Having Fun Finding

There used to be a restaurant in town that was known as much for its kitschy decor as the food.  It closed not too long ago in the midst of a labor dispute.  I had mixed feelings about the place.  The decor was fun.  Some of the food was pretty good, if a little pricey.  It wasn't one of my regular haunts, but I did go there from time to time.

One of the things the place was known for was having toys and doo dads on the tables to amuse customers while they waited for their food.  Usually, it was small plastic animals, toy cars, crayons and the like.  Whenever I ate there, a few of them somehow made their way into my backpack.  Never quite sure how that happened, but it did.

The last couple of years the place was open, they added on a gift shop.  One of the items they sold was an hourglass kind of thing filled with plastic bits.  Hidden in the bits were all kinds of little toys and items.  The object was to shake the hourglass and make the different objects surface.  You were supposed to find as many of them as possible.  This became a pretty popular table toy.  If someone really got into it, they could buy one on the way out in the gift shop.  Pretty clever.

Anyway, I was in Goodwill the other day and I found two of them for sale!  They went home with me, of course.

Okay, so they're more like cylinders than hourglasses.

Let's see what we can find!

Here's a star!

A lot of the hidden objects were these little cubes with letters, etc. on them.

Forgot to do the crappy cell phone pic alert, didn't I?

There's a list on one end, so you can keep track of your finds.

Scotty dogs are turning up in several of my posts these days.

  Okay, maybe only two of my posts.  but that's enough to declare a trend, isn't it?

One of the things I like about junking is discovering bits and pieces from local places that are no longer there.  For some of these places, these bits and pieces are the only record they ever existed.  It's cool to preserve long-ago memories.  I'd never thought about this from the perspective of places that have more recently passed from the scene.  Isn't life interesting like that?