Mirror, Mirror... and a Junk-Free Memorial Day Weekend

Is anyone else out there bothered by the high reflectivity of his or her computer screen? I mean, until the LCDS light up on my laptop it's as bad as having a great horking mirror 18 inches from my face? (Mirror avoidance = peace).

Also I just "invested" in a iPod touch and was dismayed to see it produces the same effect. I was waiting for Shackleton to return from a field trip yesterday and decided to use my new iPod to watch an episode of The Office on Netflix. If I refocused my eyeballs at any given moment, there was my own face, hovering ghostly and malevolently over a tiny Steve Carrell.

I sense a marketing opportunity here... Is there some film that we could put on these screens so they wouldn't force us to look at ourselves looking at our screens?

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In other news, my name is Woolfoot and I am junkaholic. It's been two months since my last auction or visit to an antique store.

As you know, it's Memorial Day weekend and I live in Vermont, where almost everyone is white. In case you haven't heard, White People in general, especially rural white people like most of us here in Vermont, like to pull their stuff out of their houses and onto their lawns and try to sell it during the summer. They like to get off to a big start on Memorial Day weekend.

I drove 60 miles today around our little state and, hand to heart, I saw a yard sale at least every two miles on average. I did not stop at one.

OK, OK, I'll admit I walked into the auction house where I have spent so much time and money in my past life. (They had a sign by the road that said "flea market.") I came late - people were packing - and I left immediately. Really, my stopping in was just a little auld lang syne (I own a blue-and-white jumbo coffee mug from about 1890 with the words to auld lang syne transferprinted on the saucer - FYI). Temptation had vanished. The fever has passed. Why?

I have been wondering about that myself and I have a few ideas.

First, my daydream of opening an antique store ran aground when I set up an antiques booth early last fall at a big event. That booth was work! Miserable, hard work. Not fun, as I had vaguely hoped, nor profitable, as I had argued with Whusband. Also, I just looked around my house one day, and my studio, and the outbuildings on our farm and saw that every available nook, cranny and bit of wall space was occupied - not to mention the drawers and cupboards and I thought: enough! Finally, if you have been following along, you know I pulled together a "Blook" this spring, that is a book made up of old blog posts -- and there I saw how much time and energy I have spent in the last few years accumulating things I don't need and really can't afford and then writing about it. Again, why?

OK, collecting was fun. While it lasted. But I think I am over it. I have a pin, one shaped like and anchor and covered with rhinestones, (from a box lot last year at auction last year). I think I will put it on in recognition of my new-found sobriety.

Security!

So here's my little mock-Roma family with our tent and our wares at the British Invasion car show last weekend. We spent two days trying to tempt the white people (they were mostly white, but you know what I mean, metaphorically, when I say that) to buy the goods we have spread out upon our blankets. Lots of browsers strolled through our tent but very, very few of them reached into their wallets and bought anything. And darn it, I forgot to teach the kids about how to pick pockets before we got there! As a result, I undertook an effort roughly akin to moving house, twice in a weekend, and made no money.

Still, it was not altogether a bad experience, really. It may have put me off antiques for good, which may be a good thing. Also, Whusband really chipped in, helping to pack and cart and dealing with the kids and this was quite nice. He has tended in the past to be, uhm, "critical" of my collecting and has expressed doubts about my claims that all this stuff was valuable. He had a prime chance to say "I told you so" here, but he didn't. He even agreed that the stuff was nice and encouraged me not to sell it cheap. His chit chat with one of the (rare) paying customers may even lead to the sale of an old Porsche we keep in the barn and drive three times a year. So, not a total loss. Oh - and I sold one of those three saddles, in case you were wondering. The guy who bought it really put the screws to me, trying to get an even deeper discount from the fire sale price posted. (Whusband said I should send him packing but I sold it in the end for $15 more than I paid).

Maybe next year I'll try fortune telling. What do you have to pack for that? A crystal ball? A deck of cards? That I can handle.

It's going to take some time for me to recover from all this. A perfect time to sit with the computer and read other people's blogs.