B is for bust (sort of)

Last year I wrote about the annual book sale that is held about five minutes down the road from me in the little retirement community of Pleasant Hill, TN. Well, this year's sale was held a couple of weeks ago, so after a nice response to last year's post, I thought I would cover it again.

This has already become one of the biggest highlights of my year, so I have been looking forward to it since pretty much right after last year's sale ended, although, this year's total drive time was now going to be an hour and a half, being that were still in the rental while the house is being remodeled.

For this year's recap post I had planned on taking pictures of the actual town (if you can even call it that) to add a little bit more character to the piece, unfortunately for me (and you), mother nature had other plans. It was raining when I got up that Saturday morning, enough so that I was contemplating staying home, but I couldn't shake the thought of what I might be missing, especially since the two previous years had yielded some pretty neat stuff.

Anyway, I ended up going, and it rained the whole way there and back. When I got there, the parking lot was full, so I had to park down the road and across the street, probably the equivalent of three city blocks away. Being the smart person that I am, I was dressed in my normal summer attire of t-shirt with an open button-up short sleeve shirt over it, cargo shorts, and sandals -- which as you might be able to figure out, doesn't double as rain gear. And some of you might be wondering "what about an umbrella?", to which I would reply "ha!". Needless to say, just going from the car to the building that the sale was in, I ended up being thoroughly soaked. It was at this point, that I basically forgot about wanting to take pictures all together. All I wanted to do, was get in, get out, and go home.

To make things worse, I could tell the second that I walked in, that this year's pickin's were going to be slim. There was only about half the amount of stuff that had been there in the previous two sales. But me, my nearly dripping clothes, and my now squishy sandals were still determined to try and make the best of it.

I ended up spending about twenty minutes there, and managed to find a whopping two items:

To the left of the entrance there were two plastic crates of records, something that they haven't had in year's past. Almost everything in those two crates ended up being pretty uninteresting, but I did manage to find this Star Wars soundtrack for a mere .25 cents. At this point, primarily thanks to The Phantom Menace, my Star Wars fandom is pretty minimal, but I still wasn't going to pass this up for a quarter. Also, I had never seen (or heard) this album before, so I was very curious to give it a spin. Which, since the turn table is currently packed up, will have to wait another two months or so.

Since I hadn't seen it before, I figured maybe somebody reading this hadn't either, so I have included a few more pictures:

Back cover.



Inside front cover.

 

Thankfully it still had the booklet as well.



A page from the booklet.

Apparently there is a limited edition picture disc version of this album as well, although not surprisingly, that version sells for considerably more.

The only other album that I was interested in was the soundtrack to My Fair Lady, but to my dismay, the record was all warped. Oh, and in case you're wondering, yes, I do like musicals... a lot. And since I believe that that's the first time I have ever mentioned that in any sort of public forum, I feel the need to reaffirm my manliness by saying that I also enjoy beer, guns, sports, and... lady parts :)

Now that that's covered, we can move on to the second item, which an actuality, was the first thing I picked up:

 Anytime I go anywhere that has videos, that will be the section I head to first. In fact, knowing that there was going to be videos at the sale, was my primary reason for going. The good news was the video prices were lowered to .25 cents each this year, that bad news though, there wasn't a whole to choose from.

I already have a DVD that has most of these bloopers on it, but since they were shown on a television special at some point in the past, all the expletives have been edited out and replaced by slide whistles, car horns, and other silly sounds. So I got kind of excited when I saw the bit on the back about parental advisory being necessary, as I thought this just might be the unedited version that I didn't even know existed, and you know what? It is, and it's awesome. Very funny stuff!

So after more finding nothing else of interest, I went to pay, playfully had the business given to me by the old guy manning the "cash register"(it's just a small metal box) for my contributing a whole .55 cents (tax included) to their cause, and got ready to head home.

Upon leaving, the rain decided to give me a break and slow to a light sprinkle long enough for me to get to the car, before picking up again. After I got a couple of miles down the road, a big coyote crossed the road about 50 feet in front of me, so that was kind of neat. And about half way home, the rain really kicked it up a notch, causing whiteout conditions for the rest of the way. Thankfully, being from the Pacific Northwest, I practically learned to drive in such weather, so it doesn't bother/slow me down one bit -- the people here however, are a completely different story. But if I start talking about Tennessee's terrible driver's, I'll never stop. So I will just say, their driving skills suck even under the best of conditions, so you can imagine how bad they are when trying to navigate in this kind of rain. But after traveling on some roads that were starting to flood out in the low spots, and hydroplaning a couple of times, I ended up making it home safe (and wet).

All in all, the sale (and the weather) was pretty disappointing, but if I had it to all over again... I still would have went, and to be honest, I'm already looking forward to next year's sale as well.



Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.