Better than fruit salad

ITS THAT TIME OF THE SEASON FOR LOOTING

Garage sales are a really big deal in Greeley. People who live here are either rather poor (immigrant families, college students, farmers,) or very well off (big time doctors, college students, lawyers). There are a lot of people who have been here for years, all their lives, and there is also the college population that is constantly changing; people are always moving out or moving in or moving to different apartment and what have you. We live close enough to some big time shopping cities for the rich people to buy lots of things, and there are enough thrift stores to let it all trickle down. So there is a lot of Junk in Greeley, and because of this everyone seems to wait with baited breath for the weather to warm up so that people can start putting out the crap and making a little pocket cash.

The garage sale directory in the paper usually takes up about half the page on the weekends. It’s grouped by region, and the deal is you get ten lines of text for about 30 bucks (and then you get a bunch of neon signs and balloons) so usually people can list quite a few things.

For me of course, garage sales are like mini thrift stores that are only open maybe Sat-Sun 8-3. Every Thursday when the garage sale directory first prints Janee and I will usually sit down at about 10am with our coffee and plot out our plan of attack. Sometimes we make elaborate plans, decide on a route and print out maps. Other times there aren’t as many we are interested in and we just circle a few. Some weekends we get Missy involved and we all meet at someone’s house early Saturday morning armed with thermoses and pocket change and hit up all the ones we have mapped out, other weekends we both go out separately and then talk about what we found on Monday.

If you do this every weekend like I do, you start to get a pretty good feel for it, and since it is so fleeting it’s easy to get all caught up in it and over spend because of the thrift store bug within. So I’ve made a list of some things I do or don’t that I hope you might find useful.

WHAT I LOOK FOR

1. I usually have some sort of practical item I’m looking for — this week it was flower pots for example — and I will go to the sales with that in mind. You’d be amazed at how many common household item things are at garage sales. In fact they are usually littered with them, because they are selling all the boring crap they don’t think about every day. Throughout the week I make a list of things I might need that aren‘t immediately necessary (hammer, small cast iron skillet, ice trays, mason jars, plastic cups for paint water) and see if I can’t find them there first. If I’ve gone about 4 weekends and no dice I might move up to thrift stores if its something I really need (like the flower pots — my basil was starting to get pretty crowded) but you’d be amazed at what you can dig up.

2. Estate sales and moving sales are always the best. At this point I only go to those. Moving sale is pretty obvious — the people are moving and need to get rid of some stuff they aren’t willing to move but they were willing to live with in that space. Estate sales are what you do when both of the people have died. These can sometimes be a little emotional, but they really are the jackpot because it’s all the stuff these people NEVER threw away, because it was valuable to them. I like stuff that people loved, and I like to be able to continue the love. Also a lot of good antique stuff, linens, and books are to be found at these sorts of things, along with the common things that I might be looking for anyway (see item #1)

3. Weird items or catchy titles will always make me at least get out and rummage through a box or two.

4. Because we are in a smallish town and surrounded by other smallish towns, we advertise for the surrounding areas are well. I think nothing of driving over to Ault and La Salle, and have even gone as far as Fort Morgan, although I tend to stick closer unless there is something amazing listed (church pews, last year).

5. Similarly, I sometimes get out the map and find how to get to 83724 CR 7, because the sales listed under the nebulous “country” subclass are almost always amazing. They are out at someone’s farm house, they often have an entire barn filled with baffling old things, and sometimes they have lemonade.

WHAT I RUN AWAY FROM

1. As a rule — and this should go without saying — we NEVER go to sales that aren’t advertised in the classifieds. The people who just throw stuff out on their front lawns never have stuff worth having anyway, and also the people willing to pay the thirty bucks probably have a lot more than just random stuff they found in their closet. Also, it’s a pride thing. You should put your ad in the newspaper. More people will come, the ad takers get a little commission. Everyone wins.

2. Similarly, I never go to sales if they have weird typos, or use slashes instead of spaces, or only say “too many to list.” I took pride in my job when it was my job, so even the people who made horrible typographical choices and would send them over on our online thing would face a strenuous editing process from me so that people wouldn’t get confused when reading it. Not everyone is as vigilant however, particularly since I don’t work in that department. Just the weekend there was one in Platteville: “Valley Village LLC is hold our Annual Yard Sale Weekend. Several homesites participating.” What?

3. That leads to an important point: annual garage sales. There really are people who have a sale every year, and advertise accordingly. That freaks me out. What, you have stuff that no one wants and that you couldn’t get rid of so you have to put it on sale every year? More likely of course is they go and buy up a whole lot of stuff at the thrift store or something and then sell it every year as some sort of weird quasi-business, and a) that takes stuff away from people that actually need it, and b) it defeats the purpose of garage sales, which is to get rid of the excess you have. Making a point to go out and get crap to sell just for the sake of participating in the frenzy is weird. Or maybe they really are just shopaholics that end up buying way too much crap every year and needing to sell it, but that’s kind of icky too. I wouldn’t be cheerfully drawing attention to that, and I don’t want to reward such behavior. Thus I spake.

4. Okay here’s where the claws come out. I don’t go to West Greeley anymore at all. West Greeley is where all of the rich folk live, which if fine enough if you’re looking for designer clothes or really fancy stuff, which some people are and that’s fine. However, West Greeley is also where most of the lame suburban couples go through their closets and find some ugly knickknacks to sell. These sales are almost exclusively crap. The designer stuff is often the things no one would buy off of eBay or take at the clothing resale places. I thought I’d give them the old college try a few times in May but every single time it was impossible to find (for some reason they never tell you how to get there, and yet they live in the areas where the streets get all turny and confusing. Greeley actually has streets called 23rd Ave. Rd. Ct., except it‘s off of Sunset Pl. that you have to get to via 31st and 25th., and oh just forget it.) and by the time I found it, they had nothing interesting besides some wood carvings or cats and some Christmas decorations. I also won’t go to Windsor. Similar reasons. I will drive THROUGH Windsor to get to that Estate sale in Larimer county, but I wouldn’t stop in Windsor, even if someone were selling live ducks.

And here’s a rule for you: No hitting up the ATM before hand. That defeats the purpose entirely. You can only use whatever is left over in your wallet, since the people are getting rid of what’s left over in their house.

LINKY DINKS

I had a link to some animal friends a while back, but this one takes the cake.

Some smutty reading, circa 16th century.

You can get your decadence and your holiness all in the same isle: that’s convenience for you!

Christ butter. Not to be confused with the Satan butter.

DREAM, IN SEGMENTS BECAUSE IT WAS REALLY FULL AND DETAILED AND FRANKLY WE AREN’T IN THE MOOD TO BE ALL COZY AND DETAIL ORIENTED, MAYBE I WILL ELABORATE FURTHER LATER WHEN IT ISN’T 7:13AM AND WHEN I’M NOT FRANTICALLY TRYING TO WAKE UP

1. Windsor (I will post for them mosquito notices only! — that will kick them off their high horse!)

2. The Springs (Nabu street? what?) A weird train to downtown (like a toll road but you get on a train, and its a multi colored carnival train with shoes on it.)

3. Downtown: vacant and supa-gangsta. Crappy graffiti everywhere. There’s a long tunnel under a bridge where there are all these checkpoint-esque things spray painted in the ground, where police men/security guards make you stop and wait…so you can’t run through the tunnel anymore. And the only other spot you could run is also all messed up.

4. Pikes Perk? All drinks come from one great big machine. Greens and oranges/tans, silver. A mesh drip-catchers at the bottom. Coffee, esspresso, (and tea?) all from that machine that was all clean and pristine. Nothing else was on the counter.

5. Anthony came downstairs, we walked around the back and sat outside in one of the train shoes or something. Or next to the tracks.

6. Up on patio: Getch, el Jordo, some girl who I thought looked like I would’ve, and some other girl who I hugged. Getch hugged and said “just like always” or something, el Jordo way too excited (really breathy excited hello, ear licking? what?)

7. There was something else with a bed and another train. bright colors. Windows. Hunting season, camp, waiting for something.

WHY IT ROCKS TO WORK IN PUBLISHING

Because you have hard evidence of your labor. Wednesday sucked for me, because just when I thought I was almost done, I had to spend 4 more hours on something. It was from the city, it was 60 printed pages long and 3 newspaper pages long after I had it all formatted and put in the correct fonts and margins. Oh it sucked. But I got it done, and I felt like a standing on a large rock and roaring for a while. YEEAH WOOO I’M THE BEST LEGAL NOTICE CLERK!! RAAAR I GOT THE SKILLZ! The thing is, when you start talking about margins and formatting and 130 instances of the word thence people kind of glaze over and stop listening. You say 4 hours of work (on just ONE FREAKING NOTICE) and they say “yeah I worked 10 straight what now”. So it’s nice that today is Friday, and that my 8 pages of layout are sprinkled all awkwardly throughout the classifieds, because there WERE NOT ENOUGH PAGES TO ACCOMMODATE THE GIRTH THAT WAS ALL MY WORK ON WEDNESDAY. Take that, bitches. Tonight when I go out with everyone I could whip out the paper and spread out the pages and say “do you SEE? NOW do you understand?”

HAIR TALK

My hair is the longest it’s been since middle school. And by that I mean, it easily covers my eyes, almost covers my ears, and in the back it is a little past my jawbone. This is a big deal for the oft-pixie-coiffed me, since traditionally this is the part where I flip out about OH MY GOD IT’S SO LONG and every other human on earth says oh you goofy child and eventually I black out and end up at Cost Cutters and come out a little freer. I haven’t done that for several reasons, one is that I’ve been trying to grow out my hair a little for some years now to do this photography idea, but the other is that the last time I had it shortened up I looked…bad. I don’t know if it was just the person I went to or what, but I was incredibly displeased with the shape of my head and chin. It was complicated and strange, and so my version of “starting again” has been to grow it out as much as I can stand it and then go to someone who actually knows what they’re doing and get a haircut. And of course the third reason is that at the moment I just don’t have the money to go and do that. Self-chopping is out of the question. I can trim the ends up well enough, but when you get this close to your skull you have to be careful and not take off too much here vs. there, or else your only option is buzz and start again. And frankly, my dear, I don‘t have the face for it.

Here’s the thing. A friend of mine through an unfortunate bleaching incident is basically all buzzed and beautiful at this moment. And while I haven’t seen her, she does have the face for it, and by that I mean she has a flawless little pointy face that has looked incredible no matter what she does to the mantle around it. So I said some nice things on her blog, all the while feeling somewhat like a hypocrite since I currently have long(ish) hair and I’m talking about free women and strong people and all this stuff — that I still believe with ever fiber of my body — but it lacks a certain something coming from me right now I think. So I am sorry about that, human. But I’m not sorry it happened, because again I think there’s no way it looks terrible, because you looking terrible is The Greatest Oxymoron, and furthermore I feel like all women should have hair shorter-than-they-are-initially-comfortable-with once in their lives, because it is strangely compelling to say a big FUCK YOU to conventional beauty standards, and to catch people gazing at you wistfully wishing they could be so bold. They aren’t but you ARE. That rocks.

Well. On that note it’s time to put on pants and go to work. And possibly gloat. (Eight pages!! Oh snap who’s the big dog now?!)

Sinus issues make me really disoriented, but it might just be the drugs. I feel like I am living a fever dream. I keep envisioning my inner organs configured in a rather art nouveau style, filled with unnatural curvy tall lines and gaps where organs should be. It makes me unable to breathe properly, unable to breathe without worrying I will break one of my vertical, curved ribs.

The last fever dream I had was also a kind of awake hallucination rather than an actual dream. My sinuses were backed up and flowing freely, so I had to construct a rather complicated pillow-stack in order to breath without drowning. My shifting was of course divided between one nostril and the other, but then because it was 3am and I was exhausted, somehow the lungs figured into the drainage stuff (hi. Still with me? right nostril, left nostril + right lung, left lung,) so then I had four compartments to worry about for some reason instead of 2. And then somehow each compartment kept getting bisected further, with a perpendicular line, which made no sense but was also completely unstoppable because once I get a weird visual idea I just sort of run with it, until I was unable to keep track of everything and I was turning my mental inner map into this weird cubist nightmare and I’d sit up all confused and sad. And this kept happening until I felt compelled to roll over and share it, in a sort of “stop this from happening” sort of way.

I don’t go out of my way to be a “graceful” or “dainty” person. This is not to say I’d go crashing through the woods kicking down trees, but I don’t do many of the conventional things girls do to constantly make themselves appealing. I can’t walk and make my butt do that swingy pendulum thing. I don’t make pretty hands when I’m reaching out for something. I don’t speak in questions. And so on. While I do have incredible posture and tend to have fairly good manners as far as our day and age go, I do often look like some sort of ogre-ous barefoot gypsy when compared to real women who know how to wear makeup and get haircuts.

EXHIBET A
There is a Mom at my church back home that occasionally does the readings. She is an impeccable dresser — somehow she always manages to make herself look more slender but not SKINNY or BONY in any way, because she isn’t really. She’s all tall and elegant and happy all the time, but simultaneously real, so you don’t get that cynical smirkiness about you when you see her, instead you think, how does she do it? You love her and are slightly jealous of her all the time. How does she do it? My only guess is that she’s not actually human.

EXHIBET B
You’ll remember we were eating at the crepe place for breakfast a few weekends ago. Anthony and I always get the same thing (an omelet with Swiss and apple crepes with rum-raisons,) eat half of the given dish, and then trade. Because of the deliciousness the whole thing usually takes about 7 minutes. I have blood sugar issues, so by the time I get to the meal part of the restaurant experience I am often ravenous and always make quick work of my meal. This is not new. I am usually the first one done.

This time though there was a woman by the window whose eating antics put me to shame. For every bite she would leisurely scoop a tidbit of food onto her fork, using her knife as a guide, and then she would carefully scrape each side of her knife onto the fork, thereby adding any remaining food-morsel onto the food-tidbit. Then she would bite. Then she chewed. Then she swallowed. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was astounding, I’d never seen anyone eat so slowly nor so prettily. For a split second it made me feel sorry for Anthony that he has to be with a girl who eats like a Norse King. Then I got over it.

I’ve been a flickr whore lately. I’ve been breathlessly running around in cheap 4-inch heals and vinyl skirts and leaning against walls acting aloof and disinterested, but in reality I am totally digging it, which probably doesn’t factor into that whole whore thing very well, but there we are. I have this sick addiction to beautifully photographed food, vintage books, odd housewares and plants, and fortunately now I can at least circumvent the cost factor by going to a few people’s flickr accounts and their favorites and NOT buy Martha Stewart and other dumb home-decorating magazines, which is what it had come to before. So now I have something cheaper and geared more toward instant gratification than actual possession. Like a whore. Wait so now I’ve turned the tables. Am I the pimp?

Well, I wouldn’t think so, because I think a pimp would try harder. I did put up about twenty photos on my little site, and I did write quite lengthy captions for many of them, but I didn’t go make a point to share them with the whole of the flickr community, in fact didn’t really say much about it at all other than perhaps put up a link up here. One of these days I’ll reconcile all of my online areas into one helpful clickable grand master list, but right now I’m just too lazy. Anyway it would only be for my own benefit, and I know where they all are anyway.

THE SEVEN DEADLY ZINS

Is the name of a relatively cheap wine. When I was getting Gnarly Head (a cheaper Zinfandel, one of my favorites) the guy who worked at the liquor store was all about The Seven Deadly Zins, and encouraged me to try it. I did yesterday and I was shocked to taste:

1. Smoke (to the point where I kept looking in the class to see where the smoke was coming from — it was epic, like holding your mouth open over a campfire.)

2. Ham

Smokey ham. Maybe honey-baked ham because there was a hint of sweetness. But mostly smoky ham.

I think Pride is this weekend, and beucase I’ve been in this insane DIY mood lately, I think I’m going to try and sew a flag. I don’t have any red though. Maybe a bandanna is laying around the house? I will go find one.

Work has been mean to me lately. I typed up a lot about it, but really the whole work situation has lately filled me with rage and I’ve noticed re-typing everything just re-ignites the rage.

Lots of other things have been filling me with rage too, and everything sort of came to a head last Sunday, at Anthony. Some of the things said were outlandish, a lot of the things said were true albeit seen through a rather pessimistic lens, and most of it probably isn’t such a big deal and would that we would worry about it all less, things could be happier. (There was a lot of ‘you have been so negative lately!’ ‘no, YOU have been so negative lately!!’) It wasn’t pretty, and didn’t really end smoothly and we had to exist in a vortex of careful faux-calm for a while. I’m making a conscious effort to be calmer, and he’s making a conscious effort to be less infuriating, and that’s about the only thing we could come up with.

So that was fine, and timed nicely with a three day break-from-work I’d scheduled for no real reason (well, originally to visit grad schools in New York, which turned into a time to go camping, but instead it turned into EMOTIONAL RECOVERY TIME). There was a lot of tickle fighting and reading and “sleeping”. So I feel much better, all things considered. And then this weekend we went down to the Springs to help Mom with some heavy duty yard work. And I had a ball. We watched Into Great Silence*, we spent way too much money on used books, we explored the penny arcade and played a wonderfully bizarre foosball basket ball type thing, and we ate incredible food every single day. So I’ve resolved to stop planning big things and rearranging my work schedule for Some Great Fun and instead just use my weekends wisely, since apparently that’s all it takes.

*This and Paris, Je T’aime were feel-good movies. But they were heavy feel-good movies, movies with substance. That’s a rare thing I think, and I wish I had an entire shelf devoted to substance filled happy film.

HERE ARE SOME THINGS, FIND THEM TELEOLOGICAL AT YOUR OWN DISCRENTION

1. In my pocket I just found a thing of Pez. The flavor, according to the packaging, is ORANGE CANDY. Orange is so confusing, being both a fruit and a color. And a taste.

2. There was a notice I built the other day for someone named Martina Martinez. Honest to God.

3. Similarly, there is an attorney who works with us named Issacson Rosenbaum, and every time I type his name into the billing system I have to say his name to myself.

4. I just pulled a very fine hair from my chest. It is quite long (several inches!) and crinkly but it is almost entirely colorless. I want this to mean I am turning into a polar bear, but I doubt it as to my knowledge there are very few polar bears in my family. Perhaps it is a recessive gene.

5. Lately I have spent a lot of time thinking about Gilda Radner’s impression of Jackie Kennedy in the weightlifting sketch. I cannot find it on You Tube, which makes me weirdly irritated since it’s on the Best Of Gilda Radner DVD, so it’s not like it’s totally obscure. Well, as far as SNL sketches from the 1970’s go. Wikipedia doesn’t even know about it, nor does Google in any sort of reliable way, and it’s strange to know something the internet doesn’t.

Here is some stuff I’ve been looking at recently.