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non-hoarderly forbearance
Saturday, July 30 2011
I went yardsaling with Ray and Nancy today. We started out at the semi-perpetual yard sale at the trailer at the bottom of Dug Hill Road, where Ray bought a few kids' books for the children of friends. We could have also bought a four wheel ATV.
Next stop was Bodacious Bagels in Stone Ridge, where Nancy and I both got falafel sandwiches (with red cabbage, please!). Everyone else there was eating bagels, and our sandwiches were exotic enough to elicit questions from some of the other customers. As for Ray, he had some sort of pre-flattened bagel with hummus (a recommendation I made when he forgot to bring his own non-dairy cream cheese). He was so impressed with the hummus that he vowed to never buy hummus from any other place.
We headed through the neighborhood to the west of Stone Ridge, hit a sale over there, and then doubled back to 209 to stop in at another semi-perpetual yard sale out in front of trailer: this one (41.856814N, 74.132156W) set in a Black Walnut grove near the west end of Cottekill Road. This guy had a friendly overweight ball-obsessed retriever and a lot of women's bathroom products, including large containers of expensive moisturizers. Nancy thought she was getting a good deal on a huge vat of something that should have been expensive but that only cost $5. The only downside was that it was unsealed, suggesting that perhaps it was really repotted Lubriderm (or perhaps some Chinese knockoff).
We tried to swear off semi-permanent yard sales, but we kept ending up at them anyway, particularly as we saled west down Route 28 through Ashokan. There's a fancy new store along 28 called Scandinavian GRACE which sells fashionable Swedish imports. It's a large space that looks to be a repurposed car garage and comes complete with a little coffee shop and pleasant outdoor seating. Ray and I needed to piss (we'd forgotten our yardsaling diapers) so Ray asked about a bathroom and got some sort of bitchy response, but that didn't trouble me; I walked out into a back courtyard, stuck my penis through a little diamond-shaped void in the wire of a cyclone fence, and completely emptied my bladder onto a bush.
I should say, by the way, that if one really wants to buy overpriced Swedish stuff, one should never duck into an overpriced and somewhat bitchily-staffed Swedish store while yardsaling. That huge difference in price paradigm is enough to silence the little gnome in your head who compels you to buy things that you do not need. And, if you're like me, you don't need overpriced Swedish stuff.
I didn't end up buying anything from any yard sale today, though on the drive back from Ray and Nancy's I mined four buckets of top soil from the banks of the Esopus and gathered some lightly-sanded river stones from the creek near the bottom of Dug Hill Road. Gretchen was impressed by the non-hoarderly forbearance I'd demonstrated while yard saling.
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