duck-shaped pain

A few months ago, I went to a yard sale and found a chair I liked. It's not a particularly spectacular chair, I will admit, but it was good enough for me.

It's an armchair, upholstered in a sage and green paisley fabric, with carved wooden arms and legs. It would use some new finish and perhaps some new upholstery someday, but right now, it's at about the perfect point of shabbiness: lived in, yet you wouldn't hide it when guests came over. It has the potential to have a lot of potential, like an underachieving six-year-old.

The only problem was that the woman running the yard sale wanted $60 for it. It's a nice chair, but it's not the sort of chair you would spend $60 at a yard sale for. I should have guessed, though, since this woman had greatly overestimated the demand for most of her things. Metal pie plates with lopsided roosters painted on them shouldn't fetch $12, either.

I offered her $30, but she was sort of aghast that I would think her chair was worth that. So I didn't buy it.

So, this morning, my mom and I were driving through the same neighborhood, looking for some other yard sale, and, there on the curb, was the same chair, with a sign on it that said -- FREE. We pulled over, I looked over the chair to make sure that it was still in one piece and we took it.

Free chair! Gee, this woman could have gotten $30 for it a few weeks earlier, but noooooooo......

I guess I used up my daily allotment of luck right there, because I didn't find anything at the rest of the yard sales we went to.

We made a trip to Sam's Club after that, where I bought two enormous English cucumbers and three pounds of limes.

I don't really enjoy going to Sam's much, except when I need enormous quantities of something, such as batteries or olive oil. I'm not really the customer they're trying to attract, I guess, because they rarely have the things I'm looking for. Plus, I don't have a enormous truck to haul 100-pound bags of flour around in. [1]

Somewhere in my mind, I always imagine a Sam's Club made just for me, that has walls lined with enormous packages of fountain pen refills, vegetarian cookbooks, Luna bars, turnips, composition books, cherry cider, and cardigan sweaters. I'd like to be a market force all on my own, thank you.

This morning was the biggest weekend yet at farmer's market, as the usual merchants were joined by about ten smaller peach growers, all selling their excess fruit. One thing I like about buying fruit here as opposed to the store is that there's much more selection: there were about nine different varieties of peaches to choose from. I bought some Golden Jubilee peaches (yellow outside, red and white mottled flesh inside) and some of the ubiquitous Red Havens, which were almost as big as a honeydew melon. The bell peppers also seem to be coming in, but they won't reach their peak for another month or so. Best eggplant day so far: I bought a few and almost got some little white 'plants and some long, slender Japanese ones.

Things I saw riding in two different motorcycle sidecars this morning:

• A tiny, tiny old lady in a housecoat

• Three basset hounds

(The basset hounds seemed much more excited about riding around than the old lady did)

Thing you really love to hear at the next table while you eat breakfast: "Golly. Is that thing MOVING? Smack it with your fork!"