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Garage Sale Finds - Week 5
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 3328
And a big scurry about Okotoks yesterday, woke the children early and packed them into the car for a tour of their garage sales. Lots of garage sales, the Okotoks parade of garage sales is an annual thing, literally hundreds of them.
Most of them are drive-bys, you don't need to get out of the car, tables filled with Barbies or Stage West Mugs have a low likelihood of having anything I might value, and so we simply drive by. Ones that offer some hope we stop at.
No great treasures this weekend. A trumpet for the boy, with case, in very good condition. And, because I found something for the boy I had to find something for the girl and tracked down a couple of gameboy games and a small number of Pokemon cards. A vintage 1930's Remington Typewriter, remarkable only in the fact that it appears to be in virtually new condition. With bright red keys, which is a plus.
The typewriter was it, in the end. I've already laid great plans for it. I'll take it to The Higher Ground in Kensington and "Plug it in" where all the computer junkies have their laptops docked. And I'll begin rattling away on my novel.
"Dear Diary" I'll begin...
"The Time Machine worked, but I seem to have found myself thrown into the future. It's a different world, the God now is Google and people are incessantly asking him to ...."
It'll be great. I'll have to refine the novel a bit, get a good plot worked up before I go in to type it out, but the look of the typewriter (I need an apple logo for the case), the "clickclickclick" when you wind in the paper, the percussion of the keys and the bell when I reach the end of the line, it'll be a performance art masterpiece....
Moon Phase with Westminster Chime
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2034
And while I'm missing the stabbing party downstairs I'm dreaming, completely out, and it took a while this morning to remember the dream. It came to me in bits and pieces...
I'm in a restaurant, Teatro's I think, but it's not it's someplace else, an old converted church. I'm catching up with an old girlfriend, Cheryl Howe, and I've brought along a bag of watches to show her, some are for her. It's late, but we haven't noticed the time. I've noticed the hostess, however, she's thin and blonde and tall, real tall, maybe 8 feet, but she's pleasant and that's how I know that it was a dream and not really Teatro's.....
So while I'm emptying my bag of watches to show to Cheryl I'm rediscovering some of them, there's this one, a gold case, moon-phase, westminster chime, the alarm bells ring a different tune every hour, I think I wore it there but never noticed it, then the eight foot hostess tells us they are closed, they've been for some while, they're only waiting for us to leave and gosh it's late so Cheryl leaves, I gather up my watches, I'll find her hotel later, show her the watches, but I'm lost in the neighborhood, my dream, and I wake up....
Cleaning Up
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2233
It's a weekend with children. Garage Sale Week 5, tomorrow: Okotoks.
SO the boy arrives, he's not nearly as delighted with the spider as I thought he oughtta be. He refused to enter the bedroom until I moved it into the office, and then called his mother to report that the room was "clear".
And we talk about the stabbing and the neighbors, I get some bags and gloves and we pick up the rubbish in the yard. Might as well make use of the dumpster while it's here. There's the row of cigarette butts leading to their door, bags of refuse left behind by cowboy contractors in the alley, refuse refused by even the trashmen, there are diapers, broken bottles, slurpee cups, beer cans. It takes us an hour but when we're done it's a different yard. A yard that needs mowing, but there's the issue of the dumpster.
Meanwhile Papa Stabby has shown up, he's all right, apparently it was a family dispute, younger brother took issue with older brother after a night of drinking and took a knife to him. Older Brother's fine, he'll be in the hospital for about a month and lose some of his intestines but otherwise he'll be fine. The younger brother, well, he had some warrents out and so Papa Stabby guesses he'll get a year or two in jail. He was worried he was going to be arrested as well.....
It's a family thing.
It's a lesson in how not to live for the boy. He's paying attention. And Papa Stabby has gotten a new truck, no drivers license but somehow that's not an issue, should save them about $150.00 a day in cab fare, and the babies are crawling around the back yard so he takes his girlfriend for a spin and they're off.....
Garage Sale Find - Week 4
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2079
Last week, another big round of garage sailing. (No, that's not a mispell. I've coined a new spelling that captures the romance.)
No big finds, a very old Medalta Butter Crock (#5), a bike for my daughter. And this for the boy:
A taxidermy tarantula.
It's been mounted between 2 panes of glass, so you can view it from the other side and admire it's wooly underbellly where the legs join onto the body. And it's fangs. Very long fangs, almost half an inch, highlighted with lacquer. All in all the spider probably measures 8 inches square.
Now it might seem odd, but the boy has long had some weird phobia about spiders. He blames it on me, accuses me of torturing him with a rubber reproduction when he was younger, of being tormented when camping with tales of the giant spiders in the demon outhouse....
Me, I blame heredity. As a child I was terrified of spiders. As were my sister and brother. He's just carrying the torch, it's in the genes. Our ancestors, once upon a time, probably lived in a land filled with giant spiders and learned fear as a mechanism to survive, fear kept us alive while those fearless in the tribe were captured in webs and devoured.
The boy doesn't buy it.
But I'll help him to beat this fear, I've mounted the spider over his bed. And he'll be so surprised, so grateful at my thoughtfulness...
My daughter was very impressed when I showed her. I offered to let her take it home, but she wasn't so sure that she wanted it, and so now it lurks for him...
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