I mentioned that I needed to find a Lil Tikes or the equivalent for our Trunk or Treat trunk this year. So as I was roaming the southwest part of Springfield on Friday, I saw a lot of signs for garage sales. So on Saturday morning, I bundled the youngest into the vehicle, and a-hunting we a-went.
As it happens, at the first garage sale where we stopped, we found a stroller with a car-shaped base whose handle detaches for $20. And at the last place we stopped, we found a nonfunctional powered Disney Princess car for $10. So we got two for our tableau for $30, which ain’t bad. Although I’m not sure what we’re going to do with them when we’re done. Probably leave them in the garage for a decade.
I also picked up some other stuff.
One garage sale had dollar DVDs, so I picked up a couple:
- Harvey with Jimmy Stewart
- Apocalypto directed by Mel Gibson which will likely show mesoamerican native cultures as they were.
- Porky’s which I have not seen
- Uncut Gems, the Adam Sandler drama. Surprised it got a DVD release, actually.
- Revenge of the Nerds; saw this a bunch, but not recently.
- Who’s Harry Crumb, the John Candy film.
- The Equalizer, the reboot of the television series. No, not the Dana Owens one. The Denzel Washington one.
And…. We found an unexpected estate sale off of Scenic. It looked to be run by the elderly sisters of the deceased, whom I was told was a teacher who had been a world traveler and who had spent over a decade in Italy. The garage was full of travel books, the kinds of memento books about such and such castle or this or that city. A professional sale would have had everything half off on Saturday, but they were going only 25% off, which made for some real arithmetic, so I only got one book: A comb-bound collection of photos from Okinawa, where three generations of my family have served in the Marine Corps and the home of karate (see my book reports on the works of Gichin Funakoshi). I mean, I could have gone nuts, but instead…
Instead I bought a tachi/wakizashi sword pair.
A while back, I bought a rapier. I looked at the rapier, bought didn’t have enough gift cards for it. Well, come Christmas, I had enough, and I went back, but the rapier was gone, and the little cabinet had a katana instead. As I had my heart set upon a rapier, I didn’t buy the katana. And when I steeled myself (ahut) to buy the katana, it was gone. Eventually, though, a rapier reappeared, and I bought it. It’s now on my wall with the others, but I was a katana short of satisfied.
This pair was marked $50, which meant it was under $40 for the pair, and so I bought them. Although I’m not sure where I’ll put them as my bladed wall is full already (like so many things here). Perhaps I will move things around to fit them in. One thing is sure, though: they won’t remain on the stand. The cats knocked them down in the few minutes I had them on the table to take a photo. And we don’t want any fractional kittens at Nogglestead.
The family member collecting the money said, “Ah, the ninja swords,” and I corrected her: “They’re samurai swords.” They’re different, of course, and a samurai probably would have shown her the steel had she mistaken him for a ninja. I would expect her sister would not have made the mistake.
