This would be the PERFECT job for some of you out there, wouldn’t it?
Saturday morning, Fred and I got up and got out of the house early. I’ve been wanting, for some time, a chair for the foster kitten room. Occasionally people stop by and in the course of visiting want to see the kittens, and they’ve always had to sit on the floor. The floor is just a tad uncomfortable, to say the least, so I wanted to have a chair so they could at least have the option of sitting in a comfortable spot.
I trolled the garage sale listings on Craigslist and printed out four listings that looked like they might have what I wanted. The earliest yard sale was slated to start at 6, and we left the house about 7. I hoped we hadn’t missed all the good stuff already.
We did not even bother to stop at the first yard sale – despite the long list of stuff they claimed they were selling, they had a table of stuff and a bunch of clothes. I saw no furniture anywhere, so told Fred to keep on moving. The second yard sale was only slightly better – the ad had said they had “canning jars”, which was the main reason I wanted to stop. They had canning jars, all right – four of them. Everything else was overpriced (I was interested in the picture frames they had out, but they were selling four 8×10 picture frame for $15. PLEASE.) and we got away from there pretty quickly. We were going to head to the third, but I reread the listing, and couldn’t imagine why I thought I’d be interested in anything they were selling (mostly baby stuff), so we headed to the last one.
The last one was a two-family yard sale, and as we walked up the driveway to the first house, I saw it. It was ugly – OH so ugly – but it was in decent shape, and Fred and I stood and looked at it. The owner of the house came out and started trying to convince us that we NEEDED this chair, that it was from the 1930s, a German family heirloom, but that they really had no use for it.
(Don’t know that I believe that it’s from the ’30s OR a family heirloom, but give the man points for salesmanship. He was amusing and not pushy at all.)
I sat in it, it was comfortable, and it was $15. You better bet your ass we took it and didn’t even try to haggle him down on the price. For $15, the kittens can claw it to their heart’s content, and if it lasts a year, we’ll have more than gotten our money’s worth.
Also, the kittens will adore smacking at that fringe along the bottom.
We loaded it into the back of the truck and went to the next house to see what they had. They had a neat antique desk from (I think) Yale, but it was $75 and wasn’t anything we needed, anyway. They had several boxes of books and were selling the paperbacks for 10 cents each, so we dug through them. I ended up with one book and Fred with four, which is funny – Fred hardly ever reads anymore and has a couple of shelves of books he has yet to get to already. But you can’t argue with ten cents a book!
While we were looking, someone apparently saw their ad on Craigslist and called. There was a couch and overstuffed chair and ottoman sitting in the driveway, for sale. The teenage girl who answered the phone was trying to describe the color of the furniture, and she started with describing it as “mint green”, went on to “olive green” and then her mother tried “forest green.”
It was none of these.
Finally – I am SO helpful – I said “I’d call that sage”, and the mother said “That’s right! Sage is what they called it when we bought it…”
I should have demanded a decorator’s fee.
We bought our books and headed for home. Once home, we carried the chair up into the kitten room and left it there. We ate a quick breakfast, grabbed a couple of bags of squash, and headed out again. We drove to the shelter to drop off some yellow and pattypan squash (and some cherry tomatoes and a green pepper or two, I think) with the shelter manager. Fred went wandering off to check out the cats in the cat room, and I chatted with the shelter manager and played with the two tiny, adorable girl kittens who were racing around. They’re at that perfect age when they have so much energy they just vibrate with it, and if I weren’t going to be gone this weekend, I’d have snatched them up to foster.
While I was playing with the kittens, Fred was falling into like with Shortstop. And then he went upstairs to check out more cats, and found one that looked strikingly like Mister Boogers. Only bigger and with a tail.
Didn’t quite look right with a tail, actually.
We left, headed for Amish country, and debated whether to adopt Shortstop (the pictures in his Petfinder profile don’t do him justice. He is one GORGEOUS cat.) and went back and forth on the topic. I don’t know that bringing an adult cat into the house is a good idea at this point (Sugarbutt and Tommy still pick on Joe Bob, and it’s been a year and a half since we brought him home. On the other hand, Kara was an adult when we adopted her, but she’s such a badass that no one even looks sideways at her for fear that she’ll rip them to shreds.). Shortstop’s a gorgeous cat (like Fancypants gorgeous) and he’s very laid-back (like Fancypants was, actually) and I don’t know. I don’t want to adopt him just to fill the void that Mister Boogers left behind.
At this point we’ve decided to just leave it, to not adopt anyone. When the time is right, we’ll know. Right? Right!
So we headed to Amish country, stopping on the way to pee and buy lottery tickets. It was after noon by the time we got up there, and we made our usual stop at the General Store. We stocked up on fried pies and other snacks, then headed up the road toward Ethridge.
There’s a Goodwill store in Lawrenceburg where we’ve stopped before. Fred got some decent working-around-the-farm t-shirts for a good price then, and so he wanted to look and see if he could find some more. He looked through the t-shirts while I looked at the books and housewares, and in the end he found three t-shirts and I found nothing. We went to the cash register to check out, and the woman who was ringing him up was SO FOCUSED on babbling at her coworker who was somewhere behind us that I couldn’t catch her eye until she was done ringing him up and had bagged his shirts. I AM POLITE AND DO NOT INTERRUPT PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE TALKING, OKAY?
“We don’t need a bag,” I said. And she looked at me like I was speaking another language completely. I took a Hannaford fold-up bag out of my purse. “I have a bag.”
And that fucking assface grimaced and picked up the bag that held the three t-shirts, and turned it upside down and dumped them on the counter. And then she gave me a great big grimacing assfaced pseudo-grin and crumpled up the bag and shoved it into another plastic bag.
Apparently shutting her fucking face and doing her fucking job? Not really so much part of her fucking job description. Had she been a little more focused on her CUSTOMERS and a little less focused on babbling vitally important bullshit to her fucking coworker, I could have caught her fucking attention and stopped her from bagging the fucking shirts in the first place. And the energy she would have saved could have probably helped her generate a few more fucking VERY MUCH NEEDED brain cells.
I kind of want to go back there and punch her in the face, if you couldn’t tell.
We finally arrived in Ethridge, and unlike the times in the past when we’ve driven through Amish country and not even stopped, we stopped several times. We bought a little head of red cabbage and then two big-ass heads of green cabbage (those green heads of cabbage? Five pounds each, and cost $1 each.), two big-ass cantaloupes, a huge watermelon, and then two smaller ones, and 10 pounds of onions.
We stopped at a place that advertised that they were selling cabbage, and although they were out of cabbage they had a TON of canned stuff. We ended up buying a jar of sauerkraut and a jar of cherry jelly and one of strawberry jam. Fred got to talking to the woman, and complained that he’d had a hard time finding cabbage seeds. She told him that if he wanted to wait a minute, she’d go see if she had some seeds, that she would happily sell to him.
(Side note: I discovered a row of KUDZU JELLY when Fred was paying for our other stuff. I would have dearly liked to give it a try, but he was already paying and I didn’t want to foul up the transaction.)
So we waited, and we made kissy noises at the puppies that were living under their (very well-protected) porch, and she came out to announce that she had most of a package of seeds. Eventually she came back outside, she and Fred settled on a price, and then they had a discussion about growing cabbage.
“Blah blah blah,” Fred said. “The hard part will be getting them to germinate.”
And her face lit up. I looked at her expectantly, just knowing that she was going to give us some sort of secret Amish cabbage-germinating trick that I would then come home and tell the internet about, and we would all be cabbage-growing motherfuckers.
“Are you from Germany?!” she said excitedly.
Now tell me why it is that when she said that, I felt like a complete fucking idiot? I wasn’t even involved in the conversation, I wasn’t the one who’d misunderstood what my mumbling husband had said, and yet I felt like the biggest idiot on earth.
Fred explained what he’d meant, they wrapped up the conversation, and off we went with our packet of cabbage seeds and jars of jelly (and sauerkraut).
I think that’s about the last place we stopped. By then it was about 2:00, and we were both pretty hungry. We’ve made it a habit, when we go up to the Lawrenceburg area, to stop at a particular restaurant. They have a mighty tasty burger there, and so despite Fred’s suggestion that we get Mexican food instead, we stopped at this particular restaurant.
And it was as we sat and stared at our menus and waited and waited for the waitress to show up and take our order that I remembered that the last time we’d visited this restaurant, the service was fucking awful.
Our waitress finally showed up and took our drink and food order at the same time, and then we sat and sat and waited for our drinks. And then we sat and sat and noted that EVERYONE around us had a basket of rolls, but we did not until I specifically asked for them. Then she got the basket of rolls, but had to stop and chat it up with her coworker for five minutes before bringing them to us.
(What was it about Saturday and people spending more time chatting it up with their coworkers than actually doing their job?)
Our food eventually showed up, and it was good – but Saturdays are days where they have a special wherein all burgers are $2.99, and that special doesn’t include french fries or chips or anything. Which we did not know.
And our service sucked right up ’til the end, meaning we had to wait for the fucking check, and when we finally got it, we tossed cash down (and still left a good tip because we are JUST THAT SPECIAL) and got the hell out of dodge.
It was after 3:30 by the time we got home, and we both puttered around for a little while, then I went upstairs and took a nap, and I think Fred took a nap on the couch.
(Saturday afternoons are made for napping. Sundays, too.)
On Sunday morning we went to the flea market. I thought we were going to leave without buying anything, but at the very back of the flea market, we found a man selling two small turkeys. Then we found another man selling two slightly larger turkeys. Fred was all “Should we? SHOULD WE?” I don’t give a shit, honestly, if he wants turkeys I think he should get some fucking turkeys (he’s been talking about it for three million years), and so that is how we ended up walking through a crowded flea market with four little turkeys in an onion bag.
(We put them in a carrier when we got back to the car. A cat carrier resides permanently in my back seat these days for just such an occasion. I’m no dummy.)
The turkeys – who are pretty cute, and fairly friendly as poultry go – are currently residing in the smallest chicken yard and will live in the smallest coop ’til they get a little bigger, when we’ll move them over to the maternity yard. Eventually, I think, the plan is to move them to the back forty with the rest of the chickens.
I’ve gotta say – it was a really good weekend. Not only was the weather pretty good (it’s gotten cooler again – so strange to wake up to temperatures in the low 60s at the end of July), but Fred got his beloved turkeys, we spent some quality time with cats, and we’re mostly caught up on the garden chores.
(Yesterday, Fred worriedly said “This has been such a good weekend, something bad’s going to happen now, isn’t it?” I told him maybe this weekend was payback for the suckitude of last weekend.)
Upon awakening, Sugarbutt found to his horror that it wasn’t Tommy he’d been snuggling with, but a giant mutant Zukezilla instead!
Previously
2008: The last time I wore a bikini, I was around five, and I expect that unless I lose my mind, that’s the last time a bikini will come anywhere near my body.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: And then he looked at ME, like I was the instigator or something!
2000: “Where’s my food?! Where’s my FOOD, bitch?! I need fat, I need salt, I need sugar, and GIVE IT TO ME NOW, or I’ll drive you completely insane!”