For a second weekend in a row, my youngest and I visited several sales. Unlike last week, though, we made an excursion of it, visiting an estate sale in Marshfield, Missouri, some forty minutes down I-44 (run by Circle of Life Estate Sales, who does a number of sales in the area) and a outside the bounds of north and east Springfield. We bought nothing in Marshfield, but it gave the young man the chance to buy a couple of boxes of Pokémon boxes at the Walmart since he has picked over all the Walmarts and Dollar Generals in southwest Springfield and southwest towns like Republic, Marionville, and Aurora.
We did find a couple of things at the other sales:
On the “junk” side (which I’m starting to include to explain why my garage is so cluttered):
- A scroll saw with no blades but with the manual for $13.50. I got it home and plugged it in, and it bobs when turned on according to the speed set on the dial, so this might be a really good deal. Unless I cannot actually get blades for it, the blade attachment assembly is damaged, or 16″ is too small to be really useful. I don’t actually know yet how to really use a scroll saw, so I will learn someday. Maybe.
- A portable car starter/compressor for $6.00. Since my boy(s) are traveling further afield these days, it would be useful to have one in each trunk. It did not come with a power cable; hopefully it will take a common form factor, or I might spend the rest of the amount to buy one new securing a power cable on the Internet. Or I’ll throw it in a donation box myself for another yard sale.
- A Blu-Ray player for $5. Because sometime too soon, in five or ten years, these will be hard to come by cheaply. You might scoff, but just wait.
- A 1950s Unique “Dependable” Typewriter which looks to be a little typewriter which does not have keys but a dial to set what character you want to appear. Looks to be going for $10 on the Internet which is what I paid for it. I think I’ll clean it up and put it on a shelf to display it, but more likely it will go into a closet or a cabinet until my estate sale. Although I envision a wall with shelving to display old oddities like this, c’mon, man: All walls of Nogglestead and beyond will be dedicated to books.
An estate sale outside of north Springfield yielded a couple of LPs: Two by the Alan Parsons Project, The Turn of a Friendly Card and Eve and some two-disc compilation called Love Italian Style which includes Frank Sinatra, so not Italy Italian but Italian American.
At the last sale, I expect a writer lived there as large book collection spread over counters and tables (nice bookshelves presumably sold already) included books not only including various Writers Digest books on writing mysteries but also recent books on computers and cybersecurity, pre-med and med, architecture, and more. I got a couple:
- Art and Architecture: Venice, a thick almost 600 page book not only of pictures but also diagrams, so a serious architecture book.
- That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women edited by Rayna Green. Why? I don’t know.
- Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. I saw it mentioned on a blog last week or so. I, of course, read a couple years back, and although I was not impressed with the theme, the writing wasn’t bad.
- National Lampoon Jokes Jokes Jokes: Verbal Abuse Edition by Steve Ochs. Presumably, I will get some one-liners for when Finnish proverbs just won’t do.
- Forensics: True Crime Scene Investigations, a college textbook that cost more than the dollar I paid for it.
- Handmade Houses: A Guide to Woodbutchers Art by Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro. Which is a picture book and not diagrams.
- The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks. So I can better understand Lileks and Ed Driscoll’s infrequent architecture posts trashing pomo.
- What My Cat Taught Me About Life by Niki Anderson. Will it be an anniversary gift since that’s coming up in mere days? Probably not!
I barely made it through the media section when someone backed a pickup truck to the back door and took all the rest away.
But I did get:
- Lonesome Dove on VHS.
- Meet the Spartans, a spoof movie.
- The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise. We saw this in the theater back in the day, where I realize parts of the 21st century are “back in the day.”
- The Expendables 3. I watched the first one in 2023 and just bought the second in April. Might as well complete the set.
- National Lampoon’s Pledge This. I have been a sucker for National Lampoon-badged movies. So much a sucker for National Lampoon at all (see also the book above) that I invested in it when it was a publicly traded company. And lost all my money on it.
- The Omega Man, the Charlton Hestin version of Robert Mathieson’s I Am Legend later remade into the Will Smith movie which I “recently” watched but not so recently that I wrote a report on it.
When we were checking out at that sale, the guy said if there was any book I was on the fence about buying, he would sell them to me for a quarter each. So I presume that the guys with the pickup truck bought the remaining videos at a discount to sell somewhere else. And I thought, man, if I ever open The New Curiosity Shop, I’m going to have to work out a deal with these estate sale guys.
So I spent about $60 total, which is not bad once you factor in the junk (and the fact that the records were $5 each, which is a lot for me to spend, but c’mon, Alan Parsons Project in decent covers).
I did not buy Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, but I did show side 2 to my youngest to see if he noticed anything strange about it, but he did not. Quiz time, gentle reader: What would be different about side two of that LP?
The only thing the young man bought were some basketball cards he bought for fifty cents each. He looked one up on his phone and found it had some value, so he bought the lot. As we were walking out, he said that the first one he priced was some nobody Erving guy worth $1.75….
“Julius Erving?” I asked. “Dr. J.? A nobody?”
Well, he is young. And he will never hear the end of this.
