Weird Bird in Love

Zag and I, and our new neighbor G and her three-year-old daughter W, had some very successful garage saling on Saturday. Actually, it was just one sale, and that one was at a school, not in a garage. School sales are good because there’s lots of stuff in one place, much of it tends to be kid-oriented, and they’re indoors (Saturday was quite rainy). We were probably there for 45 minutes or even an hour – which worked because it was a relatively enclosed, safe space where Zag and W could just wander around playing with stuff, while G and I shopped. Zag got so absorbed in something or another that he wet his pants, but that could happen to anyone.

Of course as usual things scattered away and became integrated into the household before I could take a picture, but here were the significant elements of our haul:

A MusicMaker lap harp, in box (with $49.95 price tag attached), with all accessories and in apparently untouched condition – Zag loved playing with one of these at my parents’ house. A gauzy purple hanging bower thing (the attendant said, “Oh, you must have a little girl!” I said, “Actually, no.”) – this has transformed the armchair in my office into a Very Special Place. Two Lauri puzzles – a train and Noah’s Ark – I think the ark puzzle is beautiful, though I share my friend E’s deep ambivalence about Noah as a children’s story.  A random skein of light brown Lamb’s Pride yarn; I love Lamb’s Pride, it felts really well. Two big bags of PlayDoh tools and cookie cutters, just so we can swap things out and keep the PlayDoh play fresh over the long winter play-inside months. (I was going to get rid of most of the cookie cutters, because it was just so many, but then we played PlayDoh this morning while Zag’s friend H was here, and I got them out just to have plenty of something to go around, and it turns out they’re really cool. They’re designed so they’re slightly flared – the cutting edge of the cutter is the narrowest part, the top edge is the same shape but a tiny bit wider – and this seems to separate the shape from the surrounding PlayDoh really well. I almost jumped right up to make sugar cookie dough; I can’t wait to see if they work as well on cookies. Why aren’t all cookie cutters like this?) And, finally, a yellow plastic hard hat and goggles, and two battery-powered toy power tools – a drill and a circular saw. (Zag adores these. He spends long periods of time pretending to cut and drill various small pieces of wood. I was afraid these would be a big bone of contention this morning while H was over, but instead they spent about twenty minutes working on a project together – building a house, H said – with H wearing the hard had and wielding the drill, and Zag wearing the goggles and using the saw. Cooperative play! Very exciting!)

When I finally dragged all this up to one of the attendants at the sale (after changing Zag into dry pants), she went through the bag and said, “Umm, how about eight dollars?” I made her take ten. Then I went and grabbed four 30-inch-squre interlocking floor foam tiles that I’d been eyeing, and got those for another $2.

I always feel a little guilty when people price things really low. But not guilty enough to cast a shadow on my bargain-hunter’s glee.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Thrifting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.