Secondhand Nation

Tierra Y Libertad! (And, uh, candles with porny-sounding names! Right?)

Figure 1: No soy mentirosa, General Zapata;  es verdad, conoczo a Ud. muy bien y tengo muchisimo respeto por su defensa de la gente mexicana!

Remember my thrift spree a few days ago, where I bought my nephews a shit-ton of dress-up garb for a present from the Halloween merch?  (And why the fuck not?  Every little boy needs phony Superman muscles and a coal miner's light strap, right?)

Well, I bought a few things for Mama, too. 

One of the things was a promotional candle from Pink Taco, a Mexican restaurant chain from Los Angeles that Lindsay Lohan's old boyfriend owns.  It's a long, pink, glass-encased pillar candle, resembling those "milagro" relig candles that you can buy in the Latino food section of the grocery.

There was much hardy-har-har about the name when these restaurants opened - in case you're a moron, more info on that here - but it's a pretty popular place.  I was sorta surprised that the damn thing was only marked at 99 cents.

Anyhoo.  It was sitting on the checkout counter while the cashier rang me up and this old woman walked by and said, "Hey, that's Emiliano Zapata.  He's a Mexican hero, you know."

Sure enough, the candle has a pic of Zapata, and he's framed by the dirty words "Pink Taco" and other Mexican-y images. 

"Have you ever heard of him?" she asked me, fingering the candle.  I thought for a second she was going to try to take it from me.

"Oh, yes," I said.  Remember, I'm all about placating the crazies.

"Yes, he saved Mexico," she said, looking deeply at him in the candle.  I was getting freaked out that next she'd ask me what "pink taco" was.

"Have you ever seen Viva Zapata?" she asked. "Marlon Brando was in it."

"Yep, I've seen it," I said.  Which is true.  And Marlon Brando was totally way to fucken tall to play a Mexican at the turn of the century. 

But I wasn't going to say that to the lady, who was now getting herself a shopping cart.  After all, I'm the Hispanic Studies/Spanish major who was buying a 99 cent candle with the words "Pink Taco" on it.

Thrift stores may sell lotsa things but irony ain't one them.

Image via Wikimedia.

Meet My Outdoor Living Room

Hoo child!  Did I score or what?

Yesterday was about to drop off my nephew Owen at school after his doctor appointment (shortly after I picked up Matilda from preschool - it was quite the  bullshit car-errand day) when the Furniture Fates favored me.

An Absolutely Free Love Seat, Armchair & Ottoman!  HOLY BALLS.

Figure 1:  Free, blue and too good to be true?

I tried to find a downside, other than I had to load it and cart it home myself, but still the man giving it away actually helped me heave the sofa, which was the heaviest piece, into my car. 

Shall I enumerate the upsides? 

It's blue. (My favorite color.) 

We need furniture for our basement TV room that's not saggy and ripped up.

It's free.  FREE!   

It's in nice shape.  (While someone might have died on it, there's no sign of it.  Ghoul that I am, I checked for blood, cat hair and other stank.)

The love seat has a pull-out bed.   And since we live in a 40's era starter home, it's the right size for our living spaces.  I am a ferocious hater of overstuffed furniture and this seems to strike a good proportional balance where the poof is concerned. 

The old dude who was giving it away only had one caveat:  I had to take the entire collection.  Fine by me.  I didn't want to ask too many questions, as he was wearing one of those old man Mr. Rogers zip-up jackets without a shirt underneath, rocking the bare chested white old man hair.  As I loaded up the ottoman, he continued mowing his lawn, not saying a word. 

Weird? In a word, yes.  And do I worry if his children will track me down and say "Grand-Dad's addled and gave away the furniture, would you mind giving it back?"

Well, yes, I would.  But because this find seems too good to be true, I did leave the entire collection in the lawn for the next few hours, should this be the case.       

News re(Cycle): Secondhand Pets

Remember that post about pet adoption?

This weekend a bed we are replacing fell over and hit Matilda and shoved her into my desk, where the corner cut her temple. So it was off to the ER and wait for 4 hours to get two (2) stitches.

Anyhoo, after the stitches, we sat out on a bench in front of the hospital waiting for Our Favorite Husband/Father to collect us.

There was an old man sitting on the bench, dressed in black wranglers and a cowboy shirt, drinking black coffee from a styrofoam cup. He also wore horrible cheap black loafers. With all that black, I guessed he was waiting on some awful news or visiting his ill wife or some such.  But no, it was just a black story he had to tell.

Figure 1:  Rat with Mammary Cyst, via Wikimedia:   "...Chelsea, a seal point pet rat with a severe mammary cyst. I took her later that day to have her put down, but the vet refused to do so as it was likely non-cancerous and she was not in any real pain. She died a couple of months later. Her two siblings also developed similar cysts, too, over the next few months."

While Matilda was sitting with me, she started chattering about dogs and cats and all the pets she likes. Then she started playing and dinking around.

The man asked me, "She like pets?"

"Yes," I said. "She sure does."

"My grand-daughter loves 'em, too," the man said. "She has a little rat that she carries around like a baby."

"Really?" I said.

"Yeah," he replied. "She got 'im from the University of Minnesota. They give 'em away free, 'cause they inject 'em with chemicals and cancer and what not. So they can study 'em."

"Oh, wow," I said.

"They get big tumors, though," he said. "From the cancer they inject in 'em. And then they die. I dunno what my grand-daugther's gonna do, now that thing's gotta a big tumor and it's gonna die soon. She carries it around like a little baby."

"Yeah, that'll be hard," I said.

I have an amazing ability to respond normally to kooks and weirdos and insane information. Of course, meanwhile, I was thinking:

What kinda family allows its kid to have a experimental animal full of cancer and who knows what else for a pet?

Are they really that poor?

Is this their way of getting their child acquainted with the niceties and protocols involved in dealing with stage 4 cancer?

Though I'm big proponent of reuse, I'm not seeing the reasoning behind this.  Of course, beyond the whole "Sweet! Free pet!" perspective. 

Halloween at the Thrifts

 

Figure 1:  A happy Halloween?  Not with all the poseurs mucking up my local thrift haunt!

For hardcore thrifters, Halloween can be excruciating. 

First, the store layout gets turned upside down to accomodate the new racks of costumes and props. 

Next, an influe of "new" (read "cheap") merchandise appears, taking away valuable shelf space for true collectibles. 

And finally, out come the amateurs, the high schoolers and dilettantes looking trawling for costumes. They laugh at and mock the state of the store and it's occupants, sniffing at the general grime and lack of merchandising and marketing that the diehard thrift devotee has learned to look past.

.

Figure 2:  Bitchin picture, huh?

If you weren't already feeling class tensions before,  you will during Halloween.  Pawing through the racks for clothing you will wear not just for a joke while scads of slumming soccer moms debate costume ideas with their snotty kids is a definite fun sucker. I avoid the thrifts if I can during this time, though I do know that the Halloween foray is often an entry point for new thrift shoppers, yes, yes, yes, I get it, everyone has to start somewhere.  Still, it annoys me. 

But this year, I decided to reap the benefits of Halloween, in order to diffuse some of the disgust I feel toward Christmas.

My two young nephews live in Holland.  Fearing that whatever new toys I'd purchase would end up being on the Made in China / Lead/Mercury Recall List, I decided to go the reuse route.  I went to Value Village and filled the cart with a wonderful assortment of Halloween costumes and gear to create a box of instant dress up that the two brothers can use whenever they decide to play superheros or firetrucks or coal miners or just wear a alien googly-eyed headband if that suits their fancies. 

I mean, I buy the plastic toy crap for my kid, too.  But what does she invariably do?  Put an old tutu on her head and then decide to play with a handful of pencils. 

Figure 3: Halloween, the heathen kid's Christmas

So why not avoid the whole stupid Christmas consumption frenzy by taking advantage of the current holidays bounty?  Most thrift stores will be marking down their Halloween stuff as the actual day approaches, so you owe it to yourself to transform this somewhat negative and insane spoke in the thrift year to your benefit.   

Image Credits:  Figure 1, A Happy Halloween, drawing by Ellen Clapsaddle via Wikimedia;  Figure 2,  Halloween in Derry 2005 by SeanMack via Wikimedia;  Figure 3:  Halloween Party at the Shafter Migrant Camp, California by Dorothea Lange, November 1938, via Library of Congress Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, LC-USF34- 018549-D    

In Which I Come Into Money

Figure 1:  The Teton Dam Burst, a metaphor for my pent-up shopping predilections

You need not learn much more than I recently acquired a princely amount of cash, just as The Favorite Husband exited the country for a long-ass business trip.  Yesterday, the convergence of these two events resulted in me hitting up My Current Favorite Thrift Store and tossing everything into the cart that pleased me.

It was the proverbial dam burst.  I hadn't properly indulged in a thrift binge in many, many weeks.  Sure, there were careful, surgical strikes at Savers - say I need a bread loaf pan or a plant pot or something.  And there were the hit-or-miss rummage sales, that have been quite shitty lately. 

Confronted with sadness and lack of inspiration since my Favorite Husband left, I decided to fill up my cart of sorrows with a shit load of clothing and tchokche. 

Perhaps you are not interested, but for the record, Your Honor, this is what I bought:

For the self:

one blue Jones New York vee neck sweater

one green Gap vee neck tee shirt

one black cardigan

one blue and green striped Fashionable Fatty Brand shirt

one bright pink Gap hoodie

one white long-sleeved henley

one black vee neck tee shirt

one pair of black Rocket Dog Mary Janes

one back issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine

a copy of F.X. Toole's Rope Burns:  Stories from the Corner

For the home

a little plaque that says "Laundry Room:  Drop Your Pants Here"

two star-shaped iron candle holders

an aqua-stringed hammock

two blue fabric-wrapped bulletin boards

For the Matilda:

one pink girls' Von Dutch hoodie

one white and green owl shirt

one blue dragonfly shirt

one velour rainbow Gap hoodie

one velour butterfly hoodie

one pair of bootcut jeans

one encrusted jeweled & sequined long-sleeved butterfly tee shirt

one pair of rainbow tights

one pair of black tights

one bag of Polly Pocket clothes and dolls

one long-sleeved rainbow logo tee shirt

one Limited Too long-sleeved jersey

one pink Children's Place long-sleeved tee shirt

one pink Land's End long-sleeved tee shirt

one multi-striped diamond-necked long-sleeved tee shirt

one green zip-up hoodie

The total?  $114.05  Take that, Conventional Retail.

Image via Wikimedia. 

Hitler and Project Runway

What the fuck, Chuck? 

It's like a giant, invisible stapler came along and attached me firmly to my couch.  I haven't been able to summon my will to power for days.  I've been eating raw cookie dough, watching Season 2 of Project Runway (I love you Daniel Vosovic!) and learning more than I ever imagined about Hitler - dude was a total tweaker! - from the History Channel.

We're outta cash, so there's no thrifting.  As I mentioned earlier, garage sales are becoming fewer and further between.  There's not a lot going on, though I cruise Bloglines daily looking for fodder.

Wednesday I put my gardens to bed, i.e. did a final lawn mow and raked leaves over everything. 

Yesterday I made a homemade blocking board for my crochet project out of a box.  Woo.

Today I am making chicken mole and challah.  Oh, yeah, and I'm hanging laundry 'cause it finally stopped raining for one second. 

Winter is coming, but we still haven't turned on our furnace.  I'm holding out until November.  We've got the feather bed out and everyone's got slippers, so I think we'll be okay.

See what I mean?  I'm as boring as church.  There's fuckall going on in my life, to say nothing of hot and sexy eco/reuse news. 

Plus, nobody told me what to do with my damn plastic chicken.   I guess a little love would be nice. 

Are you still reading this?  Do you care about my chicken?  Or Hitler's daily injections of meth? Or how to make raw cookie dough that won't kill you? 

Stop me before I do something drastic - like, trying to call into Nancy Grace on Court TV or start listening to the Smiths. 

Push It Real Good

Perennial cool-nerds at MAKE zine recently showcased some bitchin' push mowers converted into bicycles.

   

Figure 1:  A fuckload better than my broke-dick lawn mower. 

I like this idea a lot, as I'm in a hate-loathe relationship with my lawn mower, which is currently broken and is chronically running out of gas.

My Husband swears I'd hate using a push mower, but I'm guessing that being able to get one's damn lawn mowed in some kind of timely manner beats the hell out of waiting for it grow up over the goddamn windows.  And did I mention our Elderly Neighbors?  Who will be getting up on the day of the Apocolypse to water before 6 am and will surely continue mowing until the Four Horsemen arrive on the scene to personally strike them down with plague, famine, all-you-can-eat tuna hotdish and whatever other promised horrors not mentioned by Revelations.

How does one get to be one of the Four Horsemen?  I'm thinking I might apply.

Figure 2: Are you currently hiring or just keeping applications on file?   

Can you tell I'm in a mood?  It's Christly October and I'm still incensed over the dumbassed lawn.

I hate mowing it.  I wish it would convert into a prairie.  Where's the Amazing Mumford when you need him?  "A la peanut butter sandwiches!" and poof! A prairie!  I'd rather pay fines for having an unkempt free-for-all than a bunch of 10 foot, thick-ass DECORATION that needs maintenance.

   

Figure 3:  Person more likely to fix my lawn mower sooner than my Husband.   

Hmpht.  I'm going to eat more raw cookie dough now.  Don't try to follow me, either.   

You Can Gore Me, Al

Figure 1:  Is this man hotter than climate change?  "Fraid so.   

I kept it quiet at the time, because I figured it was just like my inexplicable attraction to Dennis Franz, but just a titch smarter.   

So now that's he's a top dawg peace-prize winning playa, I'm just gonna join the horny horde and ask:

Has Al Gore been working out lately or something?  What's different?  Did he wax his eyebrows or start taking beta blockers?  Did Tipper start dancing nude for him while blasting the Judas Priest?  Homeboy is just so easy in his body.  Relaxed.  Confident.  Ready to stick his pitchfork in corporate polluter ass. Hell yeah!  Let's get down to it, baby!   

Damn!  I'm about to chase him around the room. 

Image by Brett Wilson via Wikipedia.

I'm Not a Marketing Ploy...Am I?

Why civilized folk decided to make books and bags out of paper completely confounds me.

Why in the holy hell would you want these two things - things you need to LAST, mind you - to be constructed from a flimsy, disintegrating material that is neither waterproof or nor nonflammable?  Did a chimp take the wheel at that point in history or what?

Anyway, my favorite blog of beauty/fashion inanity, SheFinds, had a recent blip on the whole craze for designer handbag-maker Anya Hindmarch and her sold-out "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" bag that the whole world has been clamoring for.   Apparently, there's some charity auction for the coveted Hindmarch bag and blah blah blah, who cares, you're not reading anymore.

Because guess what?  Reusing bags for shopping doesn't involve spending 800 bucks on a piece of contorted canvas!  Apparently, this is news if you're an 80 lb. cokehead supermodel, but for the rest of us, finding a way to conveniently tote about our non-couture wares needn't be so costly or dangerous;  remember, you could be trampled by a excited mob during the launch of these "non-plastic" bags at an Anya Hindmarch boutique, thus the cancellation of the launch of the product itself.  Boo hoo, Darwin in action.

Though I had been laboring to reuse my paper sacks at Target and the grocery store, after about the fifth use, the stupid things start to break and tear.  Well, no shit.  It's not like we couldn't see that coming.

That is why I was thrilled to see my local Cub Foods carrying reusable bags.  Made by Earthwise Reusable Bags, these sacks appromixate the size of a normal grocery bag, but you can fill them up to the gills and they won't rip and send your groceries tumbling down the driveway.

I totally love them!  My sister bought a set of 10 for 10 bucks and we now trade them back and forth when we grocery shop.  (We often shop together because it saves the other gas.  Also, because we're nerds who can't be apart for more than 15 minutes.

(Long Rambling Aside: I've been bitching at Target to get similar bags whenever they give me a feedback survey.  Can't you just see a lovely red bag, with the Target logo?) 

I fear stores not wanting to give up their disposable paper or plastic bags, though - too much marketing might be lost in that sense.  However, I think it's a huge win-win-win.  You get good bags, and which you pay the store for and then the store saves cash on providing paper or plastic .  Granted, that's two wins on the side of the store, but I'm on the side of the planet and if that means giving over to the short-term minded store, so be it. 

However, in the end, I'm with William McDonough.  Make books (and bags) out of plastic or other materials that will last.  If you must throw it away, at least paper is biodegradable, right? 

Book image by David Monniaux via Wikipedia

Everything You Really Need

There is something overwhelmingly comforting to me about buying resale/reuse products.

Think about it. Everything you really need - it's already been made, it's already been partially consumed, and it's just sitting there, uniquely, waiting for you to get it at the thrift store or rummage sale.

Cargidan sweaters. Bread pans. Terra cotta pots. Tablecloths. Armchairs.

It's all there. You just have to decide where and when you'll get them.

I have never been an early adopter. Our family wasn't, either. We were the last house on the block to get a microwave, a video camera and a VCR. Prior to those inventions, we seemed to do just fine with saucepans on stovetops, Super 8 home movies and The Wonderful World of Disney.  Whenever I see something newfangled and spangly like an iPhone or a GPS navigation system and I get all tense and Luddite, fearing what complications the instruction manual will involve.

So it suits me to shop resale, to hang onto my possessions for long whiles before dropping them for the next hot thing, to arrive late at the party, as it were. I haven't always been short on cash, but I am these days, and to spend money on all-new items seems drunken and wasteful. 

But despite my low cash flow, I feel less stress about acquisition than most people. I know that when I get around to buying things, they will be cheap and relatively timeworn. I don't feel that my cost of living is increasing in this way; I'm just happy to have a television, thank you very much, never mind this plasma or LCD baloney. I don't consider trading in my car every year or upgrading to a bigger house or buying a new wardrobe from Macy's.   Too much work.  Too much money.  Not as exciting as digging for gems amidst racks of cast-offs.

Though the search for that perfect sweater or chair is exciting and stimulating, consuming in this way actually makes me feel much more calm and content.  My great ambitions include finding a enamel pots I can cook with, or a set of canning jars in great shape, or a living room sofa in crazy colors they don't make anymore. It's all a matter of going out and seeing what turns up on the sales floor or what rolls down some random stranger's driveway.  In my model, I don't need to keep up on the latest trends or iterations.  What I want is out there and getting it will be challenging and fun and satisfying than the conventional "saving up" period involved with a new purchase.

How many times have I scoured the mall - usually in pursuit of some fuddy-duddy dress-up costume for some frumpy, un-fun social event like someone's dumbassed wedding - and come up wanting?  Trying, fruitlessly, to drop cash on sparkling brand new things, in every conceivable store?  It seems impossible, in these days of endless choice, to come up for air after a day of shopping and make no progress.  But it happens to me frequently when I chose to be a primary consumer.   While in the secondary market, I come home with something that pleases me on nearly every shopping trip.

Yes, I want new things at times. New bras. Handmade soaps and lotions (Dear Santa: I want everything in the LUSH catalog. I've been good. Love, Carrie.) Some good sheets. A computer full of titzed-out software that can bake cookies and make logos, all while creating podcasts and stickers.

And I want experiences, too: a new hair cut, a full-body massage, a trip to Portand so I can spend an entire day at Powell's bookstore.

But mostly, I feel that resale has calmed the consumerist tendencies our society creates. Whatever I really need has already been made and if I'm patient enough or wait long enough, it'll show up at my local thrift hang-out, with a buck ninety-nine price tag on it.

What about Happiness? Adventure? Fun?

Yeah.  You might get those things from an afternoon of thrift shopping, too.  But where desire's concerned, there are no guarantees.  You might also end up wanting to hang yourself after a demoralizing experience like this.   

Mostly, the thrift store works best with small tangibles:  springform cheesecake pans, gardening books, jigsaw puzzles.  Those Big, Important, Capitalized Concepts, like Love, Peace, or Passion?  Never mind what greedy deceptions our shopping-crazed culture tries to sell - those things are still up to you.

Image by Darnyi Zsoka via Wikipedia. 

I'm Tapped

It's fall and it's back to being cold.  For a few days, we were sweating our buttcheeks off and had to scour the basement for fans.  I was miserably hot (and sick) and took this very personal.  So I didn't blog and that was that.

Now that I'm feeling well, I'm afraid I'm in a funk. 

Garage sale season is screeching to a close.

I'm low on funds so thrift adventures are rare.

I'm contemplating a new round of projects for the blog but can seize on none as being satisfying.

Ugh.  The pause between seasons is clearly difficult.  And, being from Minnesota, I take weather very personally, because it upsets me to sweat when it's not summer and freeze when it's mid-July.  I live in this dumbass state because I like four seasons of constancy, so it riles me to the core when our climate can't behave properly. 

Okay.   More later when I'm not a crazed space case.

Technical Difficulties

 

Figure 1:  Book you should go read while waiting for my next thrilling installment. 

Many apologies for the lack of updates.

I've been felled by some heinous flu that makes it uncomfortable to sit up and be conscious for longer than 15 minutes.  Also, not be crass, but my bathroom is quite the hot zone. 

It's a big shitty barf-o-rama, I tell you!

Go read Girlbomb.  I just re-read it and it did not disappoint.  It's Fantastic!  Totally Juicy!  Or as Perez Hilton would say, Peppered! 

Okay, that's enough of this being ambulatory business.  Going back to feeling Shiteous on the sofa.

Vinegar, Thou Art So Sweet

I can't seem to make black beans.

I burn them.  Or they're too tough.  Or they smell funny or taste gross and then I throw the whole thing away, cursing and muttering.

As much as I want to make them - cheap! healthy! meatless! child likes them! - I have no luck.  I should really call Lynn Rossetto Kasper about this and I'm gonna one day.  For serious.

Meanwhile, I had to clean out my lovely Dru Holland cookpot ($7 at St. Vincent de Paul's, natch!), which was full of some foul-smelling, encrusted em effers. 

Figure 1:  Scene of the bean crime. 

So, to paraphrase Ann Wilson of the perennially-underrated band, Heart:

Who do I run to when it all falls down?

White vinegar.  This shiz is so awesome and so cheap.  It cleans toilets and removes odors.  Dump some in yer potty overnight and then scrub in the AM - so beautiful you'll cry! 

It's almost too good to be true - I worry about Dateline doing some horrible expose which reveals that white vinegar is actually made by wringing the bodies of baby seals or something horrid like that.

I keep jugs of white vinegar under the  bathroom and kitchen sinks. Then it's handy whether you need it for cooking or cleaning up.

You can also spray a mixture of water and white vinegar on vegetables and fruits to clean them before eating.

Didja know that May is National Vinegar Month?  Dork it up with me on vinegar trivia and uses at The Vinegar Institute!

Do My Funky Chicken!

I scored this rad chicken planter from my neighbor Amber's trash cache.

It's plastic and has a drainage hole on the bottom.   What in the hell should I do with it?