Repurposed Crab Bits

Next week we start the big move. …Again.

Long-time readers may remember that last summer, we loaded up two cars with me, my wife, our two rabbits, our turtle, my parents-in-law, and enough house plants to stock the rain-forest part of a mid-sized zoo, and drove 2,500 miles from Ohio to California. This move’s going to be different. This time, we’re moving 3,000 miles.

I’ll be gone for the next few weeks, as I down-vote people’s Yik-Yaks all across this great country drive, so I wanted to leave you with something good. One last dose of California weirdness (except for all the pictures I have saved that I haven’t shared yet). I now present to you:

Little statues made out of dead crab bits.

Goodbye, California… 😭 😭 😭 😭 😭 

The 8 Strangest Things You Can Buy at My Yard Sale

It’s finally happening: I’m turning the camera around, and focusing on some of the weird stuff that I’m selling at my own yard sale. Hoisting myself by my own petard, as they say! Slipping on my own banana peel! Dropping an anvil on myself! I think the metaphor got away from me…

Anyway as you know we moved, and we did the thing that smart people do: shipped the entirety of our worldly possessions cross-country, and then decided to cull it down a bit, after realizing we couldn’t physically fit the amount of crap we’ve amassed over the years into our new house. (This is probably Lizo’s fault, since I never amass large piles of garbage.) It was either annex our neighbors’ property—which they seemed patently unwilling to agree to—or have a yard sale of our own.

This is what our yard sale looked like right after we’d finished setting it up. For comparison, here’s a shot I took at the end of the day:

As you can see, it would be exaggerating to say that business was good. It would also be exaggerating to say that any business happened at all.

We did have one customer, Bob, who was nice enough to give our weird collection of goods a once-over, all the while providing a colorful running commentary. “Those wooden spoons should be good for spankings!” he told me. “Yeahhhhh!!” (The way he said it sounded like he didn’t mean for misbehaving children.)

Then, as he was looking over some recipe books, there was “Vegetarian cooking?? That’s what FOOD eats! Ewwwwww!!” He actually said “eww” like that, like a child discovering belly-button lint. Later, as we were ringing up his purchases: “I’ll take the knives. …I need to go back and get dressed first, though.” (It’s at this point I should mention that he was wearing a pair of rubber overalls, with both of the straps down, and nothing else.) Bob was great. Things got a little awkward though when someone mentioned the Amy Winehouse documentary, and Bob muttered “another dead druggie.”

Oh, Bob.

Bob wasn’t our only customer, but he was one of maybe a dozen—most of which were neighbors who were out walking their dogs and wondering why we had the entire contents of a Sam Goody circa 2002 dumped out on our driveway. We were asked “did you guys advertise?” at least a half-dozen times, with “because I had no idea this was even happening” politely left unspoken. Then around 11:30, we had a freak thunderstorm (the first rain we’ve seen since moving here) and most of our stuff got water-logged. It was not a very good sale.

Where did we go wrong? Well for one, the house we’re renting is on a peninsula with a population smaller than my high school’s graduating class, so any yard sale we had here was doomed to failure. I guess in hindsight, too, I wish I hadn’t called out “early birds”—those people who show up before your scheduled start time—in my Craigslist ad like I did:

Also, our sign didn’t make it through the rain so good.

All-in-all I sort of hate yard sales now, so this is the end of the blog forever.

…

…

Okay I lied. Here’s a sampling of some of the weird stuff we tried to sell to Bob!

Sleepin’ with the Horsies

@beezlebrat on Twitter writes:

Today we found a pillow at goodwill that is a dead horse head? Idk we bought it

I can only assume this is what you leave in the bed of a four year old when you want to send them a message (about eating their peas or whatever). Either that, or someone’s making a Torsey plush and this was the leftover bits.

Wanna help “Yardsaling to Adventure!” grow? Do your Amazon shopping through our affiliate link! 

Marathon in a Fanny Pack

You guys. YOU GUYS! I went to 25 freakin’ yardsales yesterday! It was the best. …At least I think it was; I’ll let you know when I’ve worked up the energy to crawl back out of bed. (Honey, when you read this post, could you please bring me some cereal?)

Selections from the three (?!?!) maps they gave us for yesterday’s sales.
Crazy-man scrawls are mine.

So it turns out yesterday was my little town’s community-wide yardsale. Yardsales, yardsales as far as the eye could see! (Well, more or less. We actually have burned-out factories as far as the eye can see, but beyond those? Yardsales. Free rusty nail with every purchase.) You could tell it was supposed to be a big deal, because they had way more signs up than they did for, say, last week’s budget referendum. Pretty sure the yardsales had a better turnout, too, which is weird, because they both primarily attract old people and angry bloggers.

They were selling maps for the sales at one of the local diners, rather than just, you know, actually telling us where any of the sales were. I can kinda get why they’d do that—after all, when you’re selling a product, it makes sense to make it as annoying as possible for anyone to buy said product. It’s the same reason why most grocery stores these days charge an entry fee and nobody really knows where Disney World is.

The first few sales I went to hadn’t started setting up yet—which is typical of southern Connecticut, where the “start time” is more of an optimistic suggestion than anything you’d want to follow—but once they kicked off, they kicked it like they were a horse and you were accidentally standing behind it. (…Yeah, metaphors were never really my strong point. It’s like yardsales are the ocean, and I’m a person who’s really bad at metaphors.)

First up:

A Summer Punderland

Exploring the deer-infested wilds of New Jersey.

I was back in New Jersey this weekend to celebrate a few more family birthdays, and while our yardsale trip was cut short because 1) the sales weren’t biting much this morning, and 2) none of us were able to get out of bed before 9:30, we still managed to do our fair share of picking through other people’s garbage.

Some sales were a bit more garbagey than others.

Here are some of the highlights:

And you thought driving while texting was bad. A coffee maker for your car! Haven’t you ever wanted to brew some Joe on the Go?

…Man, that would’ve been a MUCH better slogan than the one they went with: “Just plug into your LIGHTER SOCKET!!!!!” And hey, if you decided to pick that up…

You could always grab some “genuine” second-hand coffee filters from 1984 to go with it.

At the same sale:

Awww Yeah, it’s a Tag Sale!

Now THAT’s how you advertise your sale.

Despite going to over a dozen yardsales this Saturday, I didn’t end up with all that much loot. My actual purchases included:

• A videogame,
• A spare wheel for a computer chair (I’m serious), and
• This toy car/Christmas decoration:

I’m actually kind of in love with the car. One of my favorite parts of the Christmas season (to this day, mind) is piling into the car to hunt down a Christmas tree—not in a lot, because my wife and I aren’t weenies, but in an actual farm—and then chopping it down myself with a friggin’ AXE, just like my forefathers used to do it.

 

That’s not the best part, though; the best part is drinking free hot cocoa while someone else spends the next twenty minutes struggling to tie the thing to the roof-rack.

re: Pear of Sheep

Sorry, I know I promised over at that other website that the next three posts here would all be about videogames…but I came across a phenomenon today that just has to be documented—something so disturbing yet, in a way, enlightening that it’s kind of a tragedy that there aren’t books on the subject already.

Are you ready for this?

The “pear of sheep” statue is not an isolated incident.

I was searching for “pear of sheep” on Google to try to get an idea of my new blog’s search ranking, and I came across dozens of items with the same theme. Dozens. I’m serious! The “pear of sheep” statue isn’t just one item some crazy person convinced a gullible manufacturer to mass-produce; it’s a veritable motif! My life is now dedicated to finding out why.