Bridge for Sale

I know the real estate market is in miserable shape, but some deals are irresistible.

Wouldn’t you like to own this fabulously ornate and undeveloped chunk of terra incognita? The property itself has the same luxurious texture as the lumpy pillows that engulfed you when, as a five year old, you sat down on Aunt Helene’s mammoth brocade sofa, and almost disappeared.

This wonderful bargain is, in fact, NAMED Helene. How unique!

Don’t let the fact that Helene is a rather remote property prevent you from taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Moons of Saturn are numerous, it’s true. But they are not for everyone. Helene is frightfully cold and traditionalists shopping in the moon market sometimes disparage Helene for her clack of classic roundness. But this is a satellite with an unforgettable shape – clearly distinct from any run-of-the-mill sky disc. No one looking at a line up of charming orbiters would mistake Helene for a common moon!

And Helene is much more than a chiseled work of art – she occupies one of only five exclusive Lagrange points which can guarantee consistently excellent and unchanging views of both her sister moon Dione and the planet Saturn!

Yes, it is a rare individual who could afford to even attempt to buy a moon of Saturn. But times (for some) are so flush, the embarrassing build-up of money almost requires that a grand gesture be made in the form of just this kind of extravagant purchase – the kind that no one else would ever attempt!

C’mon, doesn’t it remind you of a heavy, musty smelling pillow from that favorite couch? What did you call it back then, when you were just a child? Rosebud?!

What useless thing do you own just for the sake of owning it?

81 thoughts on “Bridge for Sale”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I now own a perfectly useless embellished (and beautiful) walking stick. This is a product of the art class I took last week. It was wonderful fun to do! And now I own it just for the sake of owning it.

    There are probably some other things, too, but it is too early to think of them. As the day goes on they may come to me!

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  2. My whole house is filled with stuff that might fall into this category, especially in my studio.

    But the first thing that comes to mind is a wooden stick, about 8″ high that divides into three at the bottom. No bark. It is a water divining stick, made for me by an African guide on a hike in South Africa. I’ve never used it for it’s designed purpose — I’m pretty sure I don’t have the right kind of water spirit to make it work, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.

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    1. Well, VS, maybe that guide could tell that you really are the kind of person who would be able to find water using that stick. I think you should keep that stick handy and if any one ever needs help finding water, you should give it a try.

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  3. Good morning to all:

    I do have a lot of useless things. However, almost always I had some reason for accumulating these things which turned out to be useless. There is one thing I bought that I really knew I would never use, a beret. When I bought the beret I thought that some how I would wear it and I really knew that I never would. I like the look of berets on other people. I just can’t wear one myself.

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    1. You are more the baseball cap type. But you’re right, that shouldn’t prevent you from owning a beret for its dramatic value.

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    2. Put it on and call yourself, St. Jacque, Beret Verde de Graine.
      Walk with a swagger, tip your beret to no one, look no one in the eye but the most attractive older women, never the young ones, but have a far-away but resolute gaze in your eyes, take long strides but stop occasionally and mutter to yourself in a slightly dangerous manner, have a few crumbs showing in your beard, but pat all children on the head and bend down to pet all dogs, even the dangerous ones, without bending your knees. But never pet at a cat, instead curse them with obscure foreign swear words.
      Now you can wear it.

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      1. But “I kiss the old ones and wink at the young pones”–a direct quote from a 94-year-old man who could have easily worn a beret despite being a Mennonite.

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      2. Okay, Clyde. Maybe I’m about ready to assume the style you have suggested. I think it should be done with a French accent like Maurice Chevalier’s.

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      3. i think you may need to go ta a different coffe shop than the usual one but i am very eager to hear of the results.
        i had a friend who once studied what doing a walk does to your brain. vary it to do john wayne and it feels different from tony randall or johnny carson or whatever. he commented on when he did my walk what it felt like for him and it made for a very interesting discussion. st. jacque, beret verde de graine./ jacque dans la grove clark may be a fun new personna to try on with the beret as the vehicle.

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      4. The swagger, “have a far-away but resolute gaze in your eyes, take long strides but stop occasionally and mutter to yourself in a slightly dangerous manner” Actually the resemblance stops there – Eddie would regularly bring home stray cats, till we had three. He was actually a fine, but slightly crazy, man.

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  4. I have a bunch of wood planes that are not useful as tools anymore – I could probably get them sharpened, but i like them for two reasons: they’re lovely (most are wood and have the sheen and warmth that can only come with use), and they belonged to my grandfather. My grandpa collected wood planes because he liked them – for the sake of owning them, not to use them. Some of the planes have notes in pencil on them noting where (or who) they came from. I staked my claim to them on a drive to my aunt’s for Thanskgiving when my grandmother was talking about what she thought each grandchild might like from the household goodies (she was started to mark some things for each of us), and I said I wanted the planes. My brother and cousins did not fuss about my claim. And they are now something that I own for the sake of owning them.

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    1. I am sure I have told you that I have a cousin in Lamberton who has every Stanley plane ever made, all in prime condition on display in his basement. Now there is useless.

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  5. Anna – your use of the word “collect” made me think about my pig banks. When I was 13 or 14, my folks came home from a trip to Kentucky bearing gifts. For me, a ceramic pig bank, but not the traditional pink pig standing on four legs. This pig is glazed brown, sitting down covering its cork. I had never had piggy bank before, but for some reason this one struck me as wonderful. And it snowballed from there. I have about 35 pigs in my collection, most of them “quirkly” and different. I put most of the pigs in storage when the teenager was younger – seemed too tempting and too breakable at the time. I should probably figure out a way to bring them out into the open.

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  6. Our items fall into the quasi-decorative category. I have a fantastically carved jade incense burner that my great grandfather allegedly got from an Italian sea captain when he was operating a dray service on the docks of Hamburg in the early 1900’s.. It must have been considered precious by the family, since they immigrated with it It to New York in 1914.. It weighs about 10 pounds and is more grotesque than anything else. Then there are the wool tomten figures and the straw Finnish goats. Useless, but there they are in the living room.

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  7. It all depends on how you look at it. If for whatever reason you had an agent come in and have an estate sale, you probably would not get much for the contents of my home. The majority of the things are cast offs from people who have moved on in life and decided they deserve better, but as I am the person they know who has nothing, surely I can use it.

    The thing is, you have to take the whole box, just to get the thing you might really want. Sorting through it all and trying to find useful homes or appropriate recycling takes time and emotional energy, and I know you are probably cringing at this (especially you, BiR), but I cannot just dump things wholesale. There are lots of reasons for this, but suffice it to say, that is just how I am.

    Some of the things we have, we have just because they are so darn nifty-some of those things come in the miscellaneous boxes, but most are from the days when I would hit the estate sales and antique stores, because those were the days before I had boxes dumped on me (and most of the current boxes are rather short on the old and nifty-my brothers have discovered eBay, so they cull anything like that out first).

    The last of the nifty estate sale purchases I made included a vertical egg slicer of German make. You place the egg in it, pointy side up, and bring down this ring that is neatly divided into six with fine wires. The shaft that holds the ring is spring-loaded, so once you get to the bottom of the egg, it comes right back up, and there you are with your hard-boiled egg neatly cut in 6 perfect wedges. We use it at least twice a week, carefully disassembling it to wash it, and the returning it to its place of honor in the kitchen cupboard. We most assuredly do not need it as much as we probably “need” a lot of things we don’t have, but it makes us happy, just to have it.

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    1. you have gotta love the persons brain who came up with that and the company that thought it was worth producing. what should you charge and how much profit can be realized from the introduction on a verticle egg slicer to the universe. i bought a waffle iron at a garage sale this summer because it is the coolest looking waffle iron i have evr seen. if look innerplanetary like a space ship. the boxes of stuff i have stashed away full of items i can not live without but have no iea of where they are goes in one of the sorry states of life catagories i partake in. i have way too much storage of way too much stuff tht would qualify

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    2. Well, Catherine, I don’t think the egg slicer qualifies as useless if you are using it. I probably have a U-haul truckload of stuff more useless than that.

      About not being able to dump things – I can identify with that. Sometimes I feel I’m fostering things till they can find a permanent home.

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      1. Linda, I agree… if you actually use it, then that’s a horse of a different color. I have the hamburger press that belonged to my grandmother. It is wooden, with a rooster on the front and it sits on the windowsill in my kitchen. There are fond memories associated with it since my grandmother would let me help make the burgers when we would eat over there on Saturday nights. But I have never used it since it came into my possession.

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      2. Linda… spill it. How is it? Have you tried something thick like risotto yet? I’m dying to hear about it!!!

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      3. VS, my mom had that very press, but I am guessing it is long gone. I’ve got a very utilitarian one that is aluminum that was in my grandmother’s kitchen. It is wonderful for making a stash of veggie burgers which then go into the stackable Tupperware burger-keepers in the freezer (same source for the Tupperware).

        We have a piano I have not played to speak of, because someday, I want to again-same goes for the harp and loom. I have these things and don’t use them, but have no intention of saying I never will and getting rid of them.

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      4. Oh, musical instruments….I have a guitar and a dulcimer and a harmonica. Can’t play, unfortunately.

        Well, VS, I have been just dying to talk about my Robostir experience. (You can probably tell I don’t have a lot going on in my life.)

        I tried it on a recipe for chicken tikka masala, where you start by sauteeing onion in a frying pan. I put the onion and olive oil in the pan and turned on the heat and released the Robostir into it. When I checked back a little later, all the onion was piled up in a ring around the edge. So I took a spatula and knocked it back into the middle of the pan, and the Robostir patiently and methodically moved the onion pieces, a few at a time, back out of danger. I intervened a couple more times, and I was starting to think, Is this really an improvement over standing and stirring? But in the end the onion came out nicely browned and evenly cooked with no scorched pieces, and I spent less time at the stove overall. Put in the rest of the ingredients, which included a can of diced tomatoes, and then the Robostir action seemed more effective, since the liquid moved back to the center on its own without my help.

        I’m thinking I may give the Robostir a name, though I haven’t picked one out yet. He does seem to be sort of creature-like. He’s a little noisy, but useful. Don’t know what would happen with a risotto. I think you just have to try it with different recipes and see what happens. I was planning to try a cooked pudding next.

        Just $9.99 at the “As Seen On TV” store at the megamall!

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      5. Hmm…he doesn’t really look like a Rosie to me. I was thinking I might call him J.D., or maybe Holden. The way he looks after the onion bits and shepherds them to safety kind of reminds of me of Holden Caulfield wanting to catch the kids in the rye field before they go off the cliff.

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      6. Oh yeah, instruments. I have an autoharp. I used to play it until a friend did me the favor of restringing it for a richer sound. Now the chords don’t match my sheet music, so I can’t play it anymore. (I was never good at it to begin with.) I should probably try to find it a permanent home with someone more musically gifted than I. I also have an electronic keyboard that I haven’t used in years, plus assorted percussion instruments, harmonicas, jews harp and the odd penny whistle.

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      7. it is not possible to have a dulcimer you can’t play if it is tuned correctly. look it up on you tube

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7JPx2Er58 and the notes are made in such a way as you can not find two that don’t go together. you can make up songs all day ong and if you want a real challange try to make one that sounds bad. it is very tough to do. great instrament. plain jane get it retuned. the new strings stretch and need to be done again. it wll be the same as you sheet music when it is done.

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      8. Thanks tim. Perhaps this is the nudge I need to get myself and the autoharp down to the Homestead Pickin Parlor.

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      9. i love homestead but the ime and money required to achievment are more than i like. auto harp is so easy go to you tube for free right now and see what you can do in 15 minutes. first tuning then playing

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  8. Morning–

    I’m sure we also have more things than I can remember at the moment… how about my Mother-in-Law’s car? We’ve been keeping it for her going on two years now… I think I moved it three times one day.

    Downstairs in one of the bedroom / storage rooms is an old light fixture from the civic center here in town. Dang thing is 3 feet tall and eighteen inches around and probably weighs 40 lbs. A tribute to lighting from 1950 or so… goes with my burned out lightbulb collection.

    Anybody else have weird dreams last night? I’m wondering if they were weather related?

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    1. That’s a question that often would get a definite yes from me – sometimes I have really elaborate dreams. Last night not so much – there was something about some small animals in a yard, and a small dog that started out as a stuffed animal but became real. I carried it around for awhile.

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      1. I dreamed about sneaking into a fair. Then something about play rehearsal and I broke the directors cell phone… and mysterious ‘goop’ coming out of the ductwork of the building.

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      2. How did you feel about sneaking into the fair?

        Sometimes in dreams I do something wrong that I would never actually do in real life, and I feel kinda bad about it. Then I wake up and think, “Whew, I’m glad I didn’t actually do that.”

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      3. Linda,
        Apparently I wasn’t too concerned about sneaking into the fair as I was crawling along the railing at the front of a grandstand of sorts so I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous….

        My ‘Recurring Dream’ theme seems to be insulting the football team or some other such large gathering of big mean guys… then running for my life. It’s High School all over again! Hah!

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    1. Is the birchbark a ring, by any chance?

      I have a circle of birchbark that one of my nieces gave me. I’ve been searching for something to put it around, like maybe a glass cylinder vase of just the right size.

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  9. I like the flatbed toy truck that my husband, the piano technician, made out of piano parts. He originally made it for his dad, the auto designer, and we inherited it back last year. It’s too fragile to play with so it’s more of a sculpture. It sits on the ledge next to a photo of my husband and his brother as toddlers riding in their Kiddielac police car. The Kiddielac is long gone.

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  10. I have a piece of Red Wing sewer pipe in my backyard. It was there when I bought the house. I sunk it into the ground a few inches with the idea that I would find some sort of large dish to perch on it that would serve as a birdbath.

    I didn’t actually go out and acquire it, so I’m not sure if it fits the question….but it is the sort of thing I might have brought home from a garage sale at some point.

    I also have a small electric iron that is very old. It has a wooden handle, and it only turns on or off; there is no temperature adjustment. Apparently when they first started to make electric irons it didn’t immediately occur to the manufacturers that it would be useful to have different temperatures for different types of fabrics. (Why do I suspect that the inventors of the early irons were probably men?)

    Sometimes people display old irons if they are the pre-electric kind that were heated on stoves, but an electric iron with a cord is not very well suited to display, so I just keep it in the linen closet.

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    1. I’m not so sure back then there was a need for different temperatures as back in the day, people didn’t wear plastic. I seldom have my new iron set at anything other than “high” .

      My mom was as pristine as a child as she is today and has her toy laundry items on display over the dryer in her laundry room now. I had never seen those things before and am glad she got them out. The little metal wringer washing machine is especially fine.

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  11. My best candidate for something I own because I don’t have a better idea of what to do with it . . . actually several items. All taxidermy stuff. I have two sets of mounted mule deer antlers, a stuffed mallard duck, a stuffed pheasant, a stuffed brown trout and a stuffed lake trout.

    People often have the wrong idea about why people have animals that they’ve taken mounted by a taxidermist. For example, the lake trout is beautiful and huge. My former wife caught it at a wonderful lodge in the Northwest Territories. It weighed 35 pounds. Larger lake trout are often ill-proportioned and goony looking, but this one is handsome. Kathe wouldn’t have killed it, but it was hooked in the gills and was obviously going to die when she boated it. So rather than throwing out the body, she had it mounted. There isn’t a sensible place in my home for this stuff now, but to just chuck it out feels like failing to respect the spirit of the animal.

    Any baboon whose life is not complete without a stuffed brown trout or duck is free to come pick up mine. I still enjoy the pheasant. The rest of it is stuff I own for reasons hard to explain.

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    1. Steve – your post made me think about one of the things that you WISH you still had around — your rug. But I can’t remember, was it possum or raccoon or what? Memory not serving me today.

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    2. Steve, your fish story reminds me of another. About 20 years ago, we took my father-in law fishing on Lake Superior. Five adults plus Captain Dana and his son on a big boat with outriggers trolling fishing lines on our way to Isle Royal. Out of deference to my father-in-law’s age (early eighties at the time), we let him have a first go at catching a fish. After about half an hour, Joe snagged a large lake trout. (As it turned out, the only fish caught on that excursion.) He was thrilled, but very disappointed and skeptical when Captain Dana said it was inedible. To console him, Dana offered that he would have it mounted for him. One year passed, Joe getting increasingly skeptical over not hearing from Captain Dana and suspecting that he had, in fact, eaten the fish himself. But in the spring of the second year, we got word that the fish was mounted and ready for pick-up. We retrieved the fish from Beaver Bay, and husband built a large, sturdy and heavy wooden box, complete with a brass handle, for transporting it. I in turn got to haul it with me, on the plane, to Denmark later that summer. As I went through customs in Copenhagen I was asked what was in the box. “A fish” I told them. They declined my offer to open the box and show them. “Just keep going” they said.

      The fish got a place of honor over Joe’s cozy bar where every subsequent visitor would be regaled with Joe’s fish story. Six years later, after attending Joe’s funeral, we were offered the fish to take back to Minnesota. We politely declined, figuring that one Trans-Atlantic flight was plenty for that goony looking fish.

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  12. Since my wife (no, she is not the useless thing I keep; I will get to it) and I moved into much smaller digs, we believe we have eliminated all useless things. I have missed a few things I tossed which would have been useful, but that means I got rid of the useless things quite well. My wife, not the useless item I will talk about, would claim I kept some useless items, as I would say of hers. Utility is not easy to define after 66/71 years of life and 46 years of marriage.
    So I was sitting here after my morning bike (maybe a useless thing; we’ll soon see) ride trying to spot an interestingly useless item while finishing a decoration for my grand-daughter’s bed (neither a useless item, although the decoration may be, but it will soon not be mine).
    There are the fishing lures of my father’s that Steve (a very useful item) helped me identify that I did figure out how to display: so, another decoration. I want to call my wife’s (the accessory queen but useful in other ways, which compensate, as I said) decorations useless, but then so would mine be. At our age an item which evokes memories is useful, now that I think about it.
    There are the remaining painting and carving supplies, which I may one day use, and I consider latent utility useful. I suppose at some point my RA and my FM (two very useless items I would like to ditch) will make those supplies superficial. But then my very useful wife, the accessory queen, has managed to make many of them decorations—and do decorations serve a purpose? And am I allowed to toss or use them, now that they have fallen under her hand?
    Then I looked out the window at my two closest neighbors, a pair of barn swallows, who have nested under a balcony near my window. They perch on a sign six feet from the window guarding their nest and flying after insects. We have grown quite used to each other. No, they are not the useless item. But I was wondering how many broods they raise each year (two the norm; mate for life but practice a bit of marital infidelity, as do most birds it seems). So I went to learn about them but not by using any of the 5 bird books I have. I went online, of course, as anyone on the Trail (a most utilitarian item) would do.
    So I guess the useless item that I keep are all of the reference-sort of books we have.

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  13. Where’ do I begin? Some of the useless stuff I own, has been hauled, at great expense, half way around the globe. Like the rocks I collected in Greenland. Hauled first to Denmark, and then to the Cheyenne, WY, and Carbondale, IL; they now reside in my back yard in St. Paul. When returning to Denmark after my six month stay in Greenland, the luggage handler at the airport in Søndrestrømfjord asked; “What do you have in this suitcase? Rocks?” I just said yes, but, of course, he didn’t believe me. I also have half a white brick, with turquoise glaze on one side, that I picked up in among some ruins in Samarkand in Central Asia. Let me not forget the four or five heavy chunks of petrified wood from a petrified forest in Wyoming that are now scattered throughout my garden. I can’t resist rocks!

    Pretty sea shells, collected from beaches in Mexico fall in the category of “latent utility.” Surely there must be SOMETHING I can do with them. The possibilities are overwhelming. And what about the old LPs we rarely play anymore? Just can’t bear to part, with them. Too many memories in that collection.

    Among the useless things that we hold on to, but that I would like to pitch, are chipped dishes husband inherited from his grandmother. I’m not kidding! Chipped dishes! They’re Royal Copenhagen, but surely with all those chips they must be worthless. Or can they be repaired? Perhaps they too fall in the “latent utility” category if I considered them as potential mosaic material. It’s a moot point, husband won’t part with them, so there they sit, collecting dust and taking up valuable space in our sideboard.

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    1. I use all our chipped dishes, even if they seem valuable. I figure if they’re already chipped and I hurt them, no problem!

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      1. Agreed. I ended up with the old ironstone we ate off of at my grandparents’ house every Christmas (there were a lot of us, and Grandma just kept getting more copies of the same pattern). It is chipped and I have broken a few of the plates (the coffee service remains in almost perfect condition from non-use), but I’ve got 17 of them, so cannot be fussed about it.

        I enjoy using them every day.

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  14. i got to csh in one one of my useless collectables today. i have been hauling around broken awning and umbrellas from the defective products i receive back form menards and the like for a couple of years because they are made mostly of aluminum and should be worth something. well today i took the first load in and son of a gun. 500 bucks. i have another 5 or six loads for sure. sometimes useless crap does work the way it is supposed to.

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    1. tim, you’re rich! Maybe i could get a couple of bucks for my old camping cook ware which stowed away somewhere in the basement.

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  15. Oh, where to start? For all my “coaching” about how to get rid of things that I’ve done with people, I am just as bad as anyone. I keep trying to get rid of books, photos, dishes, fabric, bedding… that I never use. I’ll be very good for a while, and then just bring in more of the same!

    On the other hand, I bought a kind of pretty purple blouse weeks ago, and when I got it home I realized it really wasn’t my color or style, and almost ditched it. But I hung it in the closet. This morning I went to a funeral of a friend’s mother whose favorite color was purple. Everyone was urged to wear something purple in honor of Lucy. Guess what I wore.

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    1. It’s just that sort of thing that is my downfall. I buy something at a yard sale and it turns out to be just the thing I need a couple of weeks later…or I fail to get rid of something and it suddenly comes in handy. It happens just often enough to reinforce the behavior.

      I think you’d look very nice in purple.

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  16. I have a (chipped) platter from my Grandma, and I love it because it’s from her everyday dishes that I remember eating on as a child at her house. I covet the rest of those dishes, and somewhere a cousin of mine probably is sitting with a chipped set of dishes, like PJ/Margaret from the West Side, wishing she could get them the heck out of her house. I keep coming the thrift shops hoping I’ll run into them.

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  17. Evening… have been thinking about this topic today because I was cleaning the garage in preparation for the Grad party Saturday.
    We have an unfinished single car garage so ‘cleaning’ was needed but not to the point of being crazy! I’m going to hang an old theater backdrop around the sides and middle and the snow-cone machine will be in the front portion then…

    I digress.

    In cleaning the garage I threw out many things. Strips of boards from left over projects, the cardboard pet carrier filled with wood chips from a project my Dad was working on several years ago, the lone ski pole that belonged to my brother when he lived here 30 years ago. And the ‘ball return net’ that never worked when I was a kid. You know the springy net thing you were supposed to pitch at and it would bounce the ball back to you? If it didn’t go through the gap around the edges or fly back and smack you in the forehead. My mom got it from a neighbor and it didn’t work then but it still hung in the garage all these years. Gone. Finally.
    And an old Tonka truck that I wore out: Tires were gone, cab was bent. And this was the special ‘Rust Colored’ version. It’s been here long enough- good riddance.

    Friend of mine is having an estate sale in Mankato this weekend Clyde… her Mother was a collector and there’s a lot of nice stuff in the house.

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  18. Such an irresistible topic, even if one day late. Hopefully I can finish typing before I get called this morning…

    I think with homeownership the number of useless things we own has maybe tripled. And that’s not counting the Random Mysterious Black Plastic Bits that litter my life.

    But the first item(s) I thought of in response to the question, probably because it is so shiny and gleaming in my minds eye, is a copper tea/coffee set that I picked up for $5 or so at a real estate sale last fall. I only really wanted the sugar pot, cream jug and two cups on a tray, but was convinced/forced to accept the fondue pot & stand, coffee/tea pot & trivet.

    [Side note: People are professional yard salers here… most good stuff is gone by 9am. Must be the 13% HST?]

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