.
He was a homely old dude, but a fabulous cat. Walked in, said hello to our other pets, and settled right in. We had him for three years. Still miss him.

With three neighborhoods to trawl through, you can imagine all the stuff that I didn’t buy. Here’s an example. These are salt and pepper shakers.
With rhinestone eyes. They were scary. Enough to put one off condiments for life.

A lot of stuff was overpriced today. (Bear in mind that I bought a couple of twenty five cent cashmere sweaters last week!) One of my favorite overheard lines came from a woman who was trying to justify the price she was asking for a shirt. The potential buyer wanted her to come down on her price, but she wouldn’t. “You can't get it for that at Goodwill,” she said.

My other favorite bit came from a dad. The kids were playing in the garage, behind some boxes or something. Out of sight, anyway. Big thump, and giggles. “I don’t know what you’re doing in there,” the dad said, “but you better stop!”

HERE’S HOPING

I headed back to my car, bagel in hand, as a woman got out of her car next to mine. She glanced at my open convertible and said, “You must be feeling hopeful.” Took me a moment to realize she was referring to the overcast sky. My first, instinctive reaction was to wonder how the heck this complete stranger knew I was heading out for yard sales. I always think that’s one of the best parts of Saturday morning, that hopeful feeling of anticipation. You have no idea what you will find, who you will talk to, if some fabulous treasure will be yours in the next few hours.

As I drove off, I thought of that wonderful Emily Dickinson line, Hope is the thing with feathers. Do you know the poem?

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Perhaps I'll find something with feathers today, I thought.

We pause here for a SPOILER ALERT!

If you are a certain friend of mine who had a birthday a few days ago while you were back in the Midwest visiting relatives, stop reading now if I haven’t brought you your birthday present yet. I'm just sayin’!

Okay, now that she’s out of the room we can go on.

Pulled up to the first yard sale. These people have two or three a year, which usually means I don’t stop, but I generally find something fun. And there she was.

Hope. The thing with feathers.
Is this not a riot? And while I would not buy just anyone a large pink flamingo, the friend WHO IS NOT READING THIS LEST HER SURPRISE BE SPOILED has a running joke with some family members involving these birds. They’ve done all sorts of crazy things, including costuming the creatures for various holidays. So I'm hoping this will be enjoyed, and I figure if she doesn’t want to keep it (after all, as the Queen of Fifty Cents always says, if there were no gifts there would be no garage sales) she can send it on to someone else in the family.

I had Hope sitting on the kitchen counter when my husband got home from grocery shopping. I made sure to place myself where I could see his face when he walked in. He’s really good though. If I hadn't known him for over forty years I probably would not have recognized the brief spasm of horror that crossed his face. It's a gift, I said immediately (before he could ask where I was planning to put it). Unless he’d like to keep it. No, he allowed, that’s fine.

There’s probably a name for the way people feel about flamingos. Phoenicopterphobia or some such. I met up with another regular garager a bit later and was showing off my find, and she said her son can't stand them. A neighbor’s Christmas display of festively decorated flamingos struck him as scary. So what did she buy for him? Yup, flamingo bedsheets. Be nice to your mamas, boys, especially if they still make your beds for you.

One more bit about Hope the Flamingo. I paid for her (with much merriment all around me that I was buying The Flamingo) and said something like, she seems reasonably well behaved. Anything I should know about her? The guy didn’t miss a beat.

“Red poop,” he said.

It was that kind of morning. At another place a woman was putting out a large number of shoes to sell. “You should see what’s still in the closet,” she said. I mentioned that I think shoes are one of those things that breed in our closets; you close the door on them and before you know it they’ve multiplied. She agreed, adding, “Yeah, and then there are the strays. Little illegitimate shoe children.” Cracked me up. I have to admit that’s never happened in my closet, but then I don’t have nearly so many shoes as she does. Or did.

It was a good morning for doggies. I was petting Prix
when I noticed her owner looking toward the street with a puzzled expression. A boy of about 9 or 10 was crossing the street, carrying a pair of crutches. “Look, mom,” he called, “I bought some crutches!” She just shook her head. He started right in having a great time with them. Another boy arrived on a bicycle, and the first kid called, “Look what I've got!” They both seemed to think this was the coolest toy ever. I remember thinking crutches were pretty cool when I was that age, and being jealous of kids who were lucky enough to break a leg so they’d get to have some.

This is Rascal. Would you not swear he is a Cairn terrier?
But no. He is a poodle/Chihuahua mix, and I was told he has a sister who looks completely different, with short sleek hair.

Then there was Sassy, a poodle/beagle cross. Sassy was grazing on a clump of grass, and not real interested in having her picture taken.
Finally her owner picked her up. Bingo!
And this is Molly.
Molly was a rescue dog. They said she came from a place where an old woman lived alone and had something like 75 dogs. Molly’s litter had never been out of the cage she had them in; she was about 4 months old when the dogs were rescued. They said she was scared of everything back then, but she’s just been the greatest dog. She’s some kind of shepherd mix, with the softest fur. When she stood up to be petted I saw that she’s bowlegged, I guess from being caged. She walks a little funny, but she found a wonderful forever home with a family who loves her.

I spent a total of $7. Along with the hopeful flamingo, I came home with

Some fun pink die-cut ribbon, yards and yards of it. Will probably give this away.

A Dansk reindeer. He’ll get to hang out with my Dansk cat.
Hmmm. Time to polish the cat!

The world’s heaviest grill pan.

Seriously. This puppy weighs almost 9 pounds!
I was getting near home when I saw one more yard sale sign. Almost didn’t stop, but what the heck. There was the usual pile of clothing on the driveway, and I noticed that some of the sweaters were cashmere. How much, I asked. Twenty five cents for any of the clothing. So I splurged on two cashmere sweaters…

…a merino wool cardigan with a great texture (might end up felting this one, haven’t decided)…
…and a hand knitted wool sweater from South America.

They also had a lovely corgi for me to pet. Emma.

Twenty five cent cashmere and a corgi named Emma. If that’s not enough to fulfill your hopes, I don’t know what is!

ON THE PROWL FOR THRIFTY GOODIES

My sister cracks me up. Had an email from her the other day in which she was telling me about getting caught up with listing items for sale on her website, then going out and finding more stuff to resell. “I plan on hitting a big church sale today after getting Mom home…I really should stay away from them because I have a pretty good backlog of stuff to list now, but what can I say, it's in our blood, no use fighting it. In fact it's probably affected by the full moon we've had. We are garage sale werewolves!”

So now you know, I come from a family of garage sale werewolves. Instead of pacing through the house, needing to be outside when the moon is full, we get extremely restless on Saturday mornings. And if we cannot go thrifting—look out, we bite! And yes, we’ve been known to infect others. We take someone along with us who has never been to a yard sale or thrift store, and they are so amazed at the great deals that they turn into garage sale werewolves too.

I should have t-shirts made up for us that say “Garage Sale Werewolf” but you know me, it would seem way too expensive! I’m awfully happy wearing the silk and cashmere sweater I bought for fifty cents a couple of weeks ago. As far as I'm concerned, that’s how much clothing should cost.

Being a holiday weekend, pickings were slim today. I thought for a while that not only would I find nothing to buy, it looked like I wouldn’t talk to anyone either. The curse of silence was finally broken by a couple of cute elderly pups. This is Lady, who is about 14
and her housemate Roxanne, who is 19.
Roxanne has had hard times in her life, but got lucky at the age of 10 when she was adopted by the ladies whose sale I stopped at. She’s a little lopsided from losing part of her jaw when the bone got infected, and she’s very hard of hearing, but like most dogs she doesn’t seem at all concerned about her infirmities. Dogs are such great role models! And these two have a real symbiotic relationship. Roxanne tends to dribble food since she's missing part of her jaw, but Lady is happy to clean up the dog food that falls on the floor!

The most exciting part of the morning came at a rather crowded sale where a number of shoppers showed up at the same time, including a couple walking a miniature Pinscher. “Oh,” said the lady having the sale, “keep an eye out for our cat. She likes dogs. In fact, here she comes.” This cat wasted no time checking out the dog on her driveway. She may like dogs, but she made sure that this one knew not to mess with her.
I was expecting hostilities to break out any moment, but both cat and dog decided not to push it. But neither one took their eyes off the other for a second.
Even when kitty got picked up to be petted, her gaze was glued to that dog still on the ground.

As I said, pickings were slim, but I'm happy with what I found. Spent a total of $8.50 and brought home five DVDs.
One is a new addition to the collection, the others will replace old VHS tapes.

My other find was this sweet little hand painted plate.


Love the name of the maker: Hutschenreuther.
As I often do, I looked it up when I got home. Turns out this was a well regarded German porcelain maker begun by a family of that name. Didn’t find this pattern, but there are over 3000 listings on eBay so they made a lot of china over the years! It's about 7” across, perfect for dessert.

Perhaps I should go bake something. It would be a shame to make this little beauty wait to be used.

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGETY JOG

Back from the conference in Portland, the land of really, really good food. Srsly (as the lolcats say) I don’t think you can get bad food there. Possibly the most memorable thing I ate was at a Thai restaurant half a block from our hotel, a dish called Death by Asparagus. I asked the waiter to have them tone down the heat a bit, and if they did…all I can say is the dish is well named. Delish, but way hot! Thank heavens for the cooling properties of Thai iced tea.

Conference was fine. We gave our workshop twice, once as part of the ‘virtual conference’ and again for about 200 real live librarians. The virtual presentation felt odd, I'm not used to having an audience I can't see, who are making comments by typing them in. But the live session went very well, and having that big an audience on Saturday morning amazed us all.

I was very good and did not spend the whole session looking at my watch and thinking “I ought to be going to yard sales this very minute!”

We got our MCM credenza and hutch cleaned up and moved into my office.
Still loving it. In fact, someone in the household confessed that while I was away he came in here a few times just to slide the doors back and forth. Perfectly understandable, they are very smooth.

My orange walls do not do it justice, but it will be fine here until we eventually move it into its spiritual home, the dining room of our MCM retirement house.

I poked around on the Internet and found that the logo on the back of the credenza
is from Poul Hundevad, which was confirmed last week in the comment by Janus Home. Don’t you love researching the history of your thrifty finds on the Internet? I'll be back on the garaging trail next weekend (lord willing and the creek don’t rise, as they say). Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky again. In fact, I'd almost bet on it!

IT'S SPRING AND WE’RE IN LOVE

My husband and I are in love.

Well, yes, with each other, but we’re coming up on our 38th anniversary in May, so that’s kind of an old story. No, this is a new object of our passion. We found our first addition to our furniture for the midcentury modern house we’ll be retiring to eventually.

We love her. Teak, with what I believe is birch behind the sliding doors on the base,
and this nifty felt-lined sliding tray for flatware. (Please excuse the unlovely background!)
What really makes us swoon is the beveled front edge on the shelves in the upper hutch.
She’s from Denmark, I'm guessing early to mid Sixties. Anyone recognize this logo?
I tried googling “Danish Furniture Company” and as you can imagine got several million hits.

She was an incredible deal. We had to rent a van to get her home, and even with that she cost about fifty bucks. Yeah, the van cost quite a bit more than we paid for the furniture!

We haven’t had a chance to put her two pieces together yet. This beauty is definitely not going to hang out in the garage until we move someday. We’re going to shift some furniture in the house and move her inside in a few days. I think she’s going in my home office. I'll have to move one or two white Ikea bookcases somewhere else, but I can live with that. As soon as I get her fixed up in her new spot I'll take more pics.

It's love, I tell you.

We found her at a sale on Friday, a fundraiser to support a young woman who volunteers as a psychotherapist at an orphanage in Zambabwe. She comes home to the US every once in a while to visit family and friends, and to raise funds so she can go back again.

Hers was the second sale we hit on Friday. The first was an estate sale that advertised in Craigslist that they had midcentury furniture, so I was hot to get over there at starting time. Didn’t see anything I would call midcentury, but it's a useful phrase these days to get people to your sale. My husband found this little white teapot that we like for its unusual lid catcher.
I was a bit bemused by their writing the item name on the price tag.

Maybe label switching does go on at estate sales, but I've never seen it. Most of their prices seemed silly to me. They had looked up every item on eBay and had printouts of auctions that had the highest prices they could find. Can't help wondering how much they actually sold.

Stopped at lots of sales on Saturday as well, but only bought at one of them. Definitely one of those “you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince” days. But it was fun, starting with some of the Craigslist ads. One promised “lots of toys, designer clothing, hooker/pole dancer shoes…” Kind of makes you wonder what sort of toys they were talking about. Their ad went on to tell you to look for their signs, which would be really good. “Airplanes know when I have a sale” they boasted.

I used to proofread books for a friend who is a publisher. You can imagine my shudder at this ad: “Were at the end of the cold de sack.” Hey, I live at the end of a cold de sack too. My favorite ad though was posted a few days ago, on March 16—advertising a sale on March 13…and ending sternly with “No Early Birds.”

Reminds me of a limerick I heard in my youth:
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She set out one day
In a relative way
And arrived the previous night.

Encountered a much loved Poodle today who was taking it easy and didn’t bother to get up.
These Pekes are brothers, Joey and Zack. I keep wanting to call them Zoey and Jack.
Their owner had just purchased a little stuffed Santa toy for them, which Zack was eagerly anticipating. He had no intention of sharing with his brother!

Didn’t find out this friendly kitty’s name.
He was almost impossible to get a picture of, he kept writhing on the sunny sidewalk, purring madly.
Not counting the cost of renting the van to pick up our sideboard, I spent $24 this weekend. (Told you it was an amazing deal!) At the same sale as the sideboard I found this nice black wool jacket, with velveteen lining the front facings and hood.
It was probably designed as a swing coat for someone smaller than me, but hey, it fits and that’s all I care about. Hmmm, maybe I have a swing butt. I didn’t care much for its boring black buttons, so I changed them out for these vintage ones in gray.
Found more DVDs to replace old VHS tapes.
At the same sale I picked up this embroidered rayon shawl or wide scarf.

And that’s it. Just enough to keep it interesting—though the sideboard alone was enough to make my weekend.

I will probably be absent from the blog next week. I'll be in Portland at the Public Library Association’s national convention. They’re a reckless bunch—they’re actually letting me speak. So instead of garaging next Saturday morning I'll be with some colleagues imparting what we like to think is wisdom.

Maybe I can sneak in a few anecdotes about yard sales.