Another estate sale, disappearing stores, and an under-the-sea party

The end of a busy weekend tonight.  Started early Friday morning when Duane and I hit an estate sale in a lovely old home in Hyde Park.  An older section of town where you could see the bay from the street this house sits on.  The inside of the house reminded me quite a bit of the one my family lived in in Texas.  Bright and airy inside with wood floors, lots of windows and a staircase that had a nice window on the landing between floors.  De ja vu.

Duane's haul.

Lots of lovely antiques and tons of books mostly shelved in built-in cases all over the downstairs area.  Duane found a few books and a great buy on a Blarney's sweater made of thick Irish wool.  I found a nifty bust of Bach and a Washington Redskins Super Bowl mug.  Although the Redskins are George's hometown team, my sister, Heidi, and her husband, Charlie, are season ticket holders.  I picked up the mug for Charlie since the Redskins have had a pretty rough time of it in recent years.  Maybe the mug will cheer him up!   

We hit a couple of other sales after his one and I bought a couple of

pin/tip trays (one King Tut themed and the other a Vogue cover) along with an old rosary and a number of saint's medals.  My friend, Barbara, and her daughter, Margaret, are interested in saint's medals (Margaret has her's on a bracelet) so I let them know what I found.  I also got lucky at 2 of the sales and finally came across skeins of yarn.  My cyber-buddy, Kate, is the organizer for a group called The Humble Stitch Project.  The members knit and/or crochet items to benefit South Florida's homeless in cooperation with Miami Rescue Mission/Broward Outreach.  You can find out more about this organization here.  I'm mailing the bag of yarn to Kate this week. 

After we stopped at Starbucks for our usual refreshment, we headed to one of our favorite stores, Kaleidoscope, to browse.  I had been eyeing a mid-century coffee table for some time and kept trying to figure out where I could put it in my house when I realized that it would look great in my home office.   Luckily,  the table was still there and I am now the official owner.  Very happy.  The picture I took was before I 'decorated' the table with a few items. 



Luckily, we noticed that the tile top tables that our friend, Linda, has been interested in purchasing are still in the store.  Linda and I plan to head to Kaleidoscope next Saturday when the area where Duane lives will be
having a community-wide yard sale.

Duane will be participating in the sale at her home but Linda and I will, of course, be shoppers.  We'll definitely have better luck than the three of us did on Saturday when we decided to explore some stores in the Lutz area.  Lutz is a small bedroom community, some of it still rural, outside Tampa.  There was one store in particular that we wanted to check out after seeing an article about it in the newspaper.  I searched the net the night before to find some other places to visit, too.  Good thing I did because the store we wanted to see was closed, despite the hours listed as 9am to 4pm on Saturdays.  Not sure it's going to be open much longer if that happens very often.  It's a niche type of business, anyway, and you can't sell anything if you aren't open.  Hellloooo!!!!

After we passed a few of the places I had typed up for us to check and noticed that, ahem, they were vacant, we decided that I would start calling some of these places on my cell.  A wise decision because only two of the ones listed were still in business.  I kept hearing "this number is no longer in service, etc." along with one number where the lady seemed a tad annoyed when I asked if this was the store for that number.  "They went out of business!"  Oooh, maybe she was the original owner and was bummed because now she gets potential customers after it's too late.  We kind of enjoyed that call.  These people really should make an effort to remove their listings from online.  Seriously.

We still had a great time, though.  We discovered some places we hadn't known about and even bought a few things.  Then we stopped for lunch at a terrific Mexican place and had a big booth to ourselves so that we could gab privately.  A nice day after all.

Then, today, I attended the birthday party of my niece, Ava, who turned 5.  Great party -- the theme was 'under the sea' and no one gives a party like my sister, Carol.  Coral centerpieces made of sugar, a backdrop for the little girls to have their pictures taken as mermaids, a game called 'Ava's Fishing Hole' where everyone fished for a prize package, and a game of Limbo.  Carol does nothing in half-measures and she does it all herself.  The fish and starfish shaped sandwiches, the mermaid cake, the starfish shaped s'mores, etc.  The kids had a great time and Ava had a wonderful birthday.

Part of the food table.

Mermaid cake and cupcakes.

Sugar coral and candy corn.

Ava's Fishing Hole.

Everybody limbo!

The birthday girl as a mermaid.

Enough shopping and sugar for me!  It's back to work finishing up my editing on my latest LibriVox project before I begin the next one.