I haven’t gone out as often the last couple of days because my bike needed some repairs. Of utmost importance was to change the rear tire which was getting pretty close to bursting, a dangerous situation for sure. I fixed that up at the bike co-op yesterday but unfortunately I didn’t have time to true the wheel. I feel a bump on every revolution of the wheel when I ride, which (I think, anyways) is a result of the wheel being out of tune. I don’t think it’s a particularly risky situation (assuming I don’t go too fast, that is) but it’s definitely annoying. It shouldn’t take too long to fix, I just need to get to the bike co-op while it’s open.
Tonight I went on my usual evening run of the Plateau.
I found this box full of plastic figurines and three ceramic sheep at the bottom of one of the bags. The plastic figurines look to be the various characters of ancient Egyptian mythology. They’re doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them, I guess someone just lost interest! There’s 32 in all (and one missing it’s stand) which include such names as Bes, Osiris, and Khepri, who is a sun deity with a scarab for a head.
Later on I came across some stuff on rue Chateaubriand. I feel like someone moved into a new place and decided they didn’t have room for some of their things. Exhibit A is the empty moving boxes sitting on top of the bags.
I decided to take home the stereo amplifier sitting in-between all the boxes. It seemed like a good quality machine in decent cosmetic condition, and I know some of those are worth money even if they don’t work.
My instincts were right! The model, a Marantz 2220b, sells for up to 300$ in perfect shape on Ebay. Even an obvious parts/repair model sold for 51$. Here’s a link of the other 2220b’s that sold. According to wikipedia Marantz is a pretty high-end brand.
I tested it a little bit. The lights are fairly bright but not perfect. I didn’t hook it up to speakers but it played well into my headphones. Assuming further testing doesn’t find anything wrong I should be able to sell this piece for 100$ at a minimum. Not too shabby!
I also saved some books, many of which are pretty popular titles. Books often worry me because of the possibility of them having bugs, but I trusted my instincts and brought them home. I also inspected them just to be sure. I should be able to sell these pretty easily at a yard sale.
A pretty good day overall. I hope to fix my bike wheel tomorrow so I can be ready to garbage pick to my full potential next week.
hey nice figurines! 😉
all looks interesting…
maybe you can google the figures/sheep/books by tittle/ individually to see if they are worth dollers…
look interesting enough to be in demand
I wish there’d been toys like that when I was growing up. Playing with gods would have been cool. Tis one’s selling for $14.49 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Thot-Egyptian-God-Figurines-Statue-/350551607825?pt=Toy_Soldiers&hash=item519e810a11
Nice ca.1975 receiver.
This is a nice day (on the weather front) for your yard sale, methinks.
Like the figurines and the sheep are really cute! Good luck!
Great figurine finds.Books rarely contain bugs.It is just an urban legend.Some people are trying to make everyone paranoid.
I cut and pasted this superb article from the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS about bedbug paranoia.Even if let’s say you have bugs,books do not have to be thrown out.Read and share this article.
Sleep tight, don’t let the hysteria bite: A story of bedbug paranoia
By Mary Adkins
Wednesday, June 1, 2011, 4:00 AM
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New Yorkers have a common enemy known to rear its head in the summer: the bedbug.With summer’s arrival, many New Yorkers are bracing for a bedbug plague. The pest removal company Terminix – not an impartial observer – just ranked the city first in the nation for infestations for the second straight year.
No doubt, the critters are a nightmare for some. Yet as someone who dropped $6,000 I didn’t have on an “infestation” that may not have existed, I offer another warning: Beware of paranoia.
Last June, having just graduated from law school, I spent my days as most law grads do: studying for the bar exam. While I was nurturing growing anxiety about the looming test, the city had erupted into a frenzy over the insect invaders.
I consumed every article on the subject with horror and delight. They were hiding in phones! Attacking infants! I scratched my skin at night and frantically turned on the light, hoping to catch the carnivorous buggers I was sure I had felt crawling on my skin.
The morning after the bar – the day before I was to move to a new apartment – I awoke with two bites on my back. I yanked back my sheet to catch my tormentor – a single dark, round, tiny bug, trotting merrily up the center of the mattress.
I plopped him on a piece of paper and slammed a teacup over him. The movers were coming in 24 hours. There was no way I was going to arrive in my new Gramercy apartment with any bloodsucking stowaways.
I called Arnie, the kind of landlord who gives landlords a good name.
“I have bedbugs,” I confided gravely. No one in the building had ever had them before, he said, then whispered, “I’m coming over.” When he arrived, it became clear Arnie was as clueless and distraught as I was. We agreed it was best to throw out everything I owned – though every article I had come across explicitly advised against this in favor of more reasoned measures.
“Make a coherent plan,” they urged. “Confirm your infestation.”
I didn’t have time for coherence. Over the next seven hours, Arnie and I discarded my bed, couch, TV, printer, bookshelves, desk chair, nightstand, the little armchair that been in my family for ages and a trunk from summer camp that I used as a coffee table.
Until 5 a.m., I hauled black garbage bags of clothes up and down three flights of stairs to the basement, where I thrust load after load into the dryer to expose them to high heat for 30 minutes – reported to kill the hardy demons. Recalling the story of a woman who froze her bras for a year, only to find them reinfested upon thawing, I would take no chances.
The next morning and two boxes of Hefty later, three movers arrived to load into a giant moving truck the few remaining items that could have comfortably filled a compact car.
I then purchased – on credit, having no cash or current job – all new belongings: tables, chairs, a bed, a bureau, a sofa, sheets, pillows, towels, kitchen supplies, two vacuum cleaners and every bedbug-killing product on the market. I even hired someone to steam my books, purses and shoes for $300.
I tried to bake my purses and shoes. Instead, I melted them.
For two months, I captured every organism in my studio with more than two legs, sealed them in plastic bags and submitted them to experts for inspection. They identified spider beetles, fungus beetles and book lice, but not one bedbug.
Nor did the exterminators who came to my old place, or the ones who came – with dogs – to my new one, find any traces at all.
It has been eight months. I just paid my off my debt from the episode last week. In the weeks ahead, I will no doubt be wary of putting my bag on the floor in dark movie theaters. But I’ll also be on guard against reckless decision-making.
It’s frustrating enough to drop lots of cash fighting creepy-crawlies we once naively believed were confined to nursery rhymes. It’s worse to do so when they may, in fact, be imaginary.
Adkins is a writer in New York.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sleep-tight-don-hysteria-bite-story-bedbug-paranoia-article-1.130411#ixzz2YHwB6wFk
Another article about bedbug paranoia I am cutting and pasting from TIME magazine.Puh-leez read it.
Joel Stein: What’s So Bad About Bedbugs?
By Joel Stein Sunday, Oct. 24, 2010
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My lovely wife Cassandra Made me strip naked as soon as I walked in the door upon returning from my last business trip, and it was not to have sex. It was to wash my clothes to rid them of any possible bedbugs. This, I thought, was proof that the bedbugs had won. And that I needed to start working out more.
We were once a nation deathly afraid of statistically improbable but powerful things: witches, communism, Mexicans taking our jobs. Now we are freaked out about bedbugs, 4-mm-long insects that previous generations made up cute rhymes about. In August, 20% of Americans said they changed their plans to go to a public place for fear of bedbug infestations, even though only 9% knew someone—themselves included—who had been infested. And though there are no statistics on this yet, from what I gather on the Internet, it sure seems more Americans are having hotel sex standing up.
(See “Bedbugs: The Beauty Shots.”)
Cassandra has no reason to think we are in danger of harboring bedbugs. But in addition to the forced showers after traveling, she once made us switch hotel rooms after finding a mosquito bite on her leg one morning. We have little plastic plates of talcum powder under the feet of our bed, and we put every vaguely bug-shaped piece of lint we find into a plastic container that we will show to the first unlucky person we meet at a party who makes the mistake of telling us he’s an entomologist. We’ve moved the bed away from the wall in a manner that makes reading significantly more dangerous than getting bitten by a bedbug. And Cassandra has been trying to find a way to trick my father and his wife—who are not only traveling from New York City, the international capital of bedbugs, but also staying at two hotels before visiting us—into being hosed down with boiling water before entering our home. When I got a disturbing rash recently, she said, “I hope to God you have shingles.”
(See how stinkbugs are closing in on bedbugs.)
The worst thing about bedbug hysteria is that it spreads as quickly as bedbugs themselves. The night after we switched hotel rooms, I barely slept, scratching phantom itches every few minutes. When Cassandra explained the seriousness of the bedbug problem to my mom, who does not worry about much—like whether there is a three-hour time difference before she calls me at 6 a.m. on the West Coast—the conversation ended with my mother saying, “What is the government doing about this?” This column is taking me two times longer to write than usual because I cannot stop scratching.
Bedbugs aren’t harmful. Unlike mosquitoes, rodents and, as we’ve learned, 1-year-olds, they don’t carry disease. When I mentioned this to Cassandra, she looked at me with what I imagine is the cold, hard stare of a bedbug about to reproduce through traumatic insemination. “They’re like pure evil,” she said. “They’re impossible to kill. I used to worry, living in Southern California, that there would be a tarantula or a rattlesnake in our house. Now I’m like, big deal—you catch it and you throw it outside.” I started to try to talk sense into her, but Cassandra said, “Speaking of bedbugs, maybe we should check the traps in the guest room.”
Bedbugs scare us so much because, unlike mosquitoes, chiggers, fleas, lice, ticks—I’ll stop now—they hide in your house. And we believe our homes are fortresses, even though anyone who has ever patched their floors with 2-by-4s knows that the difference between inside and outside is largely semantic. Despite all our technology, we are still at the whim of nature. We still get bedbugs, only now we can tweet about them.
(See “Bedbug Alert!” and 49 other essential travel tips.)
It’s a special weakness of our rich country to believe that we can barricade ourselves into safety—that if we just increase airport security, extremists can’t attack us; that gated communities keep predators away from our kids; that with constant vigilance, we can keep bedbugs out. When I was 9, I saw a segment of That’s Incredible! about how mites live in our eyebrows and how hot showers only cause them to reproduce more. And while I’ve spent 30 years thinking about eyebrow mites whenever I turn up the heat in the shower, what I should really be upset about is that my parents let me watch crap like That’s Incredible! But that episode did teach me that hypervigilance is weakness. That the greatest control comes from deciding not to control. And that even Fran Tarkenton had really lame career options after retiring from professional sports.
So we can live in fear of bedbugs and not travel, go to our friends’ parties or have visitors stay over. All the things that Cassandra hates to do anyway. I think I may have married a genius.
This article originally appeared in the October 18, 2010 issue of TIME.
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Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2024213,00.html#ixzz2YHxV98Hs
Love the books!
Z
http://beingzhenya.com