It’s in Our Genes!

My mother’s 90th birthday was last week, so I trundled off to Oklahoma for the festivities. The party of course was fun, but the real excitement for my sister, Midcentury Marilyn and I was that we got to go garaging together! This opportunity has not come our way since we were kids, and we had a great time. Since I had to schlep anything I found home in my backpack I contented myself with two great finds: a vintage Coach bag

and a pie bird, something I have secretly always wanted!

 

Sis did great, finding a number of items for her resale shop,

  

not to mention some items that will be gifts, or live at her house.

Everyone had to thumb through this cookbook looking for favorite recipes.

And we got a lot of hilarity out of the singing Hershey’s kiss jar.

That evening at the birthday party our nephew Evan was the last to arrive. His cousins immediately began admiring the boots he was wearing. “Ten bucks at the thrift store,” he said. Marilyn and I locked eyes and started laughing.

“It must be genetic!” she said. And indeed, all of the younger generation started comparing notes about their favorite thrifting adventures.

To my mind, those kids were raised right!

This week I got to spend Saturday morning with one of my oldest friends, Diana, who was visiting from Oregon. (We figured out that we’ve known each other for 37 years. Yikes!) Even though it was a holiday weekend, we headed out to see what we could find. Met this sweet exuberant dog, Callie, first thing.

She bounced sideways out of the shot just as I clicked the camera. But once I found that magic spot on her neck to scratch she fell right over for petting.

Callie was the dog of the day, guess the rest of them must have been cooling off at the beach or something.

Our first purchases were from an older lady who had a lot of kindergarten teacher stuff for sale. I asked if she had retired and she said no, she plans to keep working forever, but she’s been moved to a different school and she has absolutely no storage in her new classroom. So she has to downsize her teaching collection. We commiserated, and she remarked that “very few school administrators were ever kindergarten teachers.” I think she may be right! Diana picked up a couple of child size life vests, and I got a couple of twisty things:

The froggie plant ties just crack me up. I think the video is one I’ve seen before with lots of footage of tornados taken by lunatics with camcorders.

Got to mark an item off my search list: I needed a tray for my new (smaller) CPAP machine to sit on. This one just fits.

Found a couple of books for gifts, one of which I was planning to order this week from Amazon or somewhere. I’m awfully pleased to have found it on a driveway!

And the deal of the day was this large Silpat.

If you bake very much, these are great. You put it on your cookie sheet instead of grease or parchment paper, and you can use it over and over. I have a smaller one that’s just big enough to bake cookies for two people’s evening snack. I mix up cookie dough and keep it in the fridge, so whenever we need “a little something” as Winnie the Pooh would say, we whip out the Silpat and in a few minutes have warm cookies and a baking sheet that’s still clean.

I did bring back one more yard sale find from Oklahoma – but it’s not one that I bought! Almost three years ago I was in Oklahoma to help MC Marilyn do a sale for our folks, and she found this great teapot at a neighbor’s sale for a buck.

I tried to get it from her by hook or by crook, but no dice. So imagine my surprise when she gave it to me on this last trip! It’s not quite the right shade of blue for her kitchen, but she had no trouble thinking of someone who would appreciate it.

I’m just wondering what the security people at the airport thought when they x-rayed my carry on bag!