Dig This Treasure!

It was pretty dreary on Sunday, but Zach suggested we go to the Flat Rock Speedway, where they were having a flea market.  I’m glad we did because it turned out to be lots of fun!

I just looked at the large version of this photo on my computer and there is a giant Confederate flag dead center.  UGH.  I will assume it was a person selling only authentic Civil War memorabilia.  (It wasn’t.)

Man, what I wouldn’t give to drive one of those buses around the track.  They were all smashed up and looked like they had several different rounds of fire damage.  I’d still totally drive one though. And crash it.

Here are my boys.  Aren’t they cute?  I gave Everett a tootsie roll pop to keep him busy.  He sat in silence and ate it for about 2 hours.  Shoutout to tootsie roll pops.

Look! It’s another one of those ICP dolls!  On what planet was someone like, “we should totally paint the doll like this.”  It’s awful.  No one will buy that doll.

There were a ton of these jail mugshots in a ziplock bag.  I wanted all of them.  They were so amazing.  Most of the crimes were gambling and larceny related.  The guy selling these though wanted $4 EACH.  No way.  I wanted the whole bag for $10.  No deal.

I also liked this old “flicker” watch.  It was similar to a hologram.  The baseball player would swing his bat when you turned your wrist.  The guy selling it said it was from the 50s but it looks more 60s or 70s to me.  He wanted $95 for it.  That was out of my range but still very cool to try it on.

Speaking of holograms, how do you say “hologram?”  Zach says HOE-LOW-GRAM to which I promptly called him an idiot.  I say HA-LAH-GRAM.

Here is a hotdog I ate.  It was good as hell.

I only bought three things but they were all great.  This whole flea market had treasures I had not seen before, and everything was priced pretty reasonably.

I got these Gurley Halloween candles still in the box.  They are on eBay now, but I fantasized about keeping them.  They are seriously the cutest. I paid $10.

I also got this Halloween blow mold. It is also cute.  It was $5.

My largest purchase was this gigantic lot of old Sesame Street toys from the 80s and 90s.  Sarah will 100% murder me for not giving these to her.  I paid $15 and put them on eBay Buy It Now for $50.  They sold instantly, which is a blessing and a curse.  It is nice to make a profit, but the fact that they sold instantly makes me think I should have listed them for higher.

Zach bought an old railroad poster that was framed.  It was really neat until he realized it was just a photocopy of an old railroad poster.  The aging on the edges and the slight tears were not real when you looked close, just a copy!  He returned it after we raised a stink.

Zach also bought an amazing old watch here, but only after we went home first.  It was pricey, marked $395.  I could tell it was weighing on Zach’s mind and that he loved it so much.  When we got home, he texted with a watch friend in New York, who valued it around $1200.  A similar one on eBay recently sold for $980.  Zach raced back to buy the watch.

He ended up getting it for $300 which is a great deal.  This watch is a chronograph, which is way more collectible than your average vintage watch.  The brand is Vulcain and it is from the 60s. The dial style is called a “surfboard.”  I think he will probably wear it awhile and then eventually sell it.

That’s all from Flat Rock! 

-Erin

It was a lazy Sunday around our household today so Zach decided to throw some things up on Craigslist.  He had a bunch of NES games from chidhood, and I had some leftover from a college boyfriend whose possessions pop up in random storage boxes around here from time to time.

There were 22 games in total which Zach decided to sell in one giant lot.  I figured they were worth about $2 a piece, so I recommended asking $50 for all of them.  We would then wait to be lowballed and accept that offer.  Zach ended up asking $60 for all of them, but hoped someone would offer like $35.

Here is a photo of just 4 of them from the Craigslist ad.  Perhaps if you’re a Nintendo collector, you will look at this photo and immediately know the road that this story is about to go down.

Anyway, I went and ran some errands, so what happens next is all Zach’s fault.  He starts getting inundated with text messages and emails of people wanting to buy the games.  There were literally 15 texts, emails, and calls within 20 minutes of the listing going up.

Now, call me crazy, but if it were me at the helm, my Spidey sense would be on overdrive. 

One dude texted this:

You guys, Ortonville is OVER AN HOUR AWAY from our house!  If the alarm bells weren’t ringing before, they are certainly blasting now.  This guy was willing to drive an hour, in the snow, AND give us more money than we were asking for.

So after the games are sold, Zach has this little exchange:

WTF?! You’re telling me that Chip and Dale 2 is worth $150 ON ITS OWN.  FFS.  What kind of world…

Yep, sure enough:

I guess we (Zach) should’ve done our (his) homework.  Basically this is a shout-out to all of you to go tear through your video game stash.  If that stash only contains Xbox games though, you’re out of luck, as made evident by this guy:

-Erin

All that glitters isn’t gold, and apparently all that is purple isn’t actually, well, purple.  The saga of my purple insulators sure has been a roller coaster ride–one that I am sad I ever had to ride on.

I had been in communication with the buyer of my insulators as soon as I sold them.  He was super nice and I actually ended up sending him some other common insulators I had laying around.  I checked in with him to make sure the package arrived safely and that he signed for it and blah blah.  Then, I heard nothing.

A week passed and I felt comfortable spending the profit I made from this sale.  I hadn’t heard anything to the contrary, so I figured the buyer must be happy with his new purple glass buddies. 

And then I got the following ebay message:

I immediately felt ill.  I knew this wasn’t good.  F#$K F#$K F#$K.  I was at my parents’ house when this happened and I seriously felt like I got punched in the stomach.  It was that bad.  I couldn’t breathe.

Because $425 is a lot of money, and I had just gone on a Christmas shopping spree :(

Andy was actually really nice when I finally spoke to him on the phone.  I wanted to hate him.  And I wanted to blame him for this whole ordeal or try and prove somehow that he was the one scamming me.  I knew though that wasn’t true.

I should have realized something was up, because purple insulators are REALLY rare.  For me to find THREE of them all together was like lightning striking me not once, not twice, but, yes, three times.

What I can blame Andy for was the fact that he had a hunch these insulators were irradiated.  He kept saying on the phone that he was “taking a gamble” on them.  To me, if you are knowingly taking a risk on something, then you are assuming some responsibility for the fallout.  I felt as though Andy should’ve tipped me off that these might be tampered with.  I could have pulled down the listing and done some investigating.  Like my previous post, I did get tipped off by another ebay member, but he seemed really jackass-y about it.  I didn’t believe him.

I guess I should have.

Anyway, Andy told me not to panic quite yet, as he still had to blacklight test the insulators.  Irradiated insulators don’t glow under a blacklight because the xrays used to irradiate them have messed up the manganese composition of the glass (or something like this…you get the idea.)  Andy also told me that I could refund him little by little if needed–that he wouldn’t be filing any claims with paypal or ebay. 

While waiting for Andy to acquire a blacklight to test the insulators, I went ahead and sent photos to several insulator experts at the NIA (National Insulator Association).  The decision was unanimous.  Literally 6 different insulator experts (who knew the world had so many) said my insulators were irradiated.

I wanted to write back Dwayne Anthony and be like, “Damn. What a harsh and cruel blow you have delivered to me D.A.  Can I call you D.A.?"  Instead, I was all, "Bummer. Thanks.”

What is amazing about the NIA is that its Authentication & Classification Advisor, named Paul, offered to take up a collection among its members to help me cover my financial loss in buying these insulators originally. He was really impressed that I actually cared whether my insulators were irradiated and that I was refunding the ebay buyer.

I explained to Paul that only $4 was spent on the insulators when my parents originally bought them, so I wasn’t really out anything (EXCEPT MY AMAZING EBAY PROFIT, but I digress…)

Seriously, how nice is that?  Insulator people might be the most boring collectors of all time, but they sure are nice as hell.

Ok so, let’s wind this up.  The blacklight test went about as sh*tty as could be expected.  My insulators didn’t glow.  Andy sent me some photos:

That’s one of his legit purple insulators.

Here is one of my insulators:

WHOMP WHOMP.  You win this round Andy.

And in the end, I still kinda won.  Andy didn’t make me give him a full refund, just a partial one.  He said because it is Christmas, and because, like he said, he was “taking a gamble."  I think that is fair.

So still keep your eyes out for purple insulators everyone.  But before you buy them, turn your eyes into blacklights and look at the insulators REAL close.  Happy hunting!

-Erin

So a few years ago I saw this Christmas display that used old glass insulators set on top of a string of lights.  It was mega cute.  I tried googling an image for you, and the best I could find is this, which is also mega cute:

So I set out collecting insulators.  I have a whole bunch now, but have never actually set up said light display.  While in the basement today, I dug the insulators out and figured I would look them up on ebay to see if I should sell them.

I should interject here and say that I am still not totally sure what an insulator is/was.  I mean, the name is self-explanatory, but what these actually insulated is unclear to me.  Something about telephone poles.

I should also add that people EFFING love insulators.  The websites and blogspots devoted to these glass phalli ( I thought it was phalluses but I stand corrected) are numerous.

So anyway, in my stash, I had 3 purple insulators.  It turns out that these are insanely rare.  And valuable.  We’re talking way more money than you could even imagine someone would spend on a piece of purple glass that you stick Christmas lights under for decoration.  Timmy and Joan bought these for me at an auction for $4.

So of course I immediately listed mine for sale and in the matter of a couple hours they already had 18 watchers and several bids. 

And then this happened:

Some glass insulator know-it-all is trying to rain on my purple glass parade.  WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?!  I panicked of course and started frantically looking up what the hell “radiated” insulators are.  Turns out, the term is actually “irradiated,” so basically I should not trust this guy at all.

Irradiated glass, as it turns out, has literally been placed in the presence of a machine that emits radiation, like an x-ray machine.  It turns the glass amazing colors like purple or cobalt blue.  The glass will naturally turns these colors if left out in the sun for decades, say, on a telephone pole, but some scammers don’t want to wait for that to happen.  They buy cheap insulators and then irradiate them.  UGH.

This is a SUPER HOT TOPIC in the glass insulator community and is debated fiercely.  I highly recommend poking around here. Here is a taste though:

^^^ UM, ok THIEF.  Get down off those telephone poles!

So WTH.  Are my insulators fake? I really don’t know.  I don’t think so though.  Who would go through the trouble of irradiating these and then selling them in an auction for $4? 

From what I have read, it is super hard to tell which insulators have been irradiated and which are authentic.  The fact that this guy thinks he could tell just by looking at a photo of mine on ebay is sketchy. 

I am holding out hope for my little insulators! I will let you know how they end up doing!

-Erin

…Maybe?…

I know it’s been quite some time since y'all have heard from me, but I have to tell you about something crazy I just found in eBay World (new location: basement!) tonight. I decided to look at the abundance of home movies/8mm film I had down there, and finally get rid of it. As I was sorting through it all, I found this: 

I KNOW. 

So I yelled to Adam to come take a look. He has a manual 8 mm projector so he busted that out and discovered that it’s probably some footage from one of their 1964 Olympia Stadium shows in Detroit.

Adam could ID the base drum and some other stuff. 

The seats these people had were far away and the quality isn’t fabulous but… we shall see if there are any takers! 

For good measure, they decided to also include film of the Beatles performing on TV, as well as their children dancing. 

Totally awesome. 

If you know a Beatles fanatic who would be interested, spread the word! 

-Sarah

Well, it’s been three weeks since I last updated in general about the eBay World Purge that’s going on over here. 

Not a lot to report, though I am slowly but surely continuing to purge, moving my belongings out, along with a bunch of donations and garbage. There’s still a ton to sell, and I’m being REALLY optimistic because I’ve only got about 4 weeks left away from work. 

Here’s the state of the room this week: 

(bag on chair is garbage)

Lots of floor space now… 

Little Betsy even comes in and keeps me company while I work. Now that the dog bed I’ve had in here for her for a year is unearthed, she knows she’s welcome. 

Today’s project is to list some of the Real Photo Post Cards (RPPC) that I have that I think might we worth something. Who knows anything about these? 

Some seem to go for quite a bit, so we’ll see what happens. 

In the meantime, if anyone’s a big Warhol fan, I’m selling my three Best in Children’s Books that have Warhol-illustrated stories in them. You can find them on eBay now (willing to take any reasonable offer!) and here are some of the illustrations: 

I’ve got a lot more to update about, but that’s it for today! 

-Sarah

Hi y'all! 

Remember last summer when I bought an entire basement of slides while Erin was 7+ months pregnant? 

Well, since that time, those slides have resided in my very own basement, and let me tell you, Adam has been pleased about this. He was nice enough to help me move them all out of a corner of our basement this past Sunday, and I started the grueling process of sorting through them.

The slides have weighed heavily on me because of the quantity, and because I’ve known it’s a lot of money just sitting in our basement. But I also was aware of how much time it would take to go through them all. So I decided that on Sunday, it was time to start. It literally took me all day. 

That’s a picture of my view for the entire day. There were 54 slide carousels filled with slides, and then tons of boxes, as you can see. I was determined to take an inventory of everything so that I could list them with as much accuracy as possible, and also transfer all of the slides in trays into boxes, because shipping 54 slide trays is basically impossible. 

And now you can see why it’s impossible (that’s actually 51 trays–3 are not pictured). 

In the process of sorting through these slides, I found some crazy and cool stuff. For example, the dude who took these was insanely OCD about documenting the content of nearly every single slide. 

The sad thing was that they were all mixed up–the papers in the boxes weren’t always with the right trays, and so it was impossible for me to retain his notes. The good thing is that he also had notes on the slides themselves!

In the end, I counted every single slide and there were 8,429. This is what 8,429 slides looks like. 

If you want to watch this lot blow up (come on! be positive!) on eBay, you can follow it here. Or, if you’re a collector, you can bid on it! 

Also, in the process of sorting through all of this stuff, I separated a bunch of movies and sound recordings that I had also purchased at another estate sale, and Adam unearthed this gem. 

DUDE. 

-Sarah