Get In Your Pumpkin!

When yardsaling, common sense dictates that you find the best stuff the earlier you go, at the first yardsales you visit. Your competition—aka, your fellow salers—haven’t had a chance to pick through everything yet; the “good stuff” should still be there, waiting for you to hold it up and stand around awkwardly while you wait for someone to tell you how much it costs. (Or is that just me?)

…Theoretically. The problem, however, is that this is a false thing. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been finding that the first few sales of the day are always—ALWAYS—a total bust. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe the good stuff hasn’t been taken out of the attic yet, or maybe the people who start their sales during the wee hours only do so because the only things they need to set up are their three rugs.

Either way, for the first several yardsales today, the most exciting thing I found was this:

Now, I’ll grant you—angelic biker Taz is a pretty rad (and also very specific) collectible. Also confusing; as a rule, I tend to avoid anything that makes me ask “What EXACTLY is going on with that man’s torso?” (No, seriously—what the hell? Are those Taz-shaped pantaloons? Is he standing inside an albino pumpkin? Is…is that what heaven is like?) But it’s not what I drag myself out of bed at…8:30 for.

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.