Treasure Huntin'

We started this weekend by hitting an estate sale in Perry early Friday morning.  The people have moved to Alaska and they have an estate company selling their stuff and the house.  Beautiful house out in the country, complete with walk-in pantry, huge closets, shop, garden area, greenhouse, chicken coop and clothesline!  All of my dream house must-haves.  $214,900 is all they want for it.  Since I couldn't load that house up on the truck and bring it home with me, we brought home what we could.  I'm always on the lookout for baking dishes and I found a 9x13 Cerutil stoneware casserole dish marked $5 on a rack in the kitchen!  I found two other Corning French White pieces that I quickly scooped up and placed inside the Cerutil and went on my merry way toward the pantry.  Did I mention it was a walk-in pantry??!  My heart skips a beat and flips completely over when I see a walk-in pantry.  I could've stayed in there all day.  They even had canned goods, spices and pickles and jellies that were put up last summer still on the shelves for sale.  This lady comes in there and tells me she saw the stoneware dish first and acted like she wanted me to give it to her.  Um, no.  You want it, you have to PICK. IT. UP. and hold on to it like I was doing!  That's the rules.  I think.  I was nice, I laughed a little and said, "yeah, it's nice, huh?" but that was it.  Well, four other times during our tour through the house, this lady said, "I saw that dish first" to me.  Lady.  Don't.  Just don't.  I meet up with Larry and he's found an Indiana Jones fedora that he's decided to get.  (I'm glad, too, 'cause it looks awesome on him!)  Well, that same lady's husband comes up to us when we go to pay for our stuff and says HE was gonna get that hat!  We decide to gather up our things and pay and get out of there 'fore somebody got hurt.  Namely my casserole dish.  

Then I spied an adorable little patio set out on the deck! There's a lady sitting out there at another table and she tells me she thinks it's sold already and she was going to get it but she couldn't find the tag.  Well, the tag's right there, tied to one of the chairs.  $75.  I go inside, ask the folks if that set is sold yet and they say no.  I walk right back out there and grab that tag and then go find Larry again to get him to come look at it.  We were going to buy a set for our deck this summer anyway and this set was in perfect condition for $75!  While we loaded it up on the truck, Casserole Dish Lady and her husband are STILL goin' on about the dish and the hat!  Then the husband says the dish is too big for them anyway and I said I was getting it to make enchiladas in and boy, they really DID hate me then.  Lesson learned.  You want it, don't leave it.  :)  We got out of there and went to Home Depot, got us an umbrella for our little glass top table and went home and set everything up and we're so proud of it!  We sure have enjoyed it this weekend.

Saturday, we got up early (again!) and went yard saleing.  This is only the second time we've done this and I think we've discovered a passion for both of us.  We love spending the time together, just jumping in the truck with a stack of one-dollar bills, our list of yard sales we want to check out and Mapquest on the phone.  We love it.  We got some really good stuff this time, too!  Here are just a few of the treasures we found --- a vintage wooden high chair for $10 that Larry's gonna refinish for hopefully some future use in our dining room, a pretty carpet runner for the hallway, some shelf brackets, a telescope for $5 (!), a Pyrex casserole dish (definitely NOT a hoarder!  Ha!), a pound of pecans that I put into a pie last night, a The Lord Is My Shepherd throw blanket that Tabbie Hoffman LOVES already and the main thing we went after, a vintage Scrabble game!  We found a 1953 edition for 50 cents!  On the way home, we found an end table and entertainment center on the side of the road and Larry loaded them up for his next project.

Since we got done before 1:00 (and we had some ones left!), we decided to go up to Smiley's Flea Market and look around.  My favorite find of the day was at Smiley's.  Right after the 2nd Annual Atlanta Pop Festival July 4th weekend, 1970, a Macon publishing company, Drinnon Inc., published a handful of pictorials about the festival and Larry and I stumbled upon this tiny little booth yesterday at Smiley's that had old campaign buttons, old issues of Easy Rider magazine, old coins, military patches and tiny little tomato plants for sale.  Larry's always on a quest for military patches so we stopped in there to see what he had.  The fact that he had a cover draped over his booth helped, too.  It was hot and shade was precious.  While Larry looked over the patches, I spotted five of those Pop Festival books!  I showed one to Larry and told him we HAD to get it.  He agreed and so we did.  Fest On The Fourth.  I love it!!  I can't stop looking at it.

Such awesome pictures!

We got some campaign buttons, some patches and a very old incense burner (top left in the picture with the book's cover) from him and promised to come back!  His cool (in more ways than one!) booth was right up our alley.  All groovy and stuff.  :)  We got a loaf of pumpernickel bread, an old wool Army blanket (still in the bag!) and a lady bug wind spinner for our backyard.  

Cute, ain't she?

When A Comet Comes Back Around

Sometimes you get lucky.

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the 2nd Annual Atlanta Pop Festival, held in Byron. I don't remember much about it. I had just turned three years old and was there briefly with my parents and brother. I've been told that my Uncle Gene flew a plane over the festival that whole weekend. I wish I could remember that. I wish I could remember anything about it except all the cups on the ground. That's the extent of my memory. I was just too little. Something really cool was happening that weekend, though, that Larry and I like to think was the beginning of our journey to each other. Our destiny. He said something to me this weekend about when a comet misses the first time, sometimes it'll come around again. I LOVED that! When we were getting to know each other 20+ years ago, we discovered that we were both in Byron that weekend. He was down from Atlanta, about to go to Germany in the Army. He was 17 years old. We like to think we saw each other and our eyes met and we connected and knew that when our time was right, we'd be together. That comet would come around again for us. I found these pictures online and I thought I'd steal 'em for my blog. Ha! These folks were so brave coming down here to little bitty Byron with their long hair and their peace-loving mentalities. I'm constantly amazed when Larry tells me how he was treated just because he had long hair. How he wasn't welcome in some restaurants and how rednecks would throw bottles at him when he was on his motorcycle. BECAUSE HIS HAIR WAS LONG. Nowadays, hair is the least of our worries. I saw a teenaged boy at the mall the other day with a Hitler mustache. I was mortified! And I wanted to hold his butt down and shave that mess off. But you know what?? It was my Larry and his generation who made it possible for that boy to have a Hitler mustache and walk around with it at the mall. It was my Larry and his generation who changed the world. I'm sorry I missed that time with him but I thank God every day for Larry and that magical comet that brought him back around to me.