So today we’re having another high wind day, which is driving the dog insane. The windows are open, and every time a strong gust blows in and bangs a bedroom door shut, he panics. Every time the wind blows something around outside, he panics. Sam’s on edge and has just been freaking the hell out all day today, which has been driving me mental.
Kristi’s up in Sacramento with her mom today to visit her sister and our niece, and I’m here at home with the animals trying to get some work done. A bit of client work, a lot of trying to finish up Kristi’s new travel writing portfolio. Not easy to do when the menagerie (particularly the 140lb part of it) is so wound up. So rather than barricade myself in the office, I closed the bedroom windows – cutting down on the door-bang-panic factor – grabbed the car keys and got out of the house for a while.
I’d been meaning to go visit the local thrift stores for a while now, just to check them out. And lately I’ve been in a project sort of mood. There’s a Hope Chest Thrift Store around the corner from us on McHenry Avenue, run by the local hospice center, and so I drove down there to browse a bit and take a needed breather from OHMYGODITSWINDYEVERYBODYPANIC.
Hope Chest is a really nice thrift, much better than the places I remember in Orlando and Tampa. I’m guessing that’s probably because there are many more older established families here than in Central Florida, and so the items you find include many more older pieces. Go into the average Tampa thrift, and you’ll mainly find a bunch of cheap garage sale junk from the 70s and 80s. Here, you’ll also find a light scattering of items dating back to the 40s and 50s.
They have an exceptional bookstore. I found a woodworking textbook from 1950, in good condition, on sale for a dollar and picked it up; they also had a pile of books on home maintenance, gardening, things like that. One encyclopedia of handy home projects, dated 1966, included complete instructions on building an “atomic fallout shelter”.
When I wasn’t rummaging through fifty-year-old books, I was scoping out items for spare part potential. Scrap brass, chrome, wood, machined elements, that sort of things. Plenty there, and you can sure buy project materials cheaper this way than as new and raw metal or wood that then has to be machined. Like I said, been in a mood lately.
In the end, I walked out with that woodworking book for a buck and a determination to come back for more later.