It’s January and naturally we are starting to get the urge to hit some sales. The last time I went out was nearly 2 months ago. Unfortunately, there is not much out there this time of year. Meghan and I decided we’d hit a couple and if nothing else it would be a good excuse to hang out and get some breakfast. Our semi-regular guest star Leslie decided to come along for the ride as well.

After perusing the pitiful listings we decided to check out the Lake City Flea Market, where none of us had ever been.

As we walked in, Leslie pointed out that it was really more of an antique market than a flea market. I was just grateful that it wasn’t just stalls full of new tube socks and bad crafts. I circled around a few times knowing from the get-go that it would be extremely unlikely that there was anything there I would want to buy. Especially not this person’s box of Hamburger Helper.

I was pretty happy when we all decided we’d had enough and set out in search of food. We ended up finding a new cafe/bakery that hit the spot, then headed to a nearby sale that turned out not to actually exist. We were thinking we’d call it a day, then we decided to go to this one sale that had had some Craig’s List drama earlier in the week — they’d posted an ad, then someone else kept posting “rebuttals” saying “They’ve been having this sale for a month! It’s all crappy and overpriced!” Of course, these posts would get deleted, then another one would crop up, then get deleted again … Finally they posted an ad that looked similar to the real one with a disclaimer “Note: This sale started a month ago.” It was all vaguely intriguing in a wacky internet hi-jinks sort of way. When we drove up to the sale, Meghan recognized the sign from about a month ago when she’d gotten super annoyed trying to find the damn sale and ended up giving up in disgust.

The house was cute from the outside, but everything inside was quite crusty. There was an astonishing amount of stuff left considering the sale had already been going on for a while. As I looked around certain themes emerged from the piles of detritus: cats, Alaska, printmaking, and bones.

And not just regular bones! How about some bone ART.

Oh, but that wasn’t all the bone art. I was disturbed to realize that this funky-looking crucifix was made out of vertebrae. And some gold paint.

I think I was saved from getting overly creeped out by the silliness of the wet cat poster hanging right next to it. (I wonder whether that was the original owner’s placement or just a fluke of the estate sale.)

There was also a ton of really elaborate and huge carved wood antique furniture pieces. One of had a huge tall spire on top which evidently had required them to recess and re-finish a small area of the ceiling above it. I neglected to photograph that, choosing instead just to take a picture of some of the stuff on it.

In the same room as the bone art pieces (and that poodle) were these boxes of soaps. There was a sign indicating that they were ten cents each. I am going to get personal with you readers for a moment to say that if by chance you have saved anywhere near this many hotel and guest soaps, please stop now.

A little nervously, I made my way downstairs. There was a room that was just filled up with tons and tons of books, as well as assorted paper ephemera and all kinds of other random things.

It was at this point that we all felt a little sad, because some of it looked kind of good but it was way too crusted over and scungy to want to spent much time digging through.

We did leaf through a few of the piles. I picked up an odd old notebook looking thing which turned out to contain an “erotic mystery story.” I can’t tell when it was published but I would guess no later than the ’40s — probably earlier. With phrases such as “his male prerogative stood boldly upright” and “the warm dew trickling down the swollen tree-trunk” — and others a bit too dirty for me to include here — I just had to buy it. I also got a 1982 Kliban cat calendar (which sadly is not as collectible as I’d thought) and a copy of Master Detective magazine from 1984, featuring stories such as “When Hookers Fall Out, It’s Murder” and “Who’s Killing the ‘Great’ Pimps of Hamburg?”

On my way to pay, I noticed one more room I hadn’t been into. There were more bookcases here. Including this one, which Meghan pointed out was almost exclusively filled with books about the Nazis. Yet another theme emerges from this household’s stuff.

I paid a whopping $2 for my purchases and got irrationally jealous at the one item bought by the person in front of me, a lovely art deco wallpaper sample. Meghan bought one old group photograph and a 1959 edition of “Ford Times.” Leslie bought a hilarious pamphlet that I hope will be the subject of a guest Book Report for us soon. It definitely wasn’t a great day for sales, but I had fun, and that’s all I was really expecting from the second Saturday of the year.

Meghan and I were talking about some of the sales that we’d been to over the years and how sometimes there seems to be a theme for the day. Maybe you see the same book at five different sales. Or maybe there is an abundance of velvet everywhere you go. Or maybe it’s the day that the whole city has decided to get rid of their ice cream makers.

Way back in 2001 we had a day where there was a definite theme: monkeys. We came across tons of monkey items, everything from kitschy ceramic monkeys (some of which I purchased) to a book about … The Monkees. We drove past a sign reading “Free Dirt — and Free Monkey with every load!” And then I found a homemade mixed tape in a box of cassettes called “Spankin’ the Funky Spunk Munky.”

Obviously I had to buy it, based purely on the name alone. I was extra-intrigued by the custom paint job on the cassette itself. I popped into Meghan’s car stereo and it actually turned out to be good, with tracks from the Bar-Kays, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Hugo Montenegro, Barry White, and much more. There were also some funny spoken interludes like movie dialogue and weird cigarette commercials. This tape became our official yard sale theme tape and we played it at least once every single Saturday, until Meghan got a new car without a cassette player and the Funky Spunk Munky era came to a close.

I have to give respect to Meghan’s amazing sale memory, because she remembered that this was the same day that we went to a sale hosted by a wacky girl with a ton of crazy vintage and oddball stuff spread over her front lawn. Parked out front of her house was a scooter with a glittery sign reading “Funky Bunny’s Sparkle Shack.” She was about to move to L.A., which seemed entirely appropriate. I remember spending quite a lot of time looking through her stuff and chatting, and I’m sure I bought something, but I can’t remember what it was. Meghan purchased a stunning disco-themed lunchbox, which came with the original thermos … filled with booze. Nice! (I asked if she ever drank it, but she said no.)

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that we aren’t the only ones who remember this sale. This article from 2002 describes a local historian who spent some time going to yard sales and filming sellers as they parted with their junk:

Over the past three years, Dorpat has trolled Seattle’s weekend yard sales in search of bad art pieces and the people to share the stories behind them. He rolls his video camera to capture the precise moment the seller makes the release. The “Forsaken Art Project” is another of Dorpat’s projects in a life’s worth of projects.

And wouldn’t you know it, one of the sellers he filmed was the Funky Bunny herself!

I can’t find any more info about this project (is there some kind of curse on yard-sale-related movies that prevents me from being actually able to see any of them?), but it sounds completely fascinating. And it would be a bonus to get to revisit a sale we actually went to. In fact, now that I think about it, with all of the sales we were going to around then … I wouldn’t be surprised if Meghan and I recognized more than a few of the sales he filmed. Maybe some day I will get to find out!

With Meghan back in town after two weekends away, last Saturday we just had to go out and make the rounds of whatever piddly sales were out there, even though it was bordering on drizzly when we headed out. There wasn’t much advertised, and some of the listings didn’t appear to actually exist. We almost missed one of them because they just listed the intersection and said “look for signs” — which would have been great if this wasn’t the only sign they had.

I still can’t believe we actually saw that from the street. The sale was in an apartment and the stuff was about as bad as the sign.

We went to one moving sale where they had a few interesting things. Meghan bought some books and two pieces of carnival glass. When she unwrapped it at home, she discovered they had only put one piece in there, so she had to drive all the way back and get it — then the lady gave her a hard time about whether she had really paid for both.

A “rummage sale” at a cafe turned out to be two tables of vaguely interesting stuff. At least we got coffee and snacks. Another sale up the street from there was in someone’s garage, mostly full of new crappy tools. The woman said they were going to have more sales with different stuff soon, so even if we didn’t want any tools we should come back. “Did you have a store?” I asked nosily. “Sort of … an online store,” she said. The non-tool items were things like boring votive candle-holder sets for $10 that I can’t imagine anyone ever would have ordered online. Oh well.

Neither of us really had the saling vibe so we decided to knock off pretty early, making one last stop at an estate sale that sounded like it could be okay. When we got there I was a little scared by the front door — complete with bathtub no-skid stickers on the door and a stunning “Beware of Cat” sign.

When we walked in, it smelled like people had been smoking in that house for about the last 40 years. There were ashtrays for sale … and one that had about 20 cigarette butts still in it. (For sale? Who knows.) There was an assortment of crusty junk scattered all over the living room and into the kitchen. It was also freezing-ass cold.

I noticed some steep stairs in one corner (covered with grungy-looking long shag carpet) and asked if there was more stuff upstairs, to which the seller nodded. Somewhat apprehensively we went up. Upstairs was a really weird scene. It was like they had cleaned up 90% of the former contents of the room, but then decided to leave just a few random piles of junk here and there. And when I say junk, I really mean junk.

This dresser gave me a bad vibe. Along with all the really great items you can see, there were photocopies of someone’s driver’s license, sitting on top of several pieces of unopened mail.

To be honest, there was almost a crime-scene vibe to the place, and I was starting to get a little creeped out. I bought nothing and loitered around outside while Meghan paid for for a couple of yellow spaghetti string glasses. I told her when she washed them it would probably turn out that they were really white.

My only purchase? A small white garbage can (unused) for $1. Not really a day for the record books, but hey. Yard sales are a crapshoot and you gotta hit a bunch of duds to get to the ones that make it all worthwhile.

Trunk photo? You gotta be kidding.