Monday Rambles

Every so often, I have this fear that I'll have nothing to ramble about come Monday.  Most of my weeks are just not that interesting.  Like this last one for example, where all I did was try, unsuccessfully, to catch up with stuff.

Seriously, I have so much posting, house cleaning, pricing and photo taking to catch up on that it is not even funny.  I have declared a moratorium on yard sales until I get all this stuff done and, more importantly, out of the house!  

There really isn't that much to share this time, but my blogging has been so very much off-kilter lately that I feel I do need to put something up.  Hell, this is the second week in a row that Monday Rambles is going up on a Tuesday.  Sigh!

I know that my quirky, eccentric nature is part of my charm--well, that and my boyish good looks--but this is getting to be a little ridiculous.

There are some things that I want to write about, but within the context of other things, so I need to hold off a little bit on them.  Plus get organized.  Plus get caught up.  Plus do some other stuff.

It's a never-ending cycle, I tell you!

Ironically enough, this may be the most rambly ramble I've done in a while.  Much ado about nothing and all that.

I can say that June has been a really good booth sales month.  A very nice bounce-back from May.  I just need to ponder how to keep that going.  Interestingly, after I cleaned and spruced the place last week, my sales actually dipped!  Not precipitously, but they were off for several days.  That's not the first time that has happened either.  Sometimes, my spaces seem to defy the generally accepted common logic.

There's a post in that somewhere.

Oh great!  Something else to throw on the list.

I think I'll go.  I need to trim my mustache.  (That's on the list, too.  I'm getting shaggy here.)

Scan tomorrow.  Think I'll do some thrifting after that's done. The yard sale moratorium does not extend to the thrifts.  Yes, I am inconsistent.  Also eccentric and boyishly handsome and shaggy.

Monday Rambles

Welcome back to my life, as it was lived last week.  Yard sale tales and pics start on Wednesday.  I decided that they really deserved a post of their own, rather than being crammed in here.  There should be posts every day this week, in fact.  I hope you'll stop back.

We do have an important bit of business to deal with first, however.  The identification!  I got a lot of interesting responses to my request for information about this:

 

I put it up on Sir Thrift-A-Lot's Thriftasaurus party, hoping it would get some response.  I don't often join link parties, because my aesthetic is so different from other junk bloggers, but Sir-Thrift-A-Lot shares my love of pop culture from the past, so I felt he would be a good place to go. 

I picked up a few new readers from the link-up, which is always nice.  Welcome!  I also got a response from the good Sir himself!  Whee!  It turns out that he took it upon himself to research this little baby and found a similar item on eBay, which also contains key info that mine lacks, namely the words "Happy Birthday!"

Now to be fair, the ever-wonderful Shara suggested that idea in an email to me first, but the noble Sir is the one who confirmed it with evidence!  Thanks so much to everyone who added info and guesses to the quest.  I, myself, am a little heart-broken that it's not belly buttons, mainly because I get all sorts of odd ideas about how one could "enjoy" a belly button.

This does lead to a new mystery:  why doesn't mine actually use the word "birthday"?  I am guessing that it may have been a part of the packaging that has long since been lost.  Vintage finds, you are so enthralling, yet enigmatic!

Last night, I broke last month's sales record, so no matter what I do this week, I'll have a record month for the third month in a row!  Not even the fair slowed me down!  Good thing I found some good stuff over the weekend. 

I put my fall/harvest-themed items out last week, and they have already begun selling.  I don't really have that many, just a shelf or tow.  It's kind of a lead-in to Halloween for me.  The first Halloween load goes out next week and should all be out by mid-September.  I'll also be putting out a shelf of (gulp!) Christmas this week. Actually, it's already out.  I'm just going to move it to a more prominent place. 

I leave a bunch of Xmas dishes, especially Santa Coke glasses, out all year on a bottom shelf.  They'll sell bit by bit through the year and keep an out-of-the way shelf looking full.  I'm going to move them up a bit, so that I can begin adding to them a little at a time for a while.  I have enough space now that a little corner of Christmas won't distract from everything else. 

It pays to think like a retailer at this time of the year.  As people's minds turn to gift-giving, they often turn away from secondhand shopping venues, especially the true flea markets.  Stacks and stashes of decor items drive my sales from October through December.  That, plus new, unopened items, will keep me hopping this holiday season.  I want to keep my sales streak alive.

Today starts a new session at work.  I'm not totally sure what I am supposed to be doing.  The boss hinted at changes, but didn't really elaborate.  I'm heading in early to see what's up.  Friday is my next follow-up scan at the cancer center.  I'll get the results next Tuesday.  This week marks one year since my treatment ended.  I'm going to try to go to Goodwill in celebration!  This weekend is the big flea.  Labor Day is one of the twice a year antique wings out there, so I'll head out there on Monday to hunt for bargains.  Lots of dealers will have dollar tables on the last day.

Over the first two weekends in September, there are two different community sales in two nearby parks. I am debating setting up to sell in at least one of them.  It will depend on whether I can get anything pulled out of the shed and priced or not.  I do need to get back in there and work some more.  The next junk set out is coming up in mid-October.  I need to purge, so I can scrounge.  I'd like to do one more yard sale at the house, but I am running out of time for that.

I'm tentatively committed to crawling the Highway 60 yard sale in October.  There are several highway/route yard sales that crisscross Kentucky, including the mega Highway 127 sale that cuts through part of the state.  I tend to prefer the ones the begin and end here, like the 60 sale, especially when they cross through the part of the state I from whence I hail. 

I found out that there is even a sale that cuts through my old hometown.  Of course, I found that out two weeks after it happened this year, so it's on the list for next year.  I may even combine that sale with the graveside visit.  My mother would appreciate that.

I've rambled a lot today, huh? 

Ephemeral

A little while ago, I got a message on my phone telling me I was running out of storage space.  I've gotten in the habit of just whipping out my phone when I need to take a pic for the blog or Craigslist or whatever.  I usually snap several, just to make sure one of two come out okay.

I've got Dropbox installed, so the pictures I take on my phone automatically upload to my PC.  I still prefer to do what minimal photo editing I know how to do on the computer.  I get a little better control than with my fat thumbs on my phone.  Since I use the copies on the PC, all those photos have been kind of piling up on my phone, until I started to run out of space.

I ended up spending a few minutes here and there deleting things I had already used and had no reason to keep.  Do I really need that pic of a Little Tikes table that sold nearly a year ago?  Uhm, that would be a no.  Digital spring cleaning--gotta free up those megabytes!  When I was done, it struck me just how many pictures I had deleted.  It had never dawned on me just how often I grab my phone and snap away. 

I can remember when pictures were things you took at parties and on vacation, and not something you did willy nilly every time you saw a broken phone or some interesting graffiti.  (Which reminds there's a bit of "wall art" down the street I want to snap.)  I'm not being old curmudgeon dude here when I say this.  In fact, I love the freedom and flexibility this little gadget gives me, not to mention the blog content.  Hardly a day goes by that I don't use it.  I'm just surprised at how impermanent all those pics are now.  I use them and I toss them.  Done.

Junkers are used to dealing with what is called "ephemera."  Some specialize in it.  You see boxes of it at nearly every estate sale:  receipts, letter, bills, old brochures,  maps, old cards, notes, postcards, and, yes, even pictures.  Printed materials in other words.  Stuff on paper.  The term "ephemera" speaks to the fragility of paper, its impermanence.  It rips and tears.  It rots.  It burns.  Lots of it doesn't last.

Another definition for ephemera is this:  Things that are useful only for a very short time.  in that sense, all those photos clogging my phone (and probably lots and lots of other phones) are truly ephemeral.  That couch I just posted to Craigslist?  Don't need it any more.  That funny dog I just put on Facebook?  Done with it.  That plate of food I just Instagramed?  Burp.

I don't know that I have any kind of point to this at all.  It just struck me as interesting.  So does this image:  Forty years from now the junkers are pawing through a box of old cell phones and tablets at a yard sale, hoping to strike gold and find one that still has tons of pictures on it.  The box is labelled:  "ephemera."

It could happen.

Chemo Scoreboard

Two down!

Four to go!

I came home with a splitting headache and went right to bed.  There was a woman in the same pod with me who would not shut up!  She just kept babbling and babbling and babbling.  I know way  more about her and her family than I ever need to, including the fact that she likes to cut up hot dogs and put them in her mac and cheese.

Post-Holiday Babbling

Maybe that should be "Inter-Holiday Babbling"?

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday.  We sure did here.

I got Keith these:

 And he got me this:

It might seem like I came out a bit ahead on that deal, but he loved the house shoes!  In fact, when he opened the package, he said to me those three little words everyone wants to hear from their partner:

"You're a nut!"

Chiquito liked the house shoes too!

There were other presents, but those are the highlights.  I was genuinely surprised by the Nook.

I'm off work until mid-January, so I'm trying to catch up on some stuff and get some rest, at least until my surgery next week.  I'm going to try to post every day until I go the the hospital next Monday.  I'm going to clean out some old stuff that needs to go up, so I can take the items I'm posting about to the booths.

I need to get out to the booths to tidy, but as long as it's freezing rain/light snow/nasty out, I'm keeping my tubby butt inside.  I absolutely cannot get sick right now.  

I'm also hoping to go ahead and schedule a few extra posts through the end of next week, so that there is some content here while I am in the hospital.  When I get home, I'll do a quick update to let you know how things went.  I'm not totally sure how long I'll actually be in the hospital.  I'm thinking only a day or two, but my primary care doc thinks it'll be three or four days.  Neither the surgeon or the hospital has been very clear on that point, so I'm just playing it by ear.

As soon as I can, I'll put up pics of the scar where Nigel and Sixtus used to be.  I'll make sure it's not a bloody mess before I do.

Nothing Much to Say...

Don't really have anything to blog about at this moment in time, so I'll just point a couple of things out.

First, I'm not sure what happened with the Maru video I posted last week, but something glitched there.  I didn't notice it until a couple of days ago, but I did fix it.  Go back and check it out.  It's so cute it'll make your teeth hurt.

Second, I'm working in an awful hurry these days and using several different computers to boot, so it seems like more errors are creeping in past my proofing.  I do apologize.  As I catch them, I fix them, no matter how old the posts are.

I guess it is a bit ironic to do a post about the importance of proofing under those conditions, huh?  Irony, thy name is EDDIE!

See you around!

Looking Forward and Looking Back

It's probably no surprise that I approach the idea of a new year a little differently than the world at large.  It seems like the pattern is supposed to be something like this:

1.  Enter December.
2. Spend most of the month hung up on Christmas
3. Shop, eat, party, repeat
4. Around December 27, notice that the year is almost over
5. Spend a few days looking back over the year that's ending
6. Stay up late to eat and party some more on December 31
7. Dash off a couple of resolutions you have no intention of keeping
8. Carry on as normal

It's like our looking back has to be all wrapped up well before the ball starts dropping and our looking forward is an insincere little ritual.  The reality is, though, that time doesn't settle into little compartments.  The years flow into one another, and the only distinction between them are the arbitrary page breaks on our calendars.  The events from the past year keep on rolling and reverberating into the current one for sometime to come.  We may only want to spend a few days looking back, but life is a continual process of retrospection in order to renew and move forward.  I don't think our little quickie end of the year procedures do it justice.

I'll freely admit that, for me, some of this comes from the fact that I never seem to have my shit together at the end of the year enough to do my processing when everyone else does.  But, I also seem to need more time to really sort through things than other folks do.  Not sure why that is, but I do have a tendency to over-think things to death.  Given that, it takes me a little longer to transition from one year to the next, especially after a year like this last one.

The month of January is named for Janus, the Roman god of doorways.  When you pass through a doorway, you move into a new room, but can still see and access the room you left.  For this reason, Janus is depicted as having two faces, one looking forward and the other looking back.  It's an image that is actually pretty meaningful for me.

If Janus is the symbol for the month, then--to me, at least--the whole month ought to be about looking forward and looking back.  Or, at least, more than just a day or two.  Not that everyone ought to sit around and navel-gaze for four weeks, but somehow, in between the blither and blather of daily life, we ought to spend more time thinking about where we want to go over the next 300-plus days than the few minutes it takes to babble out a standard resolution about losing weight or stopping smoking.

When I journaled, it was usually somewhere around the fifteenth or the twentieth of January before I felt ready to approach the topic of the new year, particularly when it came to goals and ambitions.  I've not really dealt with the topic much in the blog, because by the time I'm ready to do it, everyone else has moved on to other things.

But the 2010-2011 transfer is different for me.  I've never had a year like this last one and it's still echoing through my life.  I need to bring some sort of closure to it--no matter how limited--for my own sake.  I also need to throw out ll these dreams and ideas I have for the upcoming months, just to get them out of my head.  If I don't write them down somewhere, then I don't have any way of checking back later to see how well I did with them.

So, next week is going to be about finally starting to lay the ghosts of 2010 to rest.  I think there'll be about three or four posts worth of stuff for that.  After that, I'm going to finish inviting the new spirits of 2011 in with another couple of posts about my hopes for this year.

C'mon Janus, let's get this party started.  Happy 2011, y'all.