{Thrift Shop Temptations} The Old Oaken Bucket That Hung in the Well...

Teenage Daughter went into town with the boys and I to run some errands before she started her new job this week. Where does my girl head when she's looking for some new office attire? The bins of course!

I wasn't looking for anything myself so I wandered over to the furniture section to see if there was anything interesting enough to take pictures of. Old radios always catch my attention. I've got one of my own and can't possibly justify a second, so they're safe to drool over.

When I saw it out of the corner of my eye, I thought this might be a sewing machine.

But nope. It's another pretty radio to drool over.

The dial is labeled with "California" and "Pacific Northwest."  That's one of those things, like the postcards I wrote about last week, that makes me wish I had a better understanding of how things used to work.

Once I ran out of furniture, I poked around in the bins a bit. There were some scattered bits of a felt set, obviously from Sunday school since they included Jesus, a hospital, a primitive hut...and body parts. I'm thinking that's part of the respiratory system and the big red thing might be a liver.

After I'd taken the picture and moved on to another bin, I found the main portion of the body. If it'd had the skeletal system I might have been tempted, but I don't need a felt torso and some random organs.

Is anyone even a little bit surprised that a few minutes later my youngest sons found the lungs and heart and announced they needed it to hang on their bedroom wall with the life size plush trophy of the purple cow? It came home with us, along with the green quilt underneath, which is destined for Teenage Daughter's bedroom.

Back before Christmas, I was looking high and low for 78 rpm records for my dad's Christmas present. He has a wind up phonograph and not nearly enough stuff to play on it. When I saw 78s, I was excited. Then I saw that the one on top was Bing Crosby singing The Old Oaken Bucket.

I've got a vivid childhood memory of my dad singing that song. Badly. When I saw that the record itself was missing a chunk, I was a little bit crushed. But the rest of the records in the set were all Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. If I'd found them before Christmas, it would've been a perfect gift. But they worked fine as a "just because" surprise.