Things that amuse me

One site I check regularly for grins and giggles and oddball shopping is Rene Bates auctions This site runs auctions for other places, mostly cities and similar municipal entities; it's based in McKinney so most of the auctions are in Texas, and many of them are local to this area.

Most of them at least attempt to group items in some sort of logical order. Then there's the Plano PD auction, which included this grouping

Portable Gazebo
Bag of bags and tools
Weed eater
Jack
Blower
Drill
Copper tubing
Baby stroller (Baby stroller ?!)

One part yard sale, one part Urban Exploration

I went to a sale this weekend in a church that had been abandoned. Several years ago, the church had been hit by a tornado, and they didn't have the insurance to rebuild, so they just left the building. The city finally decided to take the building, so the church was trying to sell off what they could from inside.

There was no electricity, and while most of the rooms had a window, several didn't. I've always wanted to go urban exploring, and now I know that I am too much of a coward to really enjoy it. I almost made it to the second floor, but chickened out at the last step and very carefully made my way back down. Every last wall on the second floor (that I could see) had been stripped down to studs.

The best part of the sale was one room in the very back which had an antique printer that I wanted so bad. Alas, it would have taken a team of strong men and another room in our house, so I had to pass on that... and the antique photo enlarger, and the slightly less antique printer. I managed to get three print drawers and a bunch of type, plus a couple other small pieces of useful detritus.

When I want to go garage sale hopping, I use the Yard Sale Treasure Map to make my plans. This website pulls Craigslist garage sale ads and maps them on google mapper. So folks, if you want me to show up at your yard sale, make sure you put in on Craigslist!