1.) Bring a friend along: Having someone that you can chat and cut a rug with while thrifting is so much fun and you can actually make light of all the chaos that may be going on around you. Even though your purchases are ultimately up to you, it’s kind of nice to have that second opinion by someone you trust. So grab a partner and get to thrifting.

2.) Don’t assume: Trust me, when you walk into some thrift shops or Goodwill stores you may be completely turned off. I’ve been in a Goodwill where clearly numerous people didn’t even bother to take a bath that morning.  Some thrift shops don’t even believe in dusting. I’ve even been to garage sales and estate sales where you know the owners were chain smokers. But don’t fret. Please don’t let that steer you out the door thinking that there couldn’t possibly be anything worth salvaging. That couldn’t be further from the truth. There are gems to be found.

3.) Be patient: I know there are tons of things in these stores and it seems like finding something would be like looking for a needle in haystack. That could very well be true but you just have to stay focused, take your time, and you’ll find your treasures. Don’t leave after 5 minutes because your already tired of looking. You’ll never find anything that way. Patience my dawlings. Patience is key!!

4.) Be critical: You have to definitely inspect all items before you purchase. I don’t know how many times I’ve bought something and once I got it home it had a hole that I didn’t see or a stain that won’t come out. Go over your items several times so that you don’t miss a thing. If you feel that you can fix those small things, then sure, bring it home. But if you know that you will let that item sit in your pile of  “projects” , it’s probably best to just leave it. Unless you like having a  pile of  “projects” sitting around for months on end.  LOL!

5.) Get creative: You may find a top that is too big for you but you just love the pattern. Use it to make scarf or a nice tote.  All items that are thrifted don’t have to be used in it’s intended way. Think outside the box and surprise yourself.

6.) Donate Donate Donate: You don’t want to become a hoarder do you. Well make sure periodically you go through your home and find things that you are not using anymore and give back to Goodwill or other thrift shops in your area. You can even donate to local churches. It’s always appreciated and it clears your space for more thrifting….he he he : )

I hope you found these tips helpful! They’ve been great to me along the way. Are there any veteran thrifters out there? Please share your tips and tricks to thrifting!!

xoxoxo,

Tashelle Monae

]]> http://recovergirl.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/4th-annual-womens-clothing-swap-2/ Mon, 20 May 2013 12:46:36 +0000 recovergirl http://recovergirl.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/4th-annual-womens-clothing-swap-2/

The 4th Annual Women’s Clothing swap was amazing.  I’m still exhausted.

Driven by the need to find the 19-year-old son an inexpensive piece of furniture for the living room in his first-ever apartment, we hit the thrift stores in Rochester Saturday afternoon, move-in day.

On the final stop, Caleb found a leather sofa tucked under a merchandise display shelf at the Goodwill store, 239 28th Street Southeast.

Total purchase price for these three items was just over $30, including tax. Additionally, I bought the coasters (about 10 of them) on the table for 25 cents at a garage sale.

His dad and I discouraged shelling out $110 for a sofa he needs for only the three-month duration of his summer internship at IBM. So I suggested he approach a floor clerk and barter. Better a poor college student seek a discount than parents. We temporarily disappeared so he could negotiate.

He and the clerk talked for awhile and then she cut the price to $75. I don’t know what transpired, but in between the time Caleb grabbed the tag and walked up front to pay, she slashed the price even more—to $25.

Hallelujah. A comfortable couch to fit a college student’s budget.

Goodwill had originally priced the sofa at $150.

Scrubbed later with a leather cleaning product, purchased for under $4 on our way back to the apartment, the sofa really shines. Plans to return the couch to Goodwill in August have been scrapped; the son wants to keep this piece of furniture now that it looks so good. That will be open to negotiation.

Prior to the Rochester move, we also secured several other apartment items at thrift stores, including a free end table from All Seasons Thrift Store, 310 Central Avenue, Faribault. The freebie was a $10 reward for spending $50 in the store. I’ll reveal those $50 purchases in a future post.

All Seasons proceeds benefit food shelves in the nearby Kenyon and Wanamingo areas.

Finally, the $3 lamp which now rests on the freebie end table next to the $25 leather couch comes from a New Ulm thrift store, The Treasure Haus, 1209 South Broadway.  As a bonus, the lamp included a three-way light bulb. Sales from the Treasure shop go toward Christian schools, programs and missions.

There you go, readers. It is possible to partially furnish a living room for around $30.

Now, let’s hear about your thrift store bargains.

© Copyright 2013 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

• 2 Pokemon Soul Silver Nintendo DS Games – Paid $24 each – Asking $56 Each
  (1 sold)
• Reusch Goaliator Pro-Tec Goalkeeper Gloves – Paid $24 – Auction starting $99.99

So overall I spent the most I have spent all summer, a total of around $75 bucks or so, but I stand to make $200+. I think it was a good day today. It is always fun to go to a place like that and find some brand new things instead of constantly listing used goods from thrift shops.

Thanks for reading and keep picking. I can’t  stress enough that there is money out there to be made, you just have to find it.

Brian

This Macintosh SE still works, outside of the fact that I’ve never seen the hard disk activity light blink.  It runs System 7.0 and seems to have been upgraded from the stock 1MB RAM to 4MB.  At the moment this is my oldest working Macintosh.

In my post about the original Macintosh I said that machine held a lot of promise but was incomplete.  The Macintosh Plus vastly improved the situation in 1986 by adding 1MB of RAM standard and a SCSI port for adding a hard drive.  But considering how many pictures you see of Mac Pluses sitting atop an external hard drive you can’t really call that machine totally complete either.

The Macintosh concept really lent itself to having an internal hard drive.

It wasn’t until 1987 when the Macintosh SE was released with an option for a built-in hard drive and the Apple Desktop Bus for peripheral accessories that you could really say for the first time the original vision of the compact Macintosh was complete.  In addition there was an expansion slot crammed in the back of the machine (behind Torx screws), which is where Apple got the “System Expansion” moniker from.  The SE was based on the same Motorola MC68000 CPU running at 7.83Mhz as all previous compact Macintosh models but added a fan that probably led to increased reliability due to better cooling.

It’s notable then that at the same time the Macintosh SE was released in March 1987 the Macintosh II was also released, which totally changed the conception of what the Macintosh was.

Some time in 1989 my mother visited a computer store in west Akron and picked up some Apple brochures that sat preserved in a drawer for years until I found them.  From one of those brochures, here is the state of the Macintosh lineup in early 1989.

The Macintosh II was basically the Macintosh re-imagined as an open, expandable desktop personal computer in the vein of the IBM PC AT and was based on the more powerful Motorola MC68020 CPU.

The Macintosh II implicitly admitted the Mac platform was too expensive to be the “computer for everyone” and finally dispensed with the appliance pretenses of the compact Macs.  Instead, Apple positioned the Macintosh II as a business workstation priced at a cool $5500 (before you bought a video card and monitor…Ouch).  People were doing desktop publishing and graphics design on Macintoshes before the Macintosh II but I suspect that once you used a 13in 640×480 screen and enjoyed the benefits of what was then a fantastical amount of RAM and the 68020 CPU you were loathed to go back to a 68000-based compact Macintosh like my SE.

So there’s a certain disappointment to the historical fact that by the time Apple built a compact Macintosh that really paid off the original concept the future was pointing to expandable Macintoshes that resembled desktop PCs.

With that said, if you had purchased this machine at the time, I suspect that you were very happy with it.

When you sit down with one of these machines at a desk you quickly understand how the subtle angle of the front of the machine puts the screen right in line with where you eyes want to look.  The lovely glow the 9″ black and white CRT focuses your attention despite it’s small size.  I think this would have been an enjoyable machine to own in 1987-1989, even considering that the price tag at the time for the model that included this 20MB hard drive would have been somewhere substantially north of $3000.  Plus, you could play Shufflepuck.

The Macintosh SE is also the best example I own of Apple’s Snow White design language, which saw it’s heyday in the Macintosh line from 1987 to 1990.  Previously I’ve talked about how I love the angular, metallic look of many pieces of 80s electronics.  Snow White goes in the opposite direction by emphasizing ornamentation and subtle curves in injection molded off-white plastic.  The overall effect is stunning.  It’s somehow very 1980s but at the same time stands out among other designs.

You can learn more about the different components of Snow White from Ed Tracy’s excellent 1998 graduate school project about Apple’s industrial design.  You may have also seen these wild prototypes that came out of the studies that designer Hartmut Esslinger from Frog Design created for Apple while developing the Snow White look.  One of the first Snow White products was the memorable Apple IIc, which may be my favorite looking computer, period.

The idea behind Snow White was to take full advantage of the fact that Apple used injection-molded plastic cases rather than the sheet metal other computers used.  If computers need air vents for cooling anyways, why not adorn plastic computer cases with horizontal and vertical lines that look like vents so they distract your attention from where the real vents are?

On the front of the Macintosh SE this results in a “grill” that contains the floppy drive, the hard drive indicator light and an air vent.

Adding the grill drastically changes the appearance of the front of the machine as compared to the original Macintosh case, even though both machines have basically the same dimensions.  The front of the original Macintosh is dominated by the large bevels that surround the floppy disk drive where on the SE the floppy disk is de-emphasized as a thin line that matches the rest of the grill.

My favorite Snow White design element is the pedestal of vertical lines along the base of the Macintosh SE and the Macintosh II series cases.

The lines on the pedestal help to conceal the air vents on the side of the machine that had been much more apparent on the previous compact Macintosh cases.

Sadly, the pedestal feature is often hidden behind the keyboard sitting in front of the computer.

Apple also produced monitors, CD drives, external hard drives, printers, scanners, and other accessories with Snow White designs from about 1986-1990.  A fellow could fall down a deep rabbit hole collecting all of them.

I’m somewhat enamored with the various Snow White computers and accessories.  In my opinion the Snow White designs have so much more personality than practically every other personal computer ever made, including Apple’s current product line.  Plastic might be out of vogue today, but Snow White showed us that plastic can be just as profound as brushed metal.

Before I really dug into learning about the Snow White look, I thought the Macintosh SE looked a bit funky.  The loss of the beveled edges the original Macintosh introduced gives the Macintosh SE a fat “chin” below the floppy drive.  If you sit a big keyboard in front of it so that the main Snow White feature you’re looking at is the grill below the screen, the machine loses at lot of it’s appeal.  However, as I have read more about Snow White I have come to appreciate the appearance of the Macintosh SE.

Yesterday, after the rain moved out, I ran (okay mostly walked) about 6 miles.  I was able to maintain a pace of a little less than 13’30” which is really good since the marathon minimum is 16’00” – I do have to admit though that six miles is a long way!  I was good up until about Mile 4; then I started thinking it was a really good thing that I was two miles from home or I would have quit!  Today is just a short 30-minute maintenance run; I’m saving the big runs for Saturdays from here on out. 

Yesterday afternoon, I headed off to Goodwill and Target to buy a few things to decorate the house.  No furniture was moved and no walls were painted this week, but it wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t do something to change it up a little before everyone gets home. 

Of course, last night I stayed up way too late again and then a storm rolled in sometime in the early morning which had me up and not sleeping.  When I finally fell asleep soundly, I missed my alarm clock this morning and as a result missed church and Kindergarten Sunday school!  Have I mentioned that I’m glad my family will be back to help me get into a real routine?  It’s a really good thing that I don’t live alone – balance is NOT one of my strong points.  Okay, I don’t think it’s really “balance” – I think it’s just the bedtime thing.  I don’t know why a woman in her 40’s has a hard time turning off the lights and going to bed at a decent time.  It’s not just that the house is so big; I struggle with the same thing when I stay in hotel rooms!  Go figure… 

So, I took advantage of the last of my alone time today to get organized for this week – Doodle has a couple of final papers due for school that I need to make time to review; LooHoo is off to Arizona to visit family; and K-Cat needs to work twice as hard on school to finish on time with her sisters.  Should be a fun week…

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• 

NEW YORK—Falun Dafa practitioner Yi Fan did not want to move to America when she left China two-and-a-half years ago because she wished to let more Chinese people know that Falun Dafa is good. Falun Dafa is a self-cultivation practice involving gentle exercise, meditation, and a teaching of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.

Fan was living under constant threat of arbitrary arrest and torture. She was imprisoned for many years and tortured for telling the truth about Falun Gong, but she said she would have never renounced her belief in the practice or disavowed its principles.

“A lot of people in China are fooled by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], by their lies,” she said through a translator. Fan, nearly 60 years old, finally surrendered to her daughter’s pleas to leave the mainland and move to the United States, and she immediately discovered the joy of freely practicing Falun Dafa again.

On Saturday, May 18, Fan was part of an annual Falun Dafa parade, surrounded by hundreds of brightly colored banners, and standing in line with nearly 8,000 other practitioners from all over the world.

After seeing the parade Ms. Zeng, a spectator, said the Chinese government cannot suppress Falun Gong. More and more people are participating and Falun Gong is well respected, she said.

Read Full Article Here

Related articles

• NYC Grand Parade Reveals History of Falun Dafa (behindlies09.wordpress.com)
• Falun Dafa Exercise Practice in Manhattan’s Roosevelt Park (theepochtimes.com)
• World Falun Dafa Day in New York (theepochtimes.com)
• Rescued by Falun Dafa (behindlies09.wordpress.com)
• Meditators Radiate Peacefulness from New York City (zen-haven.com)
• Singapore Falun Gong: Commemorating the Peaceful April 25 Appeal 新加坡法轮功学员纪念”四二五”和平上访十四周年 (kunalshawn.wordpress.com)
• Epoch Times: An Excuse for Genocide (kunalshawn.wordpress.com)

It’s a bit worn and too big for me, but that hasn’t stopped me from wearing it.

I’m really going to miss this show, but I think NBC will miss it more.

]]> http://owfotografik.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/sun-flower-rising/ Sun, 19 May 2013 17:38:12 +0000 owfotografik http://owfotografik.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/sun-flower-rising/ It is either the rising sun or the flower raising it’s petals to the sun.
I started with a photograph of a sunflower and modified it a bit. I painted and reflected the original image into a whole new image. I am retaining as much of the original textures as possible.

Volunteers collected enough household items to fill two Goodwill trucks. This is the fourth year  Wash U and Goodwill have teamed up for the collection drive.

Volunteers collected enough household items to fill two Goodwill trucks. This is the fourth year  Wash U and Goodwill have teamed up for the collection drive.

ugg saddle bag

jingly tags

this ugg purse is one of my favorite scores from my spot, goodwill. i got it the same time i got my famed stolen calvin klein purse. sometimes, when it rains, it pours at that location, like my recent trip. i got this for $10, half off of $20. this is some of the softest leather that isn’t pebbled or italian. i didn’t have anything like this, so it was a very welcome addition to the family.

several of my friends have begged me to let them have this purse (you know who you are). the answer is no. when will i ever be able to afford a purse like this unless i get it at a resale store? the 12th of never, that’s when.

confession: this was hard to write today, because a friend of mine said on facebook that i should auction all of these purses off on the last day to “cleanse my soul”. this has really bothered me. the whole reason i took this on was to do something for myself, learn something about myself, and perhaps about my love of bags. i don’t think my soul needs cleansing. at least, not the way he suggested. i immediately got defensive and started to type a response, then i’d erase it. i started again, and again – but every response felt defensive. i don’t have a need or desire to defend my purse collection. if anyone thinks that my large collection makes me selfish, a hoarder, vacuous, materialistic, or whatever, that’s fine. i know myself and the good and bad i do in the world. after a day of struggling with that comment, i’m at peace. so is my soul. for now. i do have a kid about to graduate, remember? the peace doesn’t always last for long, but i certainly know how to seek it and find it. and on that note, i’m headed to church for Pentecost. peace.

Housing is pretty affordable here, compared to Maryland.  After calling close to a dozen potential matches, I settled on a nice 2br 2ba apartment near my new job.  Of course I don’t need that much room just for myself, but I’m looking ahead here.  For now I can make the 2nd bedroom my office.  Plus, my relationship with Leah is getting stronger every day.  God-willing, I’ll need the extra bedroom for her little boy after I pop that question.  :-)

Speaking of Leah, her and I talked briefly last night about church.  Both of us grew up going there on most Sundays and both of us would like her son to have the same experience.  I’m so thankful that she wants that for him because I believe the absence of it is a big problem in our society.  Church people aren’t perfect, but most of them are trying to do right.  I can think of a lot of other places (bars and dance clubs in particular) where people aren’t trying to do right.  The world wants us to believe that church is bad, but which group of people do you believe are trying to do something good for someone else?  Maybe you don’t agree, but it’s worth considering anyway.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that the sheer number of churches in Alabama is one of my favorite things about living here.  Whichever denomination suits you best, there’s likely one close by.  After I move into that apartment next month, I’ll begin branching out into the area to see if I can find one that suits me.  Are your activities lifting someone else up in a positive way, or are they destructive to you or someone else?  God loves you.  He also needs you to share His love with the world.  Seek Him and you will find the peace that’s missing from your life.  God Bless you.

-E

Pick #1 – Goodwill

On pick number one, I was actually in Goodwill looking for a copy of The Great Gatsby to read it before I see the movie. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look around to see if I could make some extra money. I found a Super Nintendo (SNES) box, and picked it up instantly without looking inside. I paid $7. Here is what I actually found inside and what I listed it for on eBay.

• Original Nintendo Entertainment System and 3 controllers – $55 (sold)
• Contra Game for NES – $25 (sold)
• ActRaiser Instruction Manual – $3.50 (sold)
• Super Mario World Instruction Manual – $3.50
• Toe Jam and Earl Sega Genesis Poster – $7
• Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Sega Genesis Poster – $7
• Super Nintendo Box and Instruction Manual – $20 (auction style up to $21 now)

Overall paid a little bit over $7 dollars and before eBay and paypal fees, I’ll have made $121 and counting.

Pick #2 – Goodwill

On pick number two, I decided to focus a little bit on clothes. At the Goodwill, all the shirts are usually $4.50 each. I also picked up a camera for $2. Here’s what I picked up and what I listed it for on eBay.

• Brooks Brothers long sleeve T-Shirt – $20
• Brooks Brothers Striped Button Down – $25 (sold)
• Iron Man 3 Premiere 3D glasses – $7
• Sony Handycam Camcorder – $52 (sold)

I paid $0.27 for the 3D glasses, so they were worth the risk. Overall I spent $11.27 before tax, and will make $104 before eBay and paypal fees.

Pick #3 – Salvation Army and City Thrift

I decided to switch it up and go to a couple different thrift stores, and picked up a couple decent things. I bought a Jeff Gordon shirt for $4 and a Fraternity stein for $2. The Jeff Gordon Shirt has sold on eBay before for $30. Here are the items and what I listed them for.

• Jeff Gordon Vintage Dupont Shirt – $30
• Delta Tau Delta Fraternity Stein – $20

So overall I spent $6 before tax, and will make $50 before eBay and paypal fees.

I’ll continue to post my picking finds for all of you. Thanks for reading, and ask any questions you might have!! Keep picking everyone!

Brian

To provide a little bit of background, I have been around eBay since 2002 when my parents first started their account. They began selling shoes and random things, and eventually it became somewhat of a part time job for them. My mom runs the account now, and she is a power seller with over 3200 positive feedback, and countless more sales.

I just started my own eBay account less than a year ago, and as a college kid, it is a great way to earn a little bit of extra money. I don’t really have anything all that great of my own to sell on eBay, but I love to go to different thrift stores to find hidden gems to sell. I currently have 27 feedback and have sold over 50 items on eBay under my own account.

This blog will be dedicated to telling you all about the things that I find, and how I listed them and what I made.

Brian