Yes! The recent warm weather has triggered the urge in people to clean out their garages and basements and offload all their old stuff. I love yard sale season. You never can tell what you're going to find.
I have been prowling the thrift stores for cast iron cookware for a few months now. I already had a 12" Lodge skillet and a 12" grill pan, and my last piece of Teflon-coated cookware became irredeemably scratched. I thought, why keep spending money on Teflon, which flakes off into your food and may be dangerous to your health, and becomes useless trash in a few years, when cast iron is absolutely safe, may boost the iron content of your food, and becomes better with age and use?
I didn't have much luck, and was thinking of giving in and buying some new ones from Amazon, but on Saturday a guy around the corner from us was holding a garage sale. The husband walked over there and found a big stack (six!) of old skillets, Griswolds and Wagners and a couple of no-names, that the guy wanted $10 for. One was badly rusted, a couple had so much burnt on grease you couldn't read the logos through the carbonized crud, and all but one washed up like new with just a little soap and water. I reseasoned them all and cooked with the #7 Griswold a couple of times. That skillet is at least 53 years old, possibly older, is smooth as glass, and just might be the nicest thing I've ever cooked on. My 12" skillet is great for cooking but it is HEAVY, and with my arthritic joints it's sometimes hard to handle. The Griswold skillet is smaller, much thinner and lighter, and much easier to heft.
On our way to CVS yesterday, we saw a sign for a yard sale, so on the way back we stopped. I got a camera bag with a Minolta telephoto and an Albinar macro lens inside. It also came with a teleconverter, a flash, a bunch of old film, and a couple of filters. $10. Yay. None of it is worth a fortune or anything, but it'll fit on the Minolta body we've got kicking around here. Can I even remember how to use a film camera? Yikes, it's been a while.
We also snagged a couple of bikes, $10 for the pair: a woman's Schwinn Sprint and a Trek 700 Multitrack. The Trek was in (or near) a fire and while the frame looks undamaged, everything else on it is trashed. Melted or blackened and sooty. Poor bike. Everything can be replaced, as long as the frame isn't warped. For $5, I thought it was worth the risk. If the frame is irreparably damaged, then we still got the Schwinn out of the deal. All it needs are brake adjustments, but otherwise it's perfect. We couldn't fit it in the car, so my husband rode it home, hee.
The other thing I got, that I was practically jumping with glee over, was a big pile of cordless Ridgid power tools. They were asking $125 for the lot, but dropped to $100. I left without buying them, felt terrible remorse, and went back an hour later, hoping they hadn't sold. They hadn't. I bought them. I got two cordless drills/drivers, another small rotating drill/hex driver, a reciprocating saw, a jigsaw, a circular saw, a framing saw, a flashlight, six batteries, a charger, a bunch of drill bits, and a storage bag. One of the drills sparked excessively and had yucky black smoke coming out from the motor housing (sparks = normal. that smell = not normal! might be broken, might be fine. will have to use it more or take it apart to see), but everything else worked perfectly.
I <3 power tools. The young man who was helping me test them out was like, "You don't see a lot of girls who buy power tools!" Their loss, huh? What should I make? I need to replace some of the baseboard and all of the shoe molding in my house (they ripped it all out and apparently threw it away when they put in wall to wall, ouch), and I've been wanting to make some custom bookshelves to flank our fireplace. Should be a lot easier now. You know what blows? Cutting really large pieces of wood or COPING with a friggin' hacksaw, that's what blows.
I have spent a LOT of money since Friday, but I got so many fantastic things that I've been wanting or needing.
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