Monday Rambles

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

My glasses broke the other day, so I'm back to wearing contacts, which I haven't done regularly in years.  I've kept my prescription up to dote, but I've gotten to the point in life where I want getting ready in the morning to be as easy as possible, so the hassle of contacts has been just one more thing to do that I don't really want to and so I haven't.

The nerd glasses didn't really go with the longer hair anyway.  They'd work if I were planning to actually go the man bun route, but I feel like I am too old and fat for that.  I'm actually working on more of a loose, hippie ponytail.  I think little, gold-rimmed specs would look better with that.

Without my glasses, I think I look like my mother with a goatee, which kind of makes me nostalgic for my childhood days with the carnival, when I would watch Mom primping and combing her beard before going on stage to do her act is kind of unnerving.  Even worse, Keith keeps telling me how much he likes the way I look without the glasses, and in the back of my mind, a little voice is going, "He thinks your mother with a goatee is hot."  I think I need therapy.

FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

I had a great conversation yesterday at the mall with a 12 year old boy looking for Spider-Man comics.  He told me he was looking for "older ones."  I said "Old for you?  or Old for me?"  He had to think about that for a minute, then told me he meant 90's.  Old for him, then.  I told him to keep checking back and would do my best to find some.

I actually do need to carve out some time for a bad movie/comic bagging marathon.  I've been selling a lot of those boogers lately.

SPEAKING OF THE BOOTH

It feels like tax season is finally upon us.  Sales are picking up all the time.  The weekends have been gold rush city of late.  Saturday was my second best day ever.  The gravy is flowing and the small furniture is flying out of the door. So is the pricier stuff.  Saturday some dude came in and bought all of my vintage metal lunchboxes.

IT'S JUNKER CHRISTMAS!

This is junk set out week for the next neighborhood over from us, which means that we are next.  We've already got an early start on our set out pile going.  You're not supposed to do that, but my neighborhood ain't much on rules.  It's the first time we've ever tried it, though.  Watch us get cited for it, while the folks down the street who have had the nasty couches sitting on the curb for a MONTH, get by with nothing.

I made two "practice runs" last night.  One to a pile in the other neighborhood.  Got some small stuff, but nothing notable, except for two old fishing poles.  The other stop was at the magical house down the hill that disgorges all kind of interesting stuff every set out period.  They always start early and will be putting out crap right up until the garbage trucks come.  Last night it was a bunch of old religious texts and prayer books.  SCORE!

There's also a new renovation dumpster on our street, two doors down from us.  I told Keith that it was like having junk delivery!

All this is to say: 

IT'S ON BABY!

MUSIC FOR MONDAYS

And finally, to set you on your way:  The Carolina Chocolate Drops!

Family Photo Parade

I avoided the temptation to call this "Phamily Photo Parade."  I have a thing for alliteration, you know.  Too many comic books as a kid.

My great aunt passed away the other day.  She was the last surviving member of my grandparents' generation.  The family has been going through some of the photos, etc that she left behind, and one of my cousins sent me some pictures of my mother, among others. 

I was really touched by this gesture, since there were a couple in the lot that I didn't have and one I had never seen before.  A few years before he died, my grandfather divided up the family photos between my mom and uncles, but he did so in a really random order.  Instead of keeping family units together, he just sort of made piles for each of them with no importance given to the subjects of the photos.  As a result, there are some pictures of my mother as a child that I always wanted and do not have.  Included in this lot were a couple of shots of her as a young child, which really touched me.

They were such a great and unexpected treasure, that I thought I would share a few here.

School picture of my mother

Another one

Guessing at her age here, but I think this was taken in 1943-1944.

My brother and me on my ninth birthday.  STYLIN'!

I had never seen this pic of my grandfather (center) with his parents and my mom and uncle.

Uncle Larry's school pics.

Since we're rapidly approaching my 50th year, and I keep getting more and more nostalgic, I may dig some of the photos I have out and scan a few sometime.

Thursday Scrambles

Happy Boxing Day!

We'll be spending it on the road heading home.  Getting the car packed to go back is going to be a challenge.  Keith's mother gave me six boxes of junk she had collected.  I condensed it down a little, but it still takes up a lot of room.

Keith and I brought our gifts to each other with us to exchange, thus adding to the car situation.  We couldn't let Christmas Eve go by without present!  And Santa!  We mainly got each other clothes this year, which we both needed badly.  We both wear things until they're shot, and neither of us had bought any new clothes in ages.  An outlet store has been going out of business not too far from us, so that helped our shopping go farther than it normally would.

Santa, however, bought us both tablets!

It's been a good visit.  We got caught in a horrible storm coming down, but the weather has been nice otherwise.  Chilly, but nice.  We've seen all the relatives, spent time with his mom, bought local wine, shopped at Fred's (one of my obsessions), and did a little (unproductive) thrifting.  If we had another day, we'd hit the thrifts in the surrounding towns, but we're out of time and car space.  Therefore, next time.

We also had lovely meals on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  We cooked on Christmas Eve and made an abbreviated version of one of our traditional holiday feasts.  On Christmas Day, Keith's mom made all of his favorites.  It was a feast, let me tell you.

It's also been a time for doing some reminiscing.  Christmastime always makes me think of my mother and all the holiday things she did.  This visit, I heard a bunch of stories from Keith's family that I did not know.   His mom read us a letter from his dad that was a lot about him.   Keith and I have talked a lot about our relationship on this trip.  We've had a lot of Christmases together, all of them special.  This year was a little harder on us than most have been, but we're still rolling on.  His mom was excited about the engagement and happy for us.  Now, we just have to get our ducks in a row with our planning.  I'm truly lucky to have him in my life.  I wouldn't trade our time together for anything or anyone.

Now it's time to go home.  Keith set up a kitty cam in the bedroom so we could keep tabs on the boys, but it's time to see them in person.  Kosh will be in need of some major lap time, for sure.  I was gone house-sitting for the week before we left, then I came home briefly and we both left.  He's not well for that kind of thing.

I've been having too much fun to take pics, so you'll just have to imagine everything.

It's going to be busy, busy when we get home.  I'm off until the 13th, but last night I was figuring out everything I had to do when we get back and realized that's not as long as it seems.

Besides all the unpacking, laundry, putting away, cleaning up and such the usually come with returning from a journey, I  have to:

Get these boxes of stuff priced and to the booth
De-Christmas the booth
Restock the booth
Tidy the booth
Clean the house
Catch up on Days of our Lives and General Hospital on hulu
Go to the New Years big flea market
Read some comics
Work more in the junk room
Hit the 75% off post-Xmas clearance sales to stock up for next year
Price and store that post-Xmas stuff
Have traditional Xmas/New Year's brunch with friends
Write some blog posts
Initiate the Secret Project I mentioned a while ago
Take more loads from the house to booth storage
Take at least one nap or two
Spend some quality time with the boys
Junk with my uncle
Thrift a little
Finish a book that I've been reading forever

Not much of a vacation, huh?  Looks like 2013 is going to end and 2014 is going to start on a busy note.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that 2014 is bright for all of us.  Talk to you in a couple of days, after we get home!
 

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Think of this one as "Road Trip" part 2.  Or as Post 1,001.  Either one will work.

Since the main purpose for the trip was to decorate Mom's stone, I'd be remiss if I forgot to mention that and show a few pics.

I forgot to take a before pic, but I snatched two really ratty hanging pots of flowers and pitched them.  Keith saw me do that and thought I was taking flowers off random graves!  Silly man!  I bought the blue saddle arrangement at the big flea market and the Mom thing at a thrift.

Mom's and Dad's stones.  Keep in mind that they weren't married when he died in 2006 (and hadn't been for over two decades), but here they are, side by side.  I have an odd family.

We used the veteran's plaque from the VA for Dad's headstone.  I know most folks usually use them as footstones.  See the odd family remark above.  It also just really fit for my dad.  Being in the Army was a huge part of his life.  he never really got very far away from it after he retired.  We (or at least I) plan to get "Mother" and "Father" footstones for them, at some point.  Various family members pass through and keep American flags flapping on all the veterans' graves.  They'll have to add my grandfather to the list.

Speaking of my grandfather, I always have to visit the generations whenever I go to the cemetery.  I was fortunate to have my great-grandparents into my young adulthood, so I have memories of all three generations before me that are buried in that cemetery.  I must bore Keith with my stories when we go.

My grandparents--Mom's parents.  His side is still fresh from the funeral.  I can't help but wonder how his widow felt watching him get buried beside my grandmother.  I always do a doubletake whenever I see the dates on her side of the stone.  It surely can't be almost twenty years since she died.  That's like a lifetime ago!  I still miss her so much.  We lost her so suddenly.  I'm the oldest grandchild on that side of my family.  She and I really bonded.

My grandfather's parents.  I never really knew them all that well, even though she lived in a backroom at my grandparents' house for years.  I used to sit back there and watch TV with her sometimes.

My grandmother's parents.  They were the most awesome people.  I was in seminary when they died, and actually officiated at her funeral.  That was the highlight of my brief career as a ministerial student and one of the highlights of my life.  It kind of shocks me to think how long ago that was.  I was just a kid! I was almost exactly half as old then as I am now.  In the half of my life lived since then, all of the prior generations of my family have joined them in that cemetery.  Keith thinks it's kind of strange that they got married on Christmas Day.  It was always just a part of family lore when I was growing up.

We timed everything just right, because it started raining right as we finished and were leaving the cemetery!  Graveside spruced up and mission accomplished!

What's in a Name?

This is my 1000th post, something I never thought I would reach.  It's only taken ten years to get her, after all!  In honor of that, I wanted to do something a little more personal.  I hope you enjoy it.

My full name is Michael Edward Mitchell.  Some of you all already know that, as I have used it a few times here on the blog.  I've been "Eddie" derived from the "Edward" part for my whole life, however.  It's what I was meant to be called.  Never "Mike" or even "Michael."

When my mom was nearly a teenager, her youngest brother, my uncle Mike, was born.  Since both of my grandparents worked, and it was the fifties, Mom usually had to take care of him.  The story goes that she decided during these times that she would name her first boy "Michael" after him.  And so I became a namesake.

The middle name thing came along later.  Mom said that she wanted at first to name me "Michael Andrew."  The reason she didn't was because she didn't like the name "Andy."  Since there was already one Mike in the family, she didn't want to call me by that name, so she needed a workable middle name.  Rather than "Andy" she would have called me "Drew."  She eventually decided that it was going to be hard enough to get people used to using my middle name.  A less common nick name from that middle name might even be more problematic, so she scrapped the idea and went with "Edward."

She said it was just a name she liked, but we found out years later that my great-grandmother had a brother named Edward, so it's actually a family name.  If had been a girl, I would have been "Sara Dorine," two more family names--Dorine was my grandmother's name.  Mom always said that she was so sure that she was carrying a boy that she referred to me as "Eddie" just about from the moment she found out that she was pregnant.

My uncle Mike was a teenager when I was born.  We've talked a lot about how we share some of the same memories of my grandparents in ways that are different from everyone else, because we were both kids.  He was one of my first heroes when I was very young.  I loved for him to pick me up and play with me.  One of the good things that came out of my mother's passing is that we have gotten to be close again.  He lives across the river from me, and we both have booths in the same Peddlers Mall.  We get together and share stories about junk and go junking and stuff.  It's pretty cool.

As far as I was concerned, my name was "Eddie."  I never found out about this "Michael" thing until I was in first grade.  There I was sitting in the gym with my mom and all the other kids and their parents.  They were calling off names, and kids were going off with teachers.  They called this "Michael Mitchell" dude, and my mother gets up and starts walking away!  WHAT??  She finally turns to me and says:  "That's you.  Come on."  An identity crisis at 5 years old.  How cruel is that?

I had a running battle with my name for years after that.  I just wanted to be "Eddie."  But on the first day of school every year, I was "Michael."  Every time I went to the doctor, I was "Michael."  Worse yet was when people would take shortcuts and just assume they could call me "Mike" because of the "Michael" part.  That's. Not. My. Name.

My biggest problem with "Michael" was that I could not spell it correctly.  For years, I got it wrong, prompting my mother to fuss and bemoan my illiteracy.  I could do fifth grade math in the third grade, but I could not spell my own name.  Where had she failed?  It didn't help things much when I would try to point out that from my point of view, my name was "Eddie" and it would be so much simpler if everyone just got used to that.  Then I would get the story about where my name comes from.

Somewhere around the sixth grade, I figured out that if I spelled "Michael" correctly, when I looked at it backwards, the first four letters would spell "Leah."  Don't ask me how I came up with that, but it worked.

When I graduated high school and saw my name printed out on my cards, I had a revelation about how cool my name actually is.  Look at it:

Michael Edward Mitchell

It's wonderfully symmetrical.  You can draw a line right through the middle of it, and the are the same number of letters on either side.  The first and last name are derivations of each other, so the sort of mirror each other.  They have the same number of letters and start and end with the same letter.  It really is pretty cool.  It sounds awesome when it's all called out, too.

Since college, I've toyed around with using various versions of my name.  I did "M. Edward" for a while.  That's even still my official signature.  I tried "M.E." and also "Michael Edward" which I liked because it sounds really pretentious.  In fact, whenever I get business cards, I put the whole thing on there.

In every day life, I'm pretty content to be just plain ole "Eddie."  It fits.  But never "Ed."  The only two people who ever called me that are both gone now.  It's kind of reserved for their use.  I've stopped fighting the "Michael" thing and will come meekly when called.  I do, however, make every attempt to squeeze my whole middle name in when filling out forms, no matter how few spaces they give for the middle initial.  Sometimes, the broader culture needs reminding that the first name is not always the "default" name.

Monday Rambles

I'm definitely feeling better right now.  No nausea. No tin foil.  Just lots and lots of bricks.  Thanks to the 4ht, I got a four day weekend, which was nice.  It gave me a chance to rest up, yet still do things.  It rained most of the weekend, which meant no yard sales, which meant  really good sales at the Peddler's Mall for the first time this month.

I took a good load in on Wednesday and straightened up quite a bit.  I discovered that, despite slow June sales, I had some pretty bare shelves.  Four totes later, most of that was taken care of.  Now, of course, I have new bare spots to fill.  We're having our fourth anniversary fling this coming Saturday, so I'll be taking more stuff in to get ready for that.  I think I'm bringing in mainly larger items, but haven't decided for sure.  I'm not going to be in town for the shindig (more on that in a bit), but I have high hopes for some good sales.

We went to the big flea market on Saturday, as mentioned previously.  We started the day with a traditional family breakfast at my dad's favorite restaurant.

 

 

I was well-armed with my granny cart.  (I actually have three of them.  I'm really wanting one of the newer models that has a drink rack on the back.)

 

I wasn't looking to do any serious re-sale shopping.  I'm pretty well-stocked at the moment.  The main goal was to look at stuff, have some fun, and celebrate my mother's birthday.

As far as big flea markets go, this wasn't one of the better ones.  The variety that's typically there was lacking.

The Fiesta people were there.

The T-shirt people were there.

The banana box people were there.

Also, the fashion belt people, the leather purse people, the dip mix people, the flavored coffee people, the "As Seen on TV" people, and the dollar jewelry people were all there.  In fact, dollar jewelry seemed to be the theme for the day.  It seemed like there was a vendor in every row with boxes of jewelry to sort through.  Some of it looked to be older, but I don't know jewelry and don't really have the patience to stand there and jostle with people rooting through boxes.  So, I passed.

What was missing were the secondhand dealers that are always there.  There were a few, but mainly book dealers.  There were some higher end antiquers there, but not the kind of folks who have a wide variety of stuff at good prices.  Normally, there are a lot of these "mom and pop" sellers there, right alongside the "pros."  I'm not sure what the deal was, but it was a little disappointing.  I'll be writing more about the big flea market and the way it's changed over the years later this week.

We still had fun, and I did spend a little money.  I bought a couple of games for resale and a nice pic of the 23rd Psalm for a dollar.  I got some comics and books for me, plus a couple to sell.  The Kentucky Proud kettle corn folks weren't there, which was a bummer.  I did get some snacks and some stuff for the house.  It was just a relaxing, no pressure, shopping for fun kind of day--just like I used to have with Mom.  Sometimes, it's nice not to be "working."

It was still pretty tiring, since the bricks came along too.  I took a several hour nap when we got home and spent Sunday lazing around and resting up.

One of the things I picked up was a flower arrangement for Mom's tombstone.  When we were there for the funeral, I noticed that the flowers at her grave were getting kind of ratty.  We're going to take a road trip this weekend to go and spruce it up a bit.  We're also going to hit a couple of flea markets and antique malls on the way.

I've found a couple of new niches on YouTube that have me tickled:  old Disney cartoon shorts and soap opera broadcasts from the fifties and sixties.  I caught an episode of Secret Storm from the late fifties that I totally got into.  Great, classic soap opera like they don't make any more.  I also found a classic As the World Turns featuring several of the performers who were still on the show when it was cancelled a couple of years ago.  It was pretty cool.

Of course, as a junker, I have a hard time watching vintage TV without being distracted by all the background set decor and props!  So many vintage goods!  So much that I could sell!  It's a sickness, I tell you! 

Monday Rambles

I have kind of deduced that my particular chemo cycle runs like this:

Infusion Week:  Feel Like Shit
Second Week:  Feel Little Better
Third Week:  Feel Tiredest of Cycle
Fourth Week:  Feel as Good as I am Going to Get (not saying too much here)
Then it all repeats.
Lather.  Rinse. Repeat.

So last week, I started feeling a little better.  The nausea subsided.  No more puking.  Still very, very tired, but I've been able to live with that, except that it annoys me not having any energy.  The tinfoil is mostly gone, bur Diet Dr Pepper still doesn't taste right.  I can drink coffee without gagging now, so that much is appreciated.

I guess this week I'll be the tiredest of the cycle.  Oh well.  I can deal with that.

The YesterNook outdoor sale went well.  I was under the awning, so I was out of the sun ll day.  I still wore the hat, though.  I sold some stuff, but not as much as I expected.  Mostly, it was books and comics.  Next time, that will be all I bring.  They're talking about doing another one in the fall, which would be fun.

The take for the day was about 60 bucks from the sale.  I say "about" because I was shopping out of my intake, so I don't have an exact number.  After the day was over, I took all the leftover books, LP's (given to me), and comics to Half-Price Books and cashed them in for another 90 bucks!  Not bad overall!

I did buy quite a few things, so I made up for missing the best church sale in town a little.  I also had a lot of stuff given to me, which seems to happen a lot.  I managed to sell a couple of the pieces there, and the rest will keep me stocked for a long while, which is nice.  I'm thinking on laying off the sales for a while.

I managed to get some longer essay posts finished this week.  Two "Junkin' Memories" and one "This is How we Do It."  Feels good to get some of those series moving again.  Look for them on Tuesdays (starting tomorrow) for the rest of June.  It also feels good to get the drafts folder cleared out a little.  I realized the other day that, if I can finish all the drafts I have accumulated, I'll have have a thousand posts published.  I'm working on it!

Speaking of posts, there's one you won't get to see.  I mentioned on Mother's Day that I was working on a post for the anniversary of my mother's death.  I did finish it, but it ended up being a bit too personal to share on the internet, so I set it aside.  Just wanted you all to know.

Got a busy week coming up this week  I'm adding new morning duties at work, which will last for the next three months.  Good to have the summer income, but I'll miss the sleep.  Thankfully, my afternoons are still open.  I should have two or three new posts up, so keep checking back.

Take care!

Motherless Mother's Day Number Three

The title says it all.  This is the third Mother's Day since I became an adult orphan.  I've been working on a longer post that I intended to use today, but since Mother's Day and the anniversary of her death come so close together, I've decided to save it for the end of the month and use it for the anniversary.  It still needs some tweaking I'm not up to doing right now.

Instead, some random thoughts and a special treat in a bit.

For the last few years, we hadn't really done anything special for Mother's Day itself.  Usually, we'd save it until the end of the month and go to the big Memorial Day Flea Market together.  I'd either buy breakfast or lunch, and we'd call that Mother's Day.  Going to the big flea market by myself hasn't been the same.

One of the hardest things about having cancer is that it's put that need back in me to pick up the phone and call her to talk about things.  I want to know if this is how she felt.  I want to know if I responded right when she felt that way.  I'd never felt unsure about anything we did, until I had to start having chemo too.  And what I am going through is nothing compared to what she did.  I'm still fat with a head of hair.  She looked like a concentration camp victim when she died.  I remember showing her ID to people in the nursing home and hospice, just so they could see her with hair.  She would have killed me if she knew the number of people I let see her without her teeth in.

But I can't pick up the phone and make that call.  It really throws me to have that feeling again now, all this time later.  Cancer--dredging up old shit since 2103. It's some kind of really bizarre, really delayed survivor's guilt, I guess.  But it's the one feeling from this whole experience I can't seem to process. Fuck Cancer anyway.

But, I promised you a treat.  How about Emmylou Harris and her own daughters?  Seriously sweet.



I hope that you're having a good Mother's Day.  Be good to your mothers while you have them.

RIP George Jones

We just lost one of the greats.  You simply cannot imagine country music without thinking of George Jones.

My parents split when I was sixteen, right about the time this song was coming out.  There were some bad years between them after that, but somewhere along the line, they somehow managed to become friends again.  I never quite figured it out and I never really totally understood the relationship, but it was what it was.

They're buried side by side, in fact.  They ended up being better as friends than they ever were married.

Sometime in the early 90's, I'm hanging out with both of them in the NCO club at Fort Knox.  All of a sudden this song comes on. and I look up and my parents are heading to the dance floor.  I sat there kind of flabbergasted, while they danced.  My mom told me later that my dad liked the song and liked to dance to it, so she would oblige him.  But only for that one song.

We almost played it at his funeral.  It was going to be the recession music while everyone filed out.  I had Keith searching the internet for a decent version the night before. I chickened out at the next-to-the last minute and had it pulled.  I got to be really worried about what Mom's reaction would be.  She was an unpredictable sort.

Sometimes, I wish I'd gone through with it.



Truth was, my father never got over my mother.  Anyone that knew him knew that.   While I won't go so far as to say the same for my mother,  I will say that she remained fond of him for a good many years.  Yet, she always went to very great lengths to make sure that everyone knew they were divorced.  She was a complex, complicated, and sometimes downright contradictory and contrary individual.  You have no idea how much I miss that.

In my mind, wherever they are, George is playing this song right now.  And my parents are dancing. 

Holiday Traditions? We has 'em!

One of the fun things about selling vintage Christmas items is imagining all the holidays those items have seen.  How were they used in holiday traditions?  That's kind of a fertile ground for thought:  Holiday Traditions.  Most of us have some variation on them.  For example,  I haven't yet posted the Hardrock, Cocoa, and Joe video, which has become one of my traditions for the blog.  The certainly do fit in with the vintage theme, don't they?
 


I'm thinking a lot about those holiday traditions these days, since a few of them have come to an end. There won't be a gift exchange with my mother this year the Saturday before Christmas, followed by a trip to the breakfast buffet.  I'm still having a harder time dealing with that than I would like to admit.

When I was a kid, about the first grade, I made a Christmas Eve devotional in Sunday School.  It was a pretty simple deal:  Sing "Away in a Manger." Pray. Sing your favorite carol. (I chose "Deck the Halls.) Read the Christmas story.  It was written on a piece of construction paper and decorated with crayon drawings and Christmas stickers.  Mom kept it tucked in her Bible and, every year, we would do it on Xmas Eve before we opened presents (another family tradition).  Even after she and I had both moved past our church days, we kept it up. It was a sweet little part of our Christmas.  It bothers me that I have no idea what happened to it.

Some traditions tend to evolve over the years, even here at the blog.  Usually, I bring up Suzy Snowflake at about the same time Hardrock comes out.  This year, I present a slightly more modern version of Suzy:



If her Exorcist-style spinning head creeps you out, here's a more traditional version:



What are some of your traditions?

Flipping My Wig

So, I bought this last Saturday at the warehouse sale:

Yes, I know it's just a Styrofoam wig head, but I'm going to do a post on it anyway.  The warehouse sale was held in a closed costume and novelty shop, so I think they used the wig heads for, well, wigs that were a part of costume.  If they were part of some massive collection of heads, well, I don't really want to know about it.

There was a bag of heads and a sign that said the heads were a dollar each, unless you wanted to buy them all.  In that case, they would be 75 cents each.  The sign also noted that there were 18 of them all together.  I cannot imagine anyone outside of Dolly Parton needing that many wig heads, and I'm sure hers are all sequiny and stuff.  (Or maybe Hedwig...)

For the record, I got just one head.  I bought it partly because I thought it was kind of neat.  I like to sell interesting things in my Peddler's Mall booth, and this fits the bill for me.  I also got it because it reminded me a little bit of my mother.

Before you get the wrong idea, let me state that my mother did not have a head made of Styrofoam!  Nor did she have a lot of wigs.  She did have one when I was a kid, but she only wore it a few times.  I don't think she really liked it.  I'm pretty sure I ended up using it with a Halloween costume at some point, but I don't really know what happened to it.

My mother was a rather unique individual with a strange sense of humor.  Every so often, she would declare that she had some odd, made up disease.  She got a nosebleed one Christmas and declared that she had stigmata.  Seriously.  It really didn't matter to her that no one before had ever had stigmata flowing from their nose.  She was unique in that regard, because her middle name was Marie and it was Christmas.  I think it was supposed to have something to do with sympathizing with Mary's labor pains, but I'm reasonably certain that the Blessed Virgin didn't expel the Baby Jesus from her nostrils.

When I was in about seventh grade, Mom declared that she was having a combination of late adolescence and early senility.  I'm not sure even she could explain what the symptoms of that were supposed to be.  She did decide, however, to start an institution for sufferers of the dread malady.  It was going to be called "Mother Hood's Senility Complex."

Yes, I had to grow up with this kind of stuff going on.  It was never dull.

What does this have to do with wig heads, you ask?  Shortly after I moved to Louisville, she declared that she had Head Paralysis one time when I was visiting.  She went on and on about how Head Paralysis (HP for short) was overlooked and ignored by society and she was going to do something about it.  She was going to hold the first-ever Head Paralysis Awareness Parade.  Everyone was going to carry a wig head in solidarity with HP sufferers.

I'm not sure where I got it, but somehow I found a wig head when I returned to Louisville.  I wrote "Head Paralysis Support Group" on the side of it, wrapped it up, and gave it to her for Christmas.  She loved it and carried it around the house, practicing for her parade.

When they started prescribing morphine for her pain from the cancer, it really did a number on her head.  She started getting easily confused about things and would sometimes fixate on odd trivial details, while missing more important matters completely.  A couple of times, she fell, so the doctor ordered a brain scan to see if her unsteadiness was due to the meds or if the cancer had spread to her brain.

She did not have any cancer in her brain, but the scans showed that, at some indeterminate point, she had experienced a couple of mini-strokes in her brain that were so small they had no real effect on her.  They weren't able to tell when she had them or what may have caused them.  They did decide, though, that her balance issues were being caused by the meds.

When she heard the word "mini-stroke," she zeroed in on it and would not let go.  How could she have had one?  How did she not know?  When did that happen?  Anything the doctor had to say about her present state went right out the window.  After the doctor left the room, I looked at her and said, "Mom, I know exactly what happened."  She looked at me kind of oddly and asked me to explain.  I took a deep breath and said "It was just your Head Paralysis kicking in."  The laugh we had from that was just what we needed and distracted her for a bit.

She kept that wig head.  It sat on the dresser in her bedroom.  When we were packing things up after her death, I made sure it got saved.  It's still in the boxes of her stuff in the shed that I have yet to deal with.  I think I'm going to put it on my dresser.  I'm either going to put the Elmer Fudd hat she wore when she took her dogs out in the winter or the hard hat she wore when she was trimming trees on her farm on it.  Either one would be fitting.

Other families have antiques as heirlooms.  I have wig heads and Fry Guys.  It works.

Junkin' Memories: Family Ties

Finally, the long-awaited first segment in my Junkin' Memories series!

In some ways, it's my family's fault that I am a junker.  They weren't really junkers, but I gathered a lot of the ingredients that make a good junker from them.  And, while they didn't exactly encourage me to grow up and become a vendor in an indoor flea market set-up, they certainly provided me with more than enough inspiration.

To begin with, I was very close with both my grandparents and great-grandparents as a kid, so I saw and heard a lot about the ways things used to be done.  My grandmother would open up the attic sometimes and I would sit up there and look through the boxes of old stuff.  I remember reading some of the comics and kids' books that belong to my mother and uncles.  When I was taking Algebra in middle school, my grandmother brought down her Algebra textbook to show me.

One of the real treasures at my grandparents' house was the box of family photos that was kept in a closet in the bathroom.   Why the bathroom?  I have no idea, but that's where they were.  Every so often, the box would come out and we would look through them and listen to my mom and grandparents name off the people and share stories.  I've got a lot of those photos now.  When I look at them, I wish I had listened closer and tried to remember more.

My mom was the one who really taught me to respect what the older generations had to give, especially the stories.  A lot of the family mementos that are now in my possession came down through her.  She taught me to love and value things with history in them and save them to pass on.  When we bought our house, she gave me a few of the old Christmas decorations that used to be hers when she was a kid.  And every year after that, I got some kind of family item as a present:  an old spoon from one of my father's mess kits, two settings of my grandmother's china, my grandmother's tablecloth.

Interestingly enough, it was also my mother who traumatized me in a way by getting rid of a lot of my childhood stuff when I was younger.  As an Army family, we moved a lot and it seems like a lot of the stuff that we got rid of each move was mine and my brother's!  I know I rebuilt my comic book collection at least three times.  (Although, to her credit, when I went to college, she held on to the whole thing until I had a place of my own to put it in.  And that was through three or four more moves.)   The worst one, and one that she said she later regretted, was getting rid of Beartrack, my child hood Teddy.  I had loved all the fuzz and both eyes off him and my grandmother recovered him with washcloths and gave him new button eyes.  He didn't make it back from Germany.  Mom said I was going on fourth grade and too old for a Teddy Bear, so out he went.

I think somehow both sides of my mother imprinted on me and affect me as a junker.  I know the impact things can have on people and I also understand people who search and search for that lost childhood treasure.  My mother was also the one who introduced me to the local flea market.  (More on that in another post.)

It was my dad, however, who broadened my junking horizons without realizing it.  I had a really strained relationship with him after my parents split.  He had been stationed away from the family the last three years of his time in the Army, so when he retired and came home, he was a virtual stranger.  My folks divorced soon after, and he didn't handle it well.  Frankly, neither did I.  I was already 15 at the time, living in small town Kentucky, and feeling the urges of same-sex attraction beginning and unable to talk to anyone about it.  In short, I was isolated and confused.  My parents' divorce isolated me from my church group, which was my primary peer support at that time.  My own feelings cut me off from myself.  And I pretty much took it out on my dad.

Visiting Dad became about shopping.  He would take me anywhere and buy me just about anything in order to spend time with me and maybe get me to open up.  And I took advantage of that.  Yes, I was a brat.  Totally.  I didn't know how else to be.  I was young and hurting and totally unable to express it.  So on one visit, he said a fateful sentence to me, one that was to open me up to a whole avenue of shopping heretofore unknown to me:  thrifting!   "Ever been to the DAV?" he asked.  I'd never even heard of it.  And, wham!  My life changed!

Old books!  Old comics!  Dishes! Clothes! Furniture!  Strange items!  You could find it all in a thrift.  My wardrobe and library grew.  And my love for thrifting has never gone away.  It's amazing what a dollar or two will get you.

Perhaps the biggest family influence on me these days is my Uncle Mike.  He's Mom's youngest brother and was a teenager when I was born, so we share a lot of the same memories about things.  He's lived across the river in Indiana for years, but we didn't see each other much.  Until Mom got sick, that is.  One of the positive things to come out of her illness and death was reconnecting with Mike.  Mom had always intended for us to be close.  I'm named after him.  (My first name is Michael, if you did not know.)

He's been a serious junker for several years--eBay, live auctions, booths, and flea markets.  He's kind of my idol in that regard.  I'd love to be able to make a go of it like he's doing.  We get together and go junking at least once a week, and I learn so much about stuff from him.  He gives me the unvarnishd truth, rather than the BS you get from a lot of junkers.  He knows what I like to sell and keeps an eye out for stuff for me.  I do the same for him.  It's a lot of fun and I look forward to spending time with him.

I didn't start my booth because of him.  We weren't really spending time together then.  I did my first one on a lark.  Still, it was kind of a thrill when Mom told me he had checked my space out and thought I was doing okay there.  When the place he was in closed down, he moved over to the mall where I am.

Junking certainly isn't a family tradition, by any means.  My mother never even got to see either of my booth spaces.  But a whole bunch of other little influences and incidents added up to steer me on to the junking path, for sure.

And then there was the time Emmylou Harris sang with Linda Ronstadt and Ricky Skaggs while Helen Carter played autoharp

One of my favorite ELH tunes off of one of my favorite ELH albums, the sublime Roses in the Snow.  If you're looking to start listening to Emmylou and exploring her output, I can't think of a better place to start.  And, of course, any time Ms. Harris and Ms. Ronstadt sing together, magic happens.

Didn't Emmylou make a very cute pregnant woman?

Today would have been my mother's birthday.  This one's for her.  I learned to love the music of both those ladies by listening to Mom's albums.

Whiny Monday Rambles

I'm in a Junk Funk.  I got the Booth Blues.  I got the Low Sales, No Sales, Ain't Makin' Rent, Cryin' Shame, Down in the Dumps, Whinin', Cryin', Moanin', Blues!

Cue slide guitar here.

Okay, so I'm being melodramatic.  It's something I do so well.  But I'm in a bit of a slump here and I'm not coping with it well.  Not well at all.

I've already talked about not making rent at one site last month.  What I haven't really talked about is the fact that I almost didn't make rent the month before as well.  If I hadn't had several last week furniture sales, I would have gone in the hole that month too.

Last week started off looking like the same thing was going to happen again.   Can't have that.  Just can't.  So I went on the offensive (or is it the defensive?) ad pulled out the big guns.  I rearranged the whole booth.  I marked a couple of large pieces down (one sold).  I slammed the hell out of Craigslist.  And on Friday, I started a sale that's running until the end of the month.

I really didn't want to do the sale route.  I try to keep my prices low enough that I don't have to.  Any more off that cuts my margins way too thin.  Besides, I had done one at the beginning of April and didn't sell a damn thing.  It seems to be working this time around.  I finally made rent last night.  There's still a couple of days in the month, so I can still make a little money.  Maybe.

Everything that I'm seeing is telling me that it's just been an overall slow period at this store, but it's so hard not to take it personally.  I've had a real crisis of confidence over the whole thing.  I know the late spring and early summer is a slow time in this business.  In Louisville, we have to deal with Derby mania on top of everything else.  I also know I wasn't the only one to not make rent in April.  I know all of this, but it hasn't seemed to  help my mood.

Of course, part of that problem is the fact that last week sales at the other store tanked.  For most of the week (and the weekend before) I didn't do over ten bucks a day.  To add insult to injury, a week ago Friday, I had a super day.  Tons of sales--over 70 bucks worth.  Then BAM!  The floor dropped out.

One booth struggling I can deal with.  One of the reasons I have two is so they can supplement each other.  But when both are struggling, I start feeling like maybe I really don't know what I'm doing.

Thankfully, sales have picked up at that location again.  Last night, I matched last month's total, so I'm now set to increase, which is always good.  It's just that I was on a trajectory to have a killer month.  A real killer month.  And that's been totally derailed.  There's almost no way I can do that now.

So, maybe it's not bad enough to be singing the blues now, but it was for a little while.

On top of everything else, my bike got stolen last week!  From out of our back yard!  Someone hopped our fence and swiped it.  I'm still seeing red over that.  I've got another one, but it's going to require about 200 bucks worth of work to get in running shape.

So last week pretty much goes down as not one of the best ones ever.  Maybe this one will be an improvement.  I'll be house sitting this week, so I'm not sure about blogging just yet.  I intend to try, but those plans never work out when I'm away from home.  We'll see.

Today is the second anniversary of this.  I went to the big flea market over the weekend.  That was something we always did either on Memorial weekend or the Fourth of July weekend.  Didn't buy too much.  Just kind of wandered around, checking stuff out, like she and I used to do.

On a happier note, if Blogger's counter is to be believed, I have finally matched the 2005 post count!  Now for 2006 and 2011!

Monday Rambles

Okay.  I have managed to do what I could not do at all last week--carve out a few minutes in the day to put up at least one blog post.  Let's do this.

Thanks to Shara and Lynn for their sweet comments on my last post about not making my rent.  It still smarts a bit, but I appreciate the encouragement and support.  The whole deal has really made me second guess myself and whether I really know what I'm doing in this junk field.  More on some of those thoughts a little later.

This is my last week on this schedule.  I'll have a few weeks with slightly reduced hours, until about mid-June, so blogging (and junking) should pick up a bit for me.  I hope to get some posts that are hanging around finished and then stored away. I still have that 2005post total to beat!  I'm getting too close to be messing around with work and such!

Sales this weekend sucked!  I think I bought maybe a dozen small items.  Not even enough to fill up one of our backseats.  If my sales at one site continue at the place they've set so far this month, I'm going to be hurting for stock soon.  I may have to pull from the slower booth (which is struggling to get to rent again this month) to make do.

We went to four different neighborhood sales and it was only at the last one that we found sufficient quantities of sellers for it to be worth our while.  Even at that, though, most sales were nothing but crap.  I did get a cool stuffed Hong Kong Phooey toy, some glass Fleur de lis stuff, and a couple of vintage wooden kids' school chairs, but nothing else worth mentioning. 

However, we passed my former comic shop and saw that they were having their sidewalk sale, so I was able to stock up on comics, bags, and--oddly enough--old religion books.  I think I've got enough now to tide me over for a while. 

Yesterday marked Mother's Day number two without a mother.  Memorial Day will be the second anniversary of her death. Time keeps marching on in spite of everything else, doesn't it?

Finally got to listen to the new Amy Ray CD, Lung of Love, over the weekend.  It's about 27 different kinds of awesome and I cannot recommend it highly enough,  A couple of cuts give me goosebumps!

Speaking of goosebumps and cuts and such, I burned my arm on an exposed light bulb in a lamp in a booth where I was shopping last week.  I've been putting aloe and Bactine on it, but it still hurts and it's formed a blister.  I'm not sure what to do?  Should I pop the blister or leave it alone?

Okay, my few minutes are up.  Time to spell check this, throw in some links, post this puppy and go!

Monday Rambles

Ever notice how when you ride your bike on a windy day, no matter which way you turn or which direction you go, the wind is always in your face?  How is that possible?

I've been stopping at a nearby White Castle after work to grab a cup of coffee before heading home.  I learned from my mother the value of a mid-afternoon cup, so I try to grab one whenever I can.  It's good just to sit and unwind for a few minutes.  I looked at my receipt a couple of days ago and realized they've been giving me the senior discount!

The weather is supposed to be pretty nice this week, which is good.  I'm back teaching at a site that is smack dab in between three of my regular thrifts and pap's running low on smalls!  Seriously, I am down to just two tubs of my winter stock.  While it is a good thing to be using stock, it's still a little ways until the yard sales really kick in, so I cannot run totally out just yet.

Weather last week was a bit all over the place.  Cold, windy, warm, rainy--you name it, we had it!

We made a quick run back to the old hometown on Saturday to retrieve a couple of my mother's old yearbooks and a few photos that hadn't made it our way.  We ended up coming back with a truckload of furniture and have another load to go back and grab this Saturday.  Just another story in the goofy tale of my family and my life as a junker.  Let's just say the booths are now quite full.

Sales have been out of sight for the most part this past week.  I had one of the treasured hundred dollar days at the Peddlers Mall yesterday, courtesy of a guy who knocked my comic inventory from three short boxes down to only two.  He bought out all of my manga single issues, except for the large anthology titles like Shonen Jump.   I am moving through stuff there at a very fast rate, hence the depletion of the winter stock. 

YesterNook has been pretty good as well, if not as consistently steady.  It does seem now that as soon as I get something set up and staged and holding lots of smalls, it sells.  I've done much better with furniture this week and am set for a record month there.  Not bad for someone that some of the others consider a flea market rat, huh?

Since I'm night teaching as well this week, I'm not riding the bike as much.  It's too much to get it home and put away and still catch the bus to my evening sites.  Kind of a shame, since it is so nice.  Hope it holds until the weekend.

Fun Finds: You Gotta Have Heart!

I found this one at a thrift over the weekend.  While I was primarily there looking for furniture, I could not pass this baby up.

I mean seriously, Catholic Saint Bingo?  Of  course I'm getting it!  (Although why they just didn't call it "Saint" instead of "Heart" is beyond me.  It's got the right amount of letters!)

The rules are kind of odd though.  The caller has so many different ways to call that it seems a little like overkill.  I think it should have a "confessional" box that you shake until a little plastic figure of a saint falls out, which is then called out.

Honestly, it looks like one of those things someone thought up because they wanted to come up with something "good for kids" to play.  Still, the whole idea is a bit of a hoot.  I'd love to be in a huge bingo hall and hear people calling out "Olaf!"  "Cunegund!"  "Venerable Bede!"  It would be a blast!




That actually reminds me of a story about my mom.  When I was a kid, she decided that when she got to heaven, she wanted the job of calling out the names of people to get in line and be checked out to see if they got in or not.  Deciding that she had a better shot of getting this job if she practiced at it before she got there, she walked around the house for a couple of weeks shouting "Nahum!"  "Habakkuk!"  "Esther!" every so often.  It was never boring at my house, let me tell you.


My only question now is whether I should put it with my other games, in my religion section, or in my Valentine's Display?

What would you do?

Still Miss Someone

Found this one tucked in my Blogger drafts. Kind of fits my mood a little lately. I've been badly wanting to call Mom and talk to her about the new booth. She'd get a real kick out of it. This was the second birthday without a card from either parent. Some parts of getting older really suck.

There must be something about Fall that makes one think of lost loved ones. I think that must be why the All Hallow's/All Souls/All Saints/Dia de los Muertos traditions developed around this time of year.

We've had to turn the heat on a couple of times lately due to some chilly nights. Bennie always used to perk up when that happened. She'd wake up, sniff the air with her little nose twitching and make a beeline for a vent to lay on.

Fall is just not the same any more.

Return of the Ramble!

In which your Eddie-tor explains where he's been for the past month and a half.

I started a cat-sitting gig at the end of April and it ended up lasting most of May.  One of the people I sit for has had some family medical emergencies to deal with, so she's been gone for extended periods of time, often with little to no notice.  I spent most of the month at her house with her kitties, where my connectivity is pretty limited.  After a couple of days, I stopped trying to fight with it and entertained myself in other ways.

And, of course, once I got out of the habit, it's been hard to get back in.  Things have been pretty busy on other fronts as well, so I just haven't had the kind of time I normally do for stuff like blogging and planning and writing posts and such.  Hopefully, that's easing up a little.  We'll see.

I managed to make it through my first Mother's Day without a mother and the first anniversary of Mom's death okay.  My brother's birthday fell on Mother's Day this year, so I had something happier to concentrate on and that helped some.  I'm starting to get into my shed and deal with some of Mom's things, so my emotions are pretty wobbly sometimes.  So many memories.

I went to the big flea market alone over Memorial Day weekend and realized how much I miss her at times like that.  We used to do the flea market together at least once a year.  It was kind of weird not to stop at vendors she would shop from.  It was even weirder not being able to snark on stuff like we used to do.  She and I were forever finding something to carry on about or make fun of.  I had to do it all in my head this time.

Yard saling has been really lame for weeks now.  Lots of traveling and sweating for little hauls.  I made an awesome score this past weekend when I got a metric ton of Peanuts memorabilia for about twenty bucks, but it was the first rave-worthy score in ages and ages.  Even many of the annual sales I love to hit have been mediocre at best.  Not nearly as many opportunities to score a box of swag for five bucks.

Booth sales have been off too.  I owe you all reports for April and May, which I will get on soon.  I'll elaborate things in more detail at that time.  I also owe a couple of book reports too.  They'll also be forthcoming.

I even tried setting up at a community sale at a local church to pick up some extra bucks and clear out some booth duds.  Turn out was lousy for some unknown reason, so I only made about fifty bucks.  Did get rid of some stuff, though.  The organizers were making plans to have leftovers donated, so I left several items there, rather than drag them all home again.  I'd like to try the whole experience again, only with more buyers and better sales.

We've been having August in June for most of the month.  Hotter than normal.  More humid than normal.  I so miss regular seasons.

I got a smart phone the other day, so I may start tweeting again.  The "p" on my old phone only worked intermittently, which is why I stopped before.  Apparently, most of the words I like to use have "p's" in them.

My latte tastes funny.

Chiquito had a little growth spurt a while back.  Sometimes cats will have one last little burst of growth at around three, which he is.  It's made him very hungry all the time.  He's taken to trying to wake us in the middle of the night for a feeding.  I've started to put out a little extra food for my growing baby.

Kosh on the other hand is pretty much the same.  He wasn't well for my extended stay away from the house in May, but seems to have gotten over it.  Little does he know I have three nights of cat-sitting this week.  He's pretty clever in that he's learned the signs for when I'm prepping to leave for a few days.  So he starts getting freaky and extra lovey whenever I start packing up or carrying things out.  The problem is, he can't distinguish between my packing to leave and getting a booth run ready.  I'm messing with booth stuff all the time and it frequently involves packing a box or taking one out, which starts him to worrying needlessly.  Haven't figured out a way to explain things to him.

I also haven't figured out a way to end my Rambles posts, other than just stopping.  Posts on particular topics can wind themselves to a good conclusion, but just sitting down and rambling on and on is harder to wrap up.  The only way I really know to do it for sure is to shut up.

So I will.

Fry Guys!

In addition to things I purchase for the booth, a good deal of my merch comes from our house.  I originally started the booth because I desperately needed to declutter and really didn't want to do ebay or anything similar.  Even though I do purchase a lot of stuff to keep the merch momentum up, I'm still digging through closets, thinning collections and the like.

The other day I was on one of those decluttering missions when I found something really special:

MY FRY GUYS!

I had forgotten all about them. Honestly, I was surprised I still had them, after all these years.  I think there used to be a few more of them, but these six are all I have now.

I've been trying to research them online, but all I keep getting are links to the Happy Meal toys that came out in the late 80's.  I can't seem to find anything about these particular guys, so I'm throwing this up here, in hopes someone else might be able to chime in with more info.

Here's what I remember:

They came into my life during my senior year of high school (1982).  I'm pretty sure they weren't a Happy Meal thing, because neither my brother nor I were the right age for Happy Meals.  I'm thinking it must have been some other kind of promo thing.  We had to have gotten them out of town, because our little burg didn't have a McD's at that time.

What I remember about them was the fun we had with them.  As best I can recall, I'm the one who started it.  I hid them somewhere my mom would find them, her purse.  The change section of her pocketbook to be exact.  She came home laughing at me and mock fussing about pouring them all over the counter at the grocery store.

Soon, they turned up in one of my socks, when I was hurriedly trying to get dressed for school.

From then on, it was on.  They started turning up everywhere--pots and pans, drawers, pockets, you name it.  They hopped all over the place, from her to me and back, for  several weeks.  And then, it just kind of tapered off.

I graduated and went off to college.  During my first day or so there, I ran across this odd wad of paper in one of my suitcases.  I opened it up and there they were!  With a note that said:  "We skool too!"  I sat down and laughed and laughed.  It was totally what I needed just then to get over my homesickness and adjust to my new surroundings!

The first time I went home, I stashed them in the bathroom.  And they seemed to lay low for several weeks.

Until I came home for Christmas.  Guess who was all wrapped up under the tree waiting for me?  Yep.  (Mom had also wrapped up a bottle of shampoo and a pair of socks that I left at Thanksgiving.  She made me open all these "special" gifts first that year.  I thought I wasn't going to get any real gifts!)

After that, I kept them with me.  I'd stick them in a drawer with my pens and pencils, so I'd find them a lot and think of Mom and home and laughter.

Over the years, with moves and such, they ended up in a box, waiting to be found.  And finally, over eight months after her death, I found them.  Still waiting for me.  Still making me think about her.  God, we used to laugh together so much!

They're not going to be decluttered away.  I'm going to be holding on to them.  I stuck them in my sock and underwear drawer.  It seems appropriate.  I'll see them every day and I'll smile.


Here's the Wikipedia link to the story of the McDonalds mascots.  It's interesting reading.  Did you know they're downplaying the Fry Guys (actually now the Fry Kids) in these days of heathier lifestyles?