Giddiness

I think it was the sunshine that made us all giddy on Friday morning. We get a lot of rain in the winter—it's the Willamette Valley after all—but this El Nino year has seen rain in spades. Let me just say I never want to get personally acquainted with another sandbag.

But Friday was sunny. And our go-to list on Grace Pemberton Smith, my GPS, had NINE addresses on it. Nine! If that’s not a sign of spring…

We started out at KK’s next door neighbors’ sale. The mister has evidently been quite a pack rat and recently realized that he no longer needs all this stuff. Which might have accounted for the big smile that wouldn’t leave the missus’s face! I picked up a pair of felt boot liners

that I think will make warm house shoes. I wonder if I should spread a layer of Shoe Goo on the bottom of the soles. Hmmm, will have to think about that.

Didn’t get anything at the next sale, mostly kid stuff there. But they did like my glasses (I was wearing the ones with the blue frames) so I thought they were very nice young women. Then on to an estate sale that if we hadn’t been giddy before, we’d have become giddy then.

It was the prices that were so wonderful. We didn’t buy tons of stuff, but dang, it makes you so happy to see little pieces of masking tape with 25¢ or 50¢ written on them. 

As soon as we walked up, Judy spotted the wheelbarrow she’s been looking for. Decent size but not too big, a little rusty but who cares. The little piece of masking tape said $1. We couldn’t believe no one had already bought it for that, but it only took a moment for Judy to whip out that dollar bill.

The sale inside was all in the basement. Quite a bit of camping stuff, and housewares from the Sixties, and stuff made by an amateur woodworker. I picked out this tiered metal serving plate

and a cool MCM candleholder (there were two, Judy got one too).

And then I spotted the item that made my heart go pitty-pat. (Isn’t it funny, the things that will do that?)

Handmade pull-apart bookends.

Don’t you love his expression?

Not to mention his tail.

Certainly the price was right.

I noticed the maker had written his name on the bottom, which I mentioned to the lady asI paid for it, saying how much I loved it.

“Oh,” she said, “I think he made that in school. I'll tell him you like it.” And sure enough, when I looked more closely, I noticed P1 on the bottom, so he must have had woodshop during first period. And he got an A!

I think I'll call him Larry. Right now he’s holding library books.

Somehow Larry just sealed the deal on my giddiness. Every time I thought of him through the morning I had to smile.

We continued our adventures, and I got lucky again at an estate sale on the west side of town. Hanging on a bedroom doorknob I spotted these handmade wooden hangers.

They had stickers on them, but no one had marked a price. So I toted them downstairs to ask how much. Which turned out to be a quarter each. Deal. Then I spotted another item with an unpriced sticker, a handblown glass tree topper.

Another quarter. I'm planning to use it in one of my flower troughs on the deck this summer.

Out in the garage, I noticed a couple of ladders. A six-foot ladder has been on my list, to keep at our rental house so we don’t have to tote one back and forth. The marked price was $25 so I called the hubs to see if that was frugal enough. He said yes…so I offered twenty and owned a ladder. (I can rarely resist seeing if the price can go down. Hey, five bucks is a chunk of change. I could buy 20 Larry bookends for that!) Sorry, didn’t get a picture of the ladder, but it looks exactly like the $70 one on the Home Depot site.

Getting a six-foot ladder into KK’s SUV was a bit challenging (she was an awfully good sport to let me cram it in there so I wouldn’t have to drive back for it). But the three of us and two of the people from the sale all shifted earlier purchases and laid down a back seat and slid that puppy in there. And Judy was an awfully good sport to give up part of her back-seat elbow room!

After all that fun in the sun we were ravenous, so we headed back downhill for Mexican food. And margaritas.

And then we were really giddy!