It’s about getting lost, and getting un-lost.

2. I don’t have a gym story this week, but I have a couple of snippets:

Dude on treadmill, breathing heavily, to his trainer: “Now, I expect my stomach to be gone when I get off this thing!”

Trainer: “Uh uh, I am not responsible for what you do when you’re outside this room.”

Dude: “Well, that ain’t gonna work!”

And there was a bald guy with an eyepatch on the next weight bench over. We were resting between sets, also breathing a bit heavily. He got his breath back: “It ain’t fair we have to work so hard!”

3. I will not explain why I know this, but hey, if you ever just happen to be obsessively cleaning out your house and take a whole lot of things to Goodwill, and then you realize, possibly after someone else in your house informs you of the fact, that one of the things you donated really, really should not have been given away, there is a thing you can do. If you still have your donation slip, and it has not been very long since you have made said donation, you can go to the Manager and fill out a form called “Donation In Error.” And then, if it hasn’t been too long, and nobody’s, you know, bought the thing, then you can have it back.

4. Oh, and in case you haven’t seen it already, Free Rice is, to me at least, way more addictive than Sudoku.

What do you think about thrift stores selling themselves as vintage boutiques?

National Secretaries Week.

Golden Anniversary.

Actual butterfly.

Plate from which the previous photo was a detail.

Flowers. Made from feathers.

TruType teeth.

I like that it’s going to give you both physiology AND technique.

This is what I came closest to buying, but the book had been pretty seriously gnawed.

Snag, inside the flat file that is perhaps our best estate sale acquisition ever. Sixteen drawers, big enough to store original comics pages. Snag is in the zines drawer.

Which, when it’s not at Goodwill, nicely broken-in with some schmutz on the bottom, possibly makeup, that proves to be mostly removable with the application of hot coffee (I just sort of thought, huh, the coffee’s the same color as the bag, so it won’t mess with the dye, and since it’s hot it’ll probably be good at getting off the stain) — is this.

I have asked this before but I am endlessly fascinated by it: what are your favorite thrift scores??

This person had apparently been a commercial photographer, mostly of weddings. There were a few heavy albums documenting the glossy, wholesome-looking nuptials of the well-heeled. At the bottom of a box mostly full of individual shots in a similar slick style, I found two black-and-white photos, one of a stark, rocky landscape and a sky full of ominous clouds, and the other of two cows very close to a barbed wire fence, looking at the photographer/viewer with an expression that it was not hard to anthropomorphize into a sad but resigned awareness of their confinement. It made me wonder if that was a different photographer’s work, or if it represented the style the person would’ve preferred to work in, if not for the need to pay the bills.

P.S. Many thanks to all for your insightful comments on the Kindergoth bag. Inevitably, in the interval between my post and my next trip to Ross, it was snapped up by someone else, and there was only one.