This Year’s Loot

Well Great Glebe Garage Sale, once again you did not disappoint. Hubby and I left Nora with Oma and off we went, without our child, into the wild yonder on a semi-rainy day. We had been worried that the rainy weather (it was sort of drizzly, to be fair) would keep people and sellers away and cast a gloom on the whole adventure but oh no, it was as much of a zoo as every other year.

Over the years we seem to have developed a strategy, which I will generously share with you here: we park the car at the north end of the Glebe, where the quieter more well-heeled houses seem to be, and we work our way in from there. Since it's a bit quieter, the crowds are sparser, parking's a bit easier, and we get at the really interesting finds before the hordes make it over. There are much fewer students in this part of the neighbourhood as well, so the stuff is of a higher calibre. Each year we seem to find our most memorable treasures in this quadrant and since we've just gotten there, the cash flows more readily as well. We're not yet overburdened or fatigued from looking at too much junk. We are fresh and raring to buy. It's so far been a great strategy.

Herewith is a list of this year's finds:

• A petite brass antique fire extinguisher. We realized when we got home that it's still full of carbon tetrachloride – a nasty chemical that now needs to be properly disposed of.
  
• A wrought iron triangle and accompanying iron stick – a 'come and git it' bell for the cottage. "Clangalangalang! Dinner's ready!"
  
• An old duck decoy for my brother-in-law.
  
• A game of 'Clue' for my brother-in-law.
  
• A fully-equipped Spirograph set. The pens are dried up but otherwise it's perfect.
  
• A very old Milton Bradley cribbage board.
  
• Very old chicken-and-chicks salt and pepper set.
  
• Very old 'asian couple' salt and pepper set (every year I buy some kitschy old ceramics. I love them).
  
• A wooden-bead-on-curly-wires toy for Nora, overpriced. It's not old – it's from Ikea.
  
• A bag of magnetic letters and numbers for the fridge.
  
• Four very cute little board books for Nora.
  
• Some wonderful wooden pull toys for Nora – a snail and a snake, articulated, and they wiggle when they are pulled. Made in Thailand and very very colourful.
  
• A plum tree.
  
• Chives.
  
• Two little bowls from a chinese food restaurant.
  
• An old (1959) Tintin 'Journal des jeunes'.
  
• A red and black mid-century modern-looking enamel squirrel brooch.
  
• A great little turquoise wooden lamp for Nora's new bedroom (I have a problem – I cannot stop buying lamps).
  
• This neat set of make-your-own paper toys, from Germany. It appeared unused but on closer inspection, I discovered that one of the toys had been made. But there are about 6 or 7 left and they are cool.
  
• A book called "Vivre en fôret" which I bought because of a funny illustration of a man fighting a lynx in his lean-to. It was a quarter.
  
• Hubby bought a jigging rod for ice fishing and a gang troll for lake trout fishing.
  
• Two horrible cookies sold to me by two adorable little girls. Hucksters.
  
• A very old U.S. postal scale. Not sure what we will use it for but it's pretty cute. The crazy lady who sold it to us told us it had crossed two oceans so we spent some time trying to figure that out as we walked away. Did she move to Japan and come back the other way?
  
• A game called "Carrom" (sp?) which we spotted from the truck on the way out.
  
• Hubby bought a fridge magnet that says "Let's Eat Out!" from a church lady.
  
• An old creel.
  
• Two hot dogs from the Boy Scouts (one for each of us).
  

While garage saling, there are some categories of items that I rarely if ever buy: clothes (it'd have to be something really special), kids' stuff (broke my rule this year for obvious reasons), CDs and cassettes, novels, and appliances. I generally go for the old esoteric things, things that I think have a story behind them, things that would go well in a cottage or in my garden. I usually look at the plants, though it makes me laugh to see the ladies in tilley hats out there trying to foist their invasive perennials on people. I saw so much lily-of-the-valley for sale yesterday it was hilarious; I guess if I could turn a profit from ripping out my weeds I'd do it too.

Every year there's also a category of items that stick out in our minds – the things we almost bought but left behind. This year that list includes a cute set of square teak or teak veneer nesting tables, a crazy-looking houseplant that I've never seen before, a gas-fueled space heater that looked like a space ship, an old framed picture of a saluting boy scout, an offensive sculpture of a very curvy African-american woman with her thong hanging out, from Cuba (hubby wanted this – I used my veto on it), an old gumball machine (it was overpriced at $55), a ceramic vase of a woman's head complete with real dangly earrings, a neat old wall-mounted shelving unit that had a subset of tiny cubbies, a book of pervy obscure symbolist art (Felicien Rops – look him up it's crazy stuff). I am still haunted by things we didn't buy in past years, like the church pews one guy had stuffed into his garage. But that is the glory of the Great Glebe Garage Sale – some other wacko will come up behind you and snap up that stuff, because in a crowd like that there's bound to be someone else with your taste. You have to make fast decisions.

The people-watching at this event is top-notch. Everyone is in a great mood. You overhear hilarious conversations, like the one hubby caught the tail end of "….that's really cool – oh wait, is that blood on it?" and the father I heard warning his children "walk straight ahead. Don't touch ANY ceramics." A guy picked up and tried to buy hubby's travel mug, coffee included. Last year my husband bought a mannequin leg and was the talk of the town, but this year every single person asked him if he was going fishing (raincoat – check. Creel – check. Jigging rod – check). I took one picture – of a guy walking around with a basket on his head, a lady's apron on backwards, carrying a blue baseball bat (I can't figure out how to get it off my phone). I could have taken more. I was nearly run over by a man on a bike carrying cross-country skis and poles.

So Great Glebe Garage Sale, even though it was drizzy weather, you did not disappoint. The people of the Glebe put on a great show and we are sated until next year. À la prochaine.