Now I'm Cookin'!

OK, everybody, It's time to join Debbie, at Debbiedoos, I Love Livin in the Carolinas for Garage Salen
Where people are encouraged to show off their thrift store/garage sale/estate sale/rummage sale/junk sale/flea market/swap meet finds.


Of course, I like to be different, so while everyone else shows off the cool thing they got for a nickle, I am going to show some of my neat freebie finds.

NOTE:

I just discovered that Debbie is on vacation this week. We could have a party at her place without her I suppose, that way when she gets back she would find empty pizza boxes all over the furniture, but I suppose that wouldn't be very nice.

So, don't head over to her party, but I already posted this before I realized it, so it satays.

I have mentioned before that I am not above a bit of Dumpster Diving, Curb Crawling, or Pile Picking if I see something that catches my eye, and I have shown off a few treasures in the past. They aren't truly garage sale bargains, because I never pay a cent, but they are treasures none the less, and you can't beat free when it comes to a good deal!

So here is another great Find!

Recently, while tossing our trash in the dumpster, I noticed a sleeping bag, all rolled up. Now, generally, even though I know it can be cleaned, bedding is kind of a creepy thing to pull from a dumpster, at least in my book, so I was just going to ignore it, but a little voice told me to look closer. I did and lo and behold, it was rolled up around this beauty:

The sleeping bag stayed in the dumpster, it was in pretty rough shape anyway, so I didn't feel too bad, but this came home with me.

Right now they are selling brand new for anywhere from $59.99 at WalMart, to $109.00 at the big dollar special sportsman stores.

This one looks like it has been used once or twice at the most.



Be sure and join me each Tuesday for Tuesday Trivia Tie-in, where readers are invited to share trivia and show off their treasures. Read all about it here

Debbiedoos -- Dumpster Diving Delights.

OK, everybody, It's time to join

Debbie, at Debbiedoos, Loves Livin in the Carolinas for Garage Salen
Where people are encouraged to show off their thrift store/garage sale/estate sale/rummage sale/junk sale/flea market/swap meet finds.


Of course, I like to be different, so while everyone else shows off the cool thing they got for a nickle, I am going to show some of my neat freebie finds.

I have mentioned before that I am not above a bit of Dumpster Diving, Curb Crawling, or Pile Picking if I see something that catches my eye, and I have shown off a few treasures in the past. They aren't truly garage sale bargains, because I never pay a cent, but they are treasures none the less, and you can't beat free when it comes to a good deal!

So here is another great Find!

Any trip to the dumpster is an adventure around here. I often take the Little Princess witrh me, in fact, if she knows where I am going, she asks to come along. Her reasons are generally different than mine. She likes it when we see raccoons or cats, or even the occasional skunk, skulking around the dumpster, I on the other hand am always amazed at the things people will throw away.

Living in a townhouse complex, means that people will often come in on the weekends after cleaning out their garage, or after a yard sdale, and dump their unwanted things in our dumpster. It cleverly saves them the $10 fee they charge at the landfill.

Before I tell this story, I have to tell you about "Bingo."

Our little Princess, loves the song about Bingo. In fact she will sing it over and over again for hours, long enough to make Diann and I seriously insane. But at least she sings the whole song now. At first it was just "Bingo was his name oh" over and over.

Well, a few months back, we were at a restaurant and the waitress asked our little darling what her name was. With a straight face, she looked right at her and said "My name's Bingo." We laughed about it, but since that time, when anyone asks her name, that's what she answers.

So, From now on, when I talk about her on my blog, I am just going to call her Bingo. It's easier to type.

Anyway, a recent trip to the dumpster made both my eyes and Bingo's eyes light up.

Someone had thrown a perfectly good red wagon into the dumpster.

These pics were taken right after I pulled it from the dumpster, so it was still a bit dirty, but that was all that was wrong with it.

It has seating and seat belts for two, but Bingo calls the fold down portion of the front seat her "trunk" and she hides things under there.




Bargains are bargains, but free is always a good price!

Be sure and watch this space, because I have a whole bunch of other dumpster dive delights to share in upcoming weeks!

Please and join me each Tuesday for Tuesday Trivia Tie-in, where readers are invited to share trivia and show off their treasures. Read all about it here

A Good Deal Popped Up

I have never been one to call myself cheap. Thrifty, frugal, economical, maybe but not cheap.

But that doesn't mean I don't like cheap things.

One of the things we have really been trying to do is find cheap snacks. It seems like there are two kinds of snacks.
Type A) Expensive, fattening and delicious.

Or

Type B) Cheap, nutritious, and unsatisfying.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but not a very big one.

But one thing that Diann and I both like is popcorn. Now, you can go buy those bags of microwave popcorn, if you want, and I admit, they are quick and easy if you are desperate, but nothing beats the taste of real fresh popped corn.

We have a popcorn popper. It's a really nice one. It looks kind of like this:



It has a 12 oz kettle and is capable of popping about 250 oz. of corn an hour. For those of us who aren't math whizzes, I got out a pencil and paper and figured it out. That's about 15 lbs of unpopped corn. For reference, when you go to the movies and order a large popcorn, you are getting about 3 oz. so our popper can make somewhere around 80 large theatre sized popcorns an hour. (I bought this back in the mid 90's, and it was a thrifty deal when I got it, but that's a different story for a different day.)

So, we don't use it much at home. It's great for family reunions, neighborhood parties, or church and PTA carnivals, but for home we needed something a little smaller.

We have been looking, and to buy a new popcorn popper we couldn't find anything less than about $30, so we have been putting off buying one. We have been checking thrift stores, trying to find a used one, but all we could find were those air-pop poppers, and we weren't quite willing to sacrifice the flavor of "real" popcorn yet.

So Diann has been making popcorn the old fashioned way, in a 6 qt pot, on top of the stove. I've never made popcorn this way, and have no idea how to do it, so every time I wanted popcorn, I had to give Diann some subtle hints, like leaving the pot on the stove along with the canister of popcorn, a bottle of oil, and maybe a couple of empty bowls. (yeah I know, subtle isn't one of my strong points.)

The worst part of this deal is that since Diann made the popcorn, it was only logical that I should clean up. Burnt on oil is really hard to scrub out of the bottom of a stainless steel pot.

Well, the other night, at the thrift store, I found this treasure:



And what made it more of a treasure was the price. I paid $3.99.

Just for reference the same model popper, numbered 099 (mine is number 040) was listed on E-bay at the time I wrote this for $89.36.



It was made by the Robeson Cutlery Company at the Perry NY facility. There isn't a manufacture date on it, but it says "PAT PEND". Since some research on the company shows that they applied for the patent on this particular popper on January 17, 1966, and the patent was granted on October 12 1971, so I surmised that it was made between those dates.

A little bit of history on Robeson Cutlery:

Beginning:

Millard F. Robeson founded the company which bore his name in 1879 as a cutlery jobbing firm, operating from his home in Elmira, NY. Selling knives was, at first, a side-line but business grew. Robeson’s first storage area was his dresser drawers but, as additional space was needed, it overflowed into the closet and underneath the bed. Upon returning from a business trip and finding his cutlery inventory moved to the porch, he agreed with Mrs. Robeson that larger facilities were needed. They first came in the form of a new room added to the house, next a new building adjacent to the home, and finally a move to the New York town of Camillus.Read more.

And ending:

...in the 1960’s Robeson soon found itself and its products out of place in a world of big companies, foreign competition, and demand for more basic, non-premium cutlery... ...In 1971, Ontario Knife Co., Franklinville, NY, bought what was left of Robeson cutlery business. The Perry cutlery facilities closed in 1972 with the Robeson line being discontinued in 1977. Read more.

We tried it out tonight.





Now all we need are a couple of good movies to watch.

I will be linking this post to a couple of different blog parties:

Vintage Thingie Thursday at The Coloradolady

And

Thrifty Thursday at Tales From Bloggaritaville

Find of the Week

This is just a short post, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

I was driving down the road the other night and I noticed a thin white line right down the middle of the lane. I drove a ways, and realized it was a rope, laying in the road.

Not wanting someone to get it tangled around an axle or a drive shaft, I pulled over and waited for traffic to clear, then started picking up the rope.

I have big arms, and I wound the rope around my arm until it was full and wouldn't hold any more, then I put that in the back of my truck and kept winding. it took three times, filling my arm to get all the rope picked up.

I estimated somewhere around 200 yards (600 feet) of rope.

I left it in my truck until I could figure out what to keep it on. I was trying to figure out how to build some kind of spool or spindle.

Two days later, in the daylight, I was driving along and I saw a spool like the kind they keep rope on. I thought, "Hey, I should stop and get that, it would work for that rope I have."

Then, I looked at where I was and realized that I was about 50 yards from where I found the rope. What a coincidence, this was the spool from the rope I found.

So, I wound it all onto the spool.

I now have a spool full of white nylon rope, probably more rope than I will ever have any need for, for the rest of my life.

And, as a plus, the road is safer, the side of the road is cleaner, and I got a really good workout winding rope on a spool!