Yard Sale as a Verb

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. It's been nearly six months since my last pointless tirade.

The Suz has been into yard-saling (as in, to yard sale, as in to drive all over town looking at crap people put out on their lawns in an attempt to purge their homes of accumulated crap) for several years. I think she got inspired the summer her aunt found a pipe at a sale in Connecticut and spent her entire budget for the day, $25, on it, then ended up selling to on ebay for about five grand.

The Suz and I never got a score like that, but we did spend one summer cruising around Boston and its environs as The Suz purchased various types of glass and porcelain and, in one memorable case a pair of resin pigs dressed in American flags. The Suz developed an understanding of maker's marks and stamps gleaned from many, many viewings of Cash in the Attic on BBC America and was able to turn those 50 cent sugar bowls and cookie jars into enough cash to cover her share of rent and the bills for about six months.

The resin pigs never sold, not even when we had our own yard sale upon vacating The Old Apartment. Now I wish I had a picture of them.

I never had an eye for glassware, so I accumulated interesting fabrics and at the same sale where she got the resin pigs, I bought a cedar-lined cabinet for ten bucks. And nearly broke my nose trying to wedge it into the back of my little SUV in an unlikely string of events that is too complicated to recount here.

We also never sold Puddles the Duck. I gave him a good home, though.

Yesterday we started the 2012 Yard-Saling season, but since The Suz moved to New Hampshire, it isn't the same. There's a different flavor of crap in The Granite State.

I mean flavor literally. Someone was selling boxes of saltine crackers at a yard sale in a particularly dodgy section of Manchester yesterday. Store brand saltines. Not Premium. Not Krispy (with a K). Store brand, generic saltines. At a yard. sale.

Yep. I'm judging. I'm judging a lot. It's late at night, and I'm putting it online, so people are looking, and I'm judging. I know the whole world is in the economic tank. I get that. But saltines at a yard sale?

That's not economic desperation. That's something they don't have a name for yet.

What I'm saying is, I don't doubt that there are people out there who have need of free or very very heap saltines. But those aren't the people going to yard sales. And the people who are putting saltines in a yard sale seem unbalanced and greedy. Most people who have surplus unexpired (and who knows how old those saltines were) food stuffs in their pantries do the normal thing. The decent thing. They send that stuff to the local food bank and hang on to their dignity.

"Because you're having a Renaissance? No one cares."

As I have pointed out, upon occasion, winter in New England is not a riveting time to be alive. Mostly it's just staying indoors, trying to avoid hypothermia, eating inappropriate snacks, drinking inappropriate drinks, and occasionally emerging to go to work and/or shovel snow. Except we haven't had much snow in these parts this year. I can't speculate whether this is the result of global warming or my decision to buy a snowblower near the end of last season.

And we engage in activities designed to alleviate the boredom. Playing Angry Birds. Having a Sports Night renaissance. Playing Rock Band. Catching up on TiVo time. And then there's the reading. The reading never stops. It reminds me of better days. Days spent on the deck with a cold beverage and something deliciously trashy on the Kindle.

Once again, the serial fiction has sucked me in, and the result is a sink still full of dishes, laundry not done, papers not graded, and an article not yet edited. That last one is okay, because it's not part of a bundle not technically due anywhere until September, but I'm going to need clean underpants and socks before September.

In the Salad Days of August 2011 Amazon sent me a Kindle Daily Deal offering me a book by Arnaldur Indridason for the low, low price of $1.99. Indridason is Icelandic and writes a series of mysteries about an Inspector Erlander who works in Reykjavik. Iceland is on my short list of places I want to go. (What can I say? I really liked The Sugarcubes' first album.) So I took the bait, and by the end of September I had polished off all of the Erlander books available in English. Not my usual rate, to be sure, but my reading was rudely interrupted by the end of summer vacation and, you know, my job.

There are two more Erlander books, but they haven't been translated, and Rosetta Stone doesn't offer Icelandic. And, yes, I checked.

This Daily Deal is Amazon's little scheme, though. They're like crack dealers over there, with the cheap samples and the intriguing recommendations. Sometime in November Amazon suggested to me that I might like Steig Larsson. I'd resisted The Girl With The Tattoo Who Set The Hornet's Nest on Fire books, because the last time I read fiction that was so wildly popular, it ended with the Twilight debacle.

But the recommendation was made, no doubt, based on my obsession with the Icelandic mysteries, or perhaps my obsession with Swedish Fish-- I don't know how Amazon calculates these things, and I don't want to know. Then the movie came out, and I wanted to see that because, you know, Daniel Craig, but I have this aversion to seeing movies based on books if I haven't read the book... and that brings us to today with the dirty dishes and the laundry and the neglected work.

And I still haven't seen the movie. I'd planned to go Saturday. Then I planned to go yesterday. But it was more important to me to stay at home and read the second and third books in the series. That's right. The masses aren't always wrong; turns out they were just wrong about Twilight.  Compelling plot and well-developed characterization trump even Daniel Craig. Sorry, Mr. Bond.