The yard sales are caaallllllliiiinnnnnggg meeeeeeeee . . .

I started out to go to the grocery store to buy diapers, and to go donate blood at the blood bank.  Really, I did . . . .

But when I got to the corner of 47th and Duval, I found not one but two yard sales going on there—which was far too tempting for me to resist, in my weakened weekend state.  I had to stop and look, at least.

And that was all it took.  I bought a wedding dress for $20 at the first sale (size 12, sleeveless lined white polyester satin bodice with spaghetti straps, two-layer white tulle skirt with two-inch white poly satin double-sided edging on each layer, white tulle petticoat, cathedral-length train and veil).  That’s now at the dry cleaner, waiting on a cost estimate for cleaning, because the bottom satin edging was pure-dee grubby, as though the bride had had to walk through a parking lot on a rainy day, from the look of the stains.  The second sale had a Toshiba stereo amp/tuner that I finally decided to pass on, because I couldn’t determine (and the owner couldn’t tell me) whether it had output problems on one channel, or whether the CD player that he was selling with it had the output problem.

Then I got a little further down the street and found another sale that had a set of three functioning Kodak Brownie cameras (Hawkeye, Bullseye, and Reflex 20, one of each), a flashgun that fitted all of them, and two little Ziff-Davis technical books on portraiture.  (Yes, that Ziff-Davis.  Before they began publishing computer magazines, they published techie stuff in other fields.  These books have 1939 and 1941 copyright dates.)  $35 for the lot, and the owner was really trying to sell them to me because I knew what they were and knew something about photography.  I gave in.

After that I finally got to the supermarket and bought the diapers, dropped off the wedding dress at the cleaners, and went to the blood bank.  Well . . . I started to go to the blood bank.  I got distracted by yet more yard-sale signs, and by the time I fought clear of them, I had bought a Canon color inkjet printer (BJC-2100) still in its box and another Epson color inkjet printer (Stylus 740), and paid $30 for the pair.

The sales seem to go like that.  Sometimes I’ll go out and do nothing more than burn up a bunch of gasoline.  Other weeks, like today, I can’t go five blocks without finding something else begging me to pick it up, clean it up, and re-sell it.

After all that, I finally got to the blood bank, where the phlebotomist couldn’t manage to get a continuous flow going and had to ask for assistance from the senior tech on the floor.  Turned out she just hadn’t gotten all the way through the vein wall, so he pushed the trocar a little deeper and the blood came right on, and I got done fairly quickly.  The only problem came at the end; because everyone had had to wiggle the needle around trying to get the flow going, I had more post-donation seepage than usual, which called for a pressure wrap instead of a Band-Aid.

And now I’m home and it’s hot and muggy as all hell outdoors (see below), so I ain’t doing anything more until the sun goes down.

Conditions at 1251 CDT:

Temp 93° F. (35° C.), humidity 44%, humidex 109° F. (43° C.), wind SE at 8 mph (13 km/h), barometer 30.10” (1018 hPa), sky clear, visibility 10 miles.

Abraham Lincoln asked to take a besotted medicine wheel from left field.  Fnord.