Garage Sailing I: The Oddessy of a Day

I went garage sailing today (that's the best phrase I have for it.) I spent about 5 hours driving around, looking for garage sales to buy stuff at. By the end of the day I had spent somewhere between $30-$40, purchased two different kinds of lemonade from different little girls, visited 15-20 garage sales, learned that any garage sale which sounds like it's going to be awesome on the sign ("HUGE SALE!") is most definitely going to be small and full of junk, been frustrated more than once by yard sales on busy roads without any warning (when you live on a road with a 50mph speed limit, give me more than 10 feet of warning,) made small talk with a couple dozen people, and payed for a few items with a hug at my grandmother's garage sale.

It was a busy day. Here's what I got:



I found this lamp at the very first sale, a few blocks from where I'm staying at my parent's house. Got it for $5, haggled down from $10. Two out of the three lights work, but it came with light bulbs and I think I might be able to fix the third.

I've really wanted a standing lamp for awhile, but I think I'm going to need to clean it a bit, there's some rust and junk. Also, is it just me, or do lamps like this remind you of the cutting edge standing lamp in Brave Little Toaster?








This was the second thing I found, and probably my best buy of the entire day. A brand new, fully functioning crock pot. You can cook some WICKED AWESOME food with this thing. And I got it for SIX DOLLARS. I was totally stoked.



I got the book of Romantic poems, and the rest of the books, at two separate garage sales. The poetry book is where I got my second glass of lemonade (didn't buy anything at the sale where I got my first cup.) It's always fun to help out little girls with making some money. The rest of the books were purchased later on in the day, at a sale where someone pointed out to me that my fly was open. "whups!" I thought. Immediately followed by "Oh shit, I bet those girl's mom was kinda freaked out by that >.>"

Luckily, I wear two pairs of pants most of the time.

I don't actually read Star Trek books, but I'm familiar with the author, A.C. Crispin. I've enjoyed her work before, specifically the Han Solo trilogy, where I felt she did a superb job of writing what was (in many ways) a romance novel, which felt like it was written towards masculine romantic sensibilities, if that makes sense.

The book that kinda got cut off is a textbook which contains many of the important works of western civilization. Many of which I already own (Dante's Inferno) but some of which I do not (Don Quixote)

All together the books cost me $3. One for the book of poetry, one for the hardback Star Trek book, and one for all the rest of them.



I bought these for 2 dollars from a lady who was trying to pay her rent with a garage sale, and kept pointing me to jewelery which she was trying to sell for hundreds of dollars. I felt pretty bad for her, so when she couldn't break a five I told her just to keep it. She gave me a belt buckle which she said was made of solid silver. I gave it to my dad.

Neither toy is in very good condition, but I like picking up robot and batman toys when I find them.



I got these from this crazy garage sale where everything was way overpriced. If you're selling your dishes on a cracked driveway to whoever happens to stop by to take a look at what you have out of curiosity, you're not going to be able to make $50 off of them. That's just how it goes.

The stuff there was mostly really nice, which makes me think she should have been selling it on eBay rather than on her driveWay. The CDs, however, were a buck-a-piece. She also had this really neat chalkboard for $18, but I prefer whiteboards. Probably should have got it for my chalkboard-loving uncle though. Oh well.



God of War I got for $10 at a garage sale with a horse, and a sign that said "MAKE ME A DEAL!" They also had these wicked KISS album covers called "The Four Faces." I found a picture online of them: http://www.xrecords.co.uk/images/kiss/airfresh4faces.jpg This wasn't one cover with the four faces though, it was four covers, each with a face. It looked like a really hardcore collectible, and I can't really blame them for wanting $50 for it. But again...eBay!

I got Spider Man 2 because it was free and I liked it and I don't have it. Gotta love my grandma, more on that sale later.



I got this set of pots and pans at this cool sale in a storage unit complex. It as though a bunch of people who owned storage units there had organized to have their garage sales on the same day. There wasn't much of interest, but I got all these pots and pans for $3! Only downside is that I was only able to find one match between all the pots and lids. So I've got two useless lids now.



This is a rice cooker, which I paid for with 1 hug. My grandmother agreed, but told me she hoped I wasn't attempting to pay for ALL my garage sale items with hugs. She's a funny lady!

A bunch of the family was there, including my badass uncle Joe, and my cousin Courtney, who I've been getting along with quite well since moving back to the area. When I left she was a teenager, now she's got a husband and two kids. Things change, yo.

Growing up, the garage sales my extended family would put on were always one of the most awesome events of the summer for me, so I stuck around to talk with people for an hour or so. My grandpa kept trying to hard-sell me on all the junk that wasn't moving, my younger cousin kept bringing up video games, and my grandma seemed to be having trouble staying awake. It was good to see them. I'm not close with most of my extended family, but these are people I've always liked. Particularly Joe. I always looked up to him while I was growing up, and now that I am grown up we seem to have a pretty good friendship, which is like...a huge ego boost for me.



On the right, there, is a garlic shredder, the one item I let my grandpa hard-sell me on, because I love cooking with garlic, and shredding it is a pain. On the left is a computer fan, which I pulled from a gutted "free" computer case at the same garage sale where I showed the little girls my open fly. >.<



At my last garage sale of the day, I got these little stands to display things. On the left is the stand by itself, so you can see what it looks like. On the right is a stand displaying this weird lid thing that the lady who sold me the pots and pans gave me. I paid a dollar for the both of them.



Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedsheets need no justification.

They were actually being used as a tablecloth, but I was like "ZOMG MUST HAVE!" got them for fifty cents.

I also Nintendogs for my younger sisters (and the case also had Animal Crossing inside, as I later found out.) which cost me two dollars.

And that's it!

Huh...I guess I could figure out exactly how much I spent, since I remember how much I spent on each item...=O

Eh, too lazy.

And that's how I spent my Saturday.

Garage Sailing 0: Impetus of the Wizard

Yard sales are one of my favorite things in the whole world. Some of my most cherished possessions have come from yard sales. Including the original LP of the Star Wars soundtrack, and the comforter from this set of sheets:



Which is actually the only comforter I own, so I sleep with it pretty much all the time.

The fact of the matter is that I'm extremely quirky in my material desires. I have been for over a decade now. I remember being 12 years old, trying to put eBay auctions on my birthday lists, because that was the best way I could think of to tell people I wanted an SNES game that hadn't been sold in half a decade.

Yard Sales represent a gold mine for somebody with quirky sensibilities like mine, because not only do they often have the kind of old stuff I love, but the people selling the stuff are often so eager to get rid of it that they'll sell these things for mere fractions of what they're worth. What's more, there's this feeling of discovery, of finding something you really want among the mountains of chipped dishes and old clothes, which is a really fantastic high.

As you may have guessed, I visited a yard sale today. I was on my way home from Jeremy's house (Or Kaygan's, or Egamdaednu's, or "a friend's," depending on who is reading this post) and I saw a big one. Looked like the kind my family used to do, where the entire extended family would gather up their unwanted stuff and sell it all at once.

At first glance there was nothing of great value. There was a printer, but lesson 1 of garage sales is that stuff like that almost NEVER works out in the buyer's favor. I've got a 40inch television which attests to that. There were a LOT of dishes, some very nice cheap end/coffee tables, but those are common and I don't have a place to put them right now, so I skipped them. I also found something I REALLY wanted, which you don't see too terribly often: a HUGE bag of assorted lego. Unfortunately they wanted $20 for the lot, and I had $7 on me. I could have made them an offer, but if I were selling them, I honestly would take offense to an offer below $10, and would expect to haggle my way up to $12-16 at least.

Then I saw one of the greatest sites you can see at a garage sale: a big pile of NES games. There weren't many good ones there, not ones I'd want to go home and play. But I did find this one:



This looks pretty awesome. Lets take a closer look at the cart art:



Oh yeah! Looks like I'm in for some old-school console RPG fun!

I picked it up for a dollar, and because I don't actually own a working NES at present, I booted up the emulator for the game. I know that sounds silly, but being a child of that era, owning the cart gives me a strong emotional bond to the game. Someday I'm sure I'll be able to find a working NES. Until then, the pleasure of owning the funny shaped gray bit of plastic warms my heart.

Turns out though, Legacy of the Wizard isn't an RPG. It's sort of a...sandbox platformer. I know that sounds weird, but take a look at this:



Yeah, I know right?

I played the game for about 30 minutes on full screen. I get the feeling that the manual was pretty essential to this game--more so than it was with games like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. I thought I picked the rogue, but I think I ended up picking a wizard with really short range spells and super high jumps. She wandered around killing bad guys for awhile, and I made it all the way to just above the center of that map. If you're looking at it and see the same pattern I see, I got to the third column from the left, sixth row from the top.

The game is pretty fun, but I want to find a scan of the manual, I feel like I'm really missing something here.

/most rambly post evar