Yard Saling!

Yard saling was one of my favorite activities when I lived out in Vermont after college. My friend Andrew and I would often wile away a Saturday morning searching for such treasures as broken vacuum cleaners, croquet sets, and large handpainted dinosaur clocks. The yard sales in Vermont were wonderful - people seemed to be trying to clean out their houses and get rid of old junk. Prices were great (I once got an entire set of cross country skis for two bucks) and selection was always good.

So when I first moved out here three years ago I had grand ambitions of furnishing our new house with garage sale fare. I was quickly disabused of that notion - in my first weekend I found someone trying to sell a "magic bullet blender (made for TV)" for $50 and some junky hand-done cross-stitch project for $12. Yikes. It seems that California yard sales are a different breed - people are actually trying to make a profit on their stuff. There are also a lot of "professional" yard salers that troll the sales first thing in the morning to buy all of the good stuff. Apparantly they tote their new finds to the flea markets and turn them around for a profit. After trying a couple more times, we basically gave up and turned to IKEA for our inexpensive furnishing needs.

At any rate, when Tom and I woke up to a cloudy morning today, yard saling came to mind. We checked out craigslist and found that it was "community yard sale day" in Sunnyvale, which meant that there were sales all over! We wrote down directions to a few promising ones (in search of a breadmaker, some sporting equipment, and maybe some old video games) and set off. We had a nice day overall - for a grand total of $2.85, we bought a resin tray with a roadrunner on it (matching a cardinal tray we got for the wedding), a ceramic bowl, two books, and a kleenex box cover shaped like a sneezing tiki god. Not exactly what we had been looking for, but treasures nonetheless! We also splurged on two chocolate chip cookies and a brownie for an additional $1.25.

Banjo was a big hit throughout the day as well, and endeared himself to many of our fellow yard sale patrons. At one point, a smitten vendor offered to trade us a $10 workshop vise we had been admiring for little 'Jo. We think he is worth a shop-vac at least, so we declined.

We returned home 4 hours later, having walked 5.8 miles (according to google pedometer) and feeling quite pleased with ourselves. Nothing better than a bargain!