It is not only the season for garage sales, but neighborhood garage sales as well. Many times on this blog I have written about the neighborhood sales I used to attend in Sun Valley, the neighborhood I grew up in, and in most of those posts I have opined how the sales they hold today pale in comparison. When I was a kid, it seemed like some years nearly half the residents in our neighborhood participated in garage sale day. A couple of years ago when we attended, there were only four sales in all. This year I’d guess there were maybe a dozen — again, a far cry from the old days, but who knows. Maybe someday, the number of sales will rise again.

Fortunately for me, plenty of other nearby neighborhoods have picked up the baton. In the 1980s neighborhood garage sales seemed like a novelty; these days, it seems like every neighborhood organizes one. Unfortunately there are only so many weekends which means many, many neighborhoods end up scheduling their events on top of one another. This past weekend five neighborhoods all scheduled neighborhood garage sales. The largest of those was Surrey Hills, who had over 130 sales in one neighborhood alone. Logistically it’s simply not possible to visit them all in one day. On days like that, Susan and I drive through neighborhoods slowly and try to scan each one for things that look interesting, rolling past the ones that seem focused on clothes and furniture.

I found a lot of neat things this weekend, none of which I need. That’s part of what’s fun about visiting garage sales. When things only cost a buck or two you can buy them, use them a time or two, and toss them if they break or aren’t exactly what you had hoped for — or, if you’re like me, you can hang onto them until you eventually have your own garage sale and try to sell them to someone else!

Two of the things I picked up this weekend were the Igloo KoolTunes cooler and a set of LED lights, both of which you can see above. The Igloo KoolTunes cooler has speakers built into the side so that you can kick out the jams while enjoying cool drinks at a picnic. Igloo recently released an updated version of their KoolTunes cooler with Bluetooth and USB connections, but this is an original one from the 1980s that came with a small headphone jack for connecting an audio source. While it works, the speakers have no power and rely on the amplification from the power source which I learned the iPhone is not very good at. The LED lights surrounding the cooler were a $5 purchase. The lights have three configurations: red, blue, and red and blue together.

Throughout the day I bought lots of normal garage sale items like DVDs and books and a few not-so-normal items like hanging hooks that look like fingers, but one of our most unique purchases was this blow mold Wise Man.

Whenever I see an odd item at a garage sale I always ask the owner questions about it. My question at this sale was, “how does one end up with a single wise man from a nativity scene?” Turns out, the thing had a great story attached to it. According to the seller, his father worked for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and once responded to a 911 call of a small child dressed in blue standing in the middle of the interstate. When the officer arrived he found this wise man, and ended up bringing it home. The story was worth $4 to me, and so now I own it (and the wise man, too).

(Don’t ask why the wise man is wearing a poncho in this picture. We’ve decided he was the fourth wise man who brought tamales, bot got lost along the way.)

For somewhere around $20 I got a cube filled with LED lights, an R2-D2 that does something (I’m not sure what yet), a cooler with speakers, some other LED lights, finger-shaped hangers, a ceramic skull, a boardgame, and several other items. Oh, and a wise man. Hopefully I’ll have enough time this week to clean everything up and try everything out before next weekend’s sales!