Want A Free “Handle With Care” Sticker?

Okay, so I have about 30 of these “Handle With Care” stickers from yesterday’s yardsale, and I’m afraid that, if I keep them all, I WILL die, because I will inevitably want to lick them all and stick them to everything in my apartment, including both of my bunny rabbits and my wife.

There’s only one way out of this that I can see,* and that is: the first-ever Yardsaling to Adventure giveaway! Yes, I’m giving away these absolutely ancient “Handle With Care” adhesives! For free! To anyone who wants them!

All you have to do get one is:

1) Like our brand-new Facebook page!
2) E-mail me your mailing address!
3) Promise you’ll stick the adhesive to something cool! and
4) Send me a picture of the cool thing you stuck it to.

After a bit I’ll post everyone’s pictures—and then maybe even give an additional prize to the best one. Baby Benjamin Franklin, anyone?

Send me your addresses now! It’s the only way to save my life.


* Actually this was my cousin Christina’s idea.

Connecticut Prices

You know what? I’m just going to say it—screw anyone who posts their Craigslist ads more than a week in advance. I ended up driving 15 minutes out of my way today in search of a neighborhood-wide sale that ended up not existing, because the stupid listing was posted a week early, and I hadn’t noticed.

…Okay, granted, if I had actually looked at the date in the listing, I would’ve realized that it wasn’t today. BUT WHATEVER. There’s no need to get your ads out that early; nobody cares! Do you really think someone’s going to be like “Well, I was planning to visit my nonnie in the hospital that morning, but NEVERMIND! THERE’S A YARDSALE! CLEAR MY CALENDAR!” These people are almost as bad as the jerks who only hold their sales on Fridays, WHEN EVERYONE’S WORKING, YOU DUMMIES! MAN!!

…

Okay, I’m done fumigating now. Here’s some stuff I found.

A Gift That You Can Never See

As I’m learning, there are two kinds of estate sales: those, like the one I went to a couple of weeks ago, where everything’s set up more or less like a typical yardsale, with items priced and arranged tastefully, and professional sellers buzzing about just delighted with the prospect of helping you buy their things.

Then, there’s ones like the one I went to today. Look at your home, right now. Notice how you have everything arranged. Notice how everything’s set up. Very personal. Very cozy. That’s how this place was set up—which is to say, it wasn’t set up at all. Nothing was priced; nothing was arranged neatly on tables. It was as if the owners had gone on vacation, and in the meantime the most enterprising robbers of all time took it over and tried to sell everything. It made me feel weird and creepy. 

I didn’t buy anything, although I did find this—on a table they set up in the front yard, to display the most choice merchandise:

This Old House

Mmmmmmm. Can you smell that? Other people’s garbage. Unwanted wares, plopped unceremoniously into a yard or garage in hopes that someone with too much money to waste (although frugal enough not to buy things brand-new) will want to part with a quarter or a dollar for the honor of bringing home your rusty old fishing poles, or perhaps your fifth-grade art project.

The 2012 yardsale season starts not with a bang, but with a “Hey, is that a yardsale?” The weather report was calling for rain, so I’d assumed sales would be light-to-nonexistent this Saturday morn’, but lo: on the way to the supermarket, we found it. The season’s first sale. An estate sale, in a house that, from the outside looked nice, although from the inside, it appeared as though one errant stomp might send the whole thing crashing down.

We trod lightly.

re: My Life, Completed

No new yardsales yet (in fact, I haven’t been to a single one since I found naked Batman and “homemade”  bread back in October), but I wanted to bring to light something that came in the mail the other day. Something that—I’m not overstating things when I say this—will change my life forever. Take a look:

YES YES YES YES YES YES YESSSSSSSSSSS! Forget that stupid statue; I now have, nailed to my hot little wall, an original “pear of sheep” art masterpiece, courtesy of my friend Shannon, wife of my friend Nathaniel, fellow GameCola writer and co-proprieter of the geek blog Exfanding Your Horizons. I was speechless when I opened the box; I took such a sharp intake of breath that I thought it might stab right through my esophagus, killing me before I got to raise my fun meter by just spam-admiring it all day.  This is just beautiful. I’m not sure I’ll be able to tear myself away from it long enough to go to any actual yardsales this season; I don’t want to leave it alone.

And speaking of the coming season! In other news, my wife and I are joining the early 2000s, as we have our first-ever iPhones coming in the mail later this week. What does this mean for you? Theoretically, higher-quality photos! Yaaaay! It also means I’ll never be able to sleep again because I’ll have Facebook right there on my nightstand.

Season Finale

And so the yardsale season comes to kind of a puttering end, as so often it does.

This week my wife Lizo joined me, for one of only a few times this season, because I believe she’s put off by just how much time I put into looking through people’s future-garbage. There weren’t a lot of nearby sales to choose from this week, and so we had a big decision to make—the kind that all couples have to go through at some point in their relationship:

Did we want to visit the big church sale on one end of town, and risk smelling like old people for the rest of the day? Or did we want to visit the “30-vendor sale” at the high school on the other end of town, and risk having to find nothing but vendors?

We went with the latter, and while we didn’t actually buy all that much (more on that in a bit), we still managed to find a few choice products:

“Homemade” banana bread! I shudder to think of the meaning behind the quotation marks. Is it something as innocuous as “we actually just bought them from a store”? Or is it something more sinister, like “enjoy your loaf of razorblades, bloody-mouth!” We steered clear, for obvious reasons.

Fat and Poor

There were two things I picked up at this week’s sales:

1) An audio book that was, conveniently, the next book in a series I’d been listening to during long car rides (I’d say which series, but it’d make me look even more like a middle-aged woman than starting a yardsale blog already has), and

2) A decreased sense of self-worth.

More on that in the paragraphs to come. First, here are some nice creeper shots of the stuff I couldn’t bring myself to purchase. For example:

A spoon fashioned to look like the skyline of Pittsburgh, PA! Hey, why not? I’d probably have bought it if I had any knowledge of Pittsburgh other than that I’m supposed to hate their sports teams, since I’m originally from the Philadelphia area. GO WHATEVER OUR BASKETBALL TEAM IS!!

True story: I found this spoon at the same yardsale that I practically stole a PS3 controller from a couple of weeks ago. While browsing this week’s goods—just to be on the safe side—I took the time to plot out exactly how I should try to disguise my voice in case I had to ask for a price, to make sure no one would recognize me.

Later that morning, I came across: