OK so what do I find when i go to yard sales? A little bit of everything. Today is the setup day for the Watertown, TN mile long yard sale. It actually is more like 10 miles long since it starts at the freeway which is 10 miles from the town. (BTW - unless you plan on dying there to not buy any property in Watertown. You will get an incredible price but you will never be able to sell it. There is no industry there so no home buyers). Since this was the setup day I figured that I could spend a little time at other sales first. There was a community yard sale going on in the area that started at 7AM so i figured if i got there at 6:30 that would be about right. It was and at the very first sale today I bought 80 pounds of salt for the water softener. Did I need salt? Not really but it will run out eventually and instead of paying $6 plus tax I paid $2 a bag. I had on my "I buy casino chips" shirt and a guy at that sale said he saw a bag of casino chips somewhere that morning. Sure enough a little while later I run into a small bag of the F B Social club chips at a sale and of course I buy them. Time to head over to the mile long sale. At the first place I stop at one guy sees my shirt and tells me that he has $500 in old Vegas chips at home and he will bring them tomorrow. Guess I gotta go back tomorrow even though it is 30 minutes from my house. What we won't do to get that elusive piece of clay! Once I start working my way towards town I realize that there is no one else looking for jewelry today! In the scan the first two rows are gold. Yes the pieces are mostly very small but who cares? I only paid $8.25 for all of the gold and at $30 a gram it does not have to be very heavy to be profitable. I bought most of it after noon. The rest of it is all marked .925 silver. I paid a total of $16.25 for the jewelry.

Other things I picked up today include a two handled Roseville vase for $65 (that was the asking price - he wouldn't come down a penny), the cards, dice and two ashtrays. I think the bracelet in the top row may be fake or possibley only the end clips are really gold. It is marked 14K but it seems really light. I may have to test it. Speaking of testing - I may have passed up on the biggest score of all today. In the town a lady had about 15 large necklaces all marked 14K. She wanted $30 each or 4 for $100. I asked her is she had them tested and of course she said no. I didn't have my test acid with me so I had no way to tell if it was real or not. Just one necklace was over 1/2 oz. so was probably worth $450 if real. They all had price tags on them with reduced prices marked. That one was something like $459. But again for their size they were pretty light in weight. She said she got them at a jewelry store that was closing. Here is the problem. Any jeweler would rather scrap them out for $450 at the local pawn shop instead of selling them for $30 so it sounded very suspicious. Of course they could have been stolen also. If they were all real I just missed out on a $6500 profit.

So it starts to drizzle and I walk back to the car and my cell phone rings. Cindy says she got a strange phone calls from a lady who wants to give our daughter a very small narrow piece of property adjoining her property. Since I am near the county seat I head to the courthouse to check it out. Well the courthouse is only a few blocks from the Habitat For Humanity where I used to donate a lot of the junk from my rehab houses. I wanted to stop in and say "HI" and I also needed a screen for the back door. As I am driving back I decide to stop at a local auction company since I have several boxes of Cindys quilts that she wants to sell. Well the auction is starting just as I walk in the door. I figure it couldn't hurt to look around. I head up to where the auctioneer is and thereare several glass cases. In one of the cases is...........a bag of casino chips. A quick check show that there is not much there EXCEPT the $1 Hilton in the HCE mold(H rated). There is also a bag of casino tokens with several that I may not have. I check out another bag of about 50 foreign coins and I see one big one that is marked as having .72 oz of silver in it. OK that one coin is worth $25 and there are several other coins that look like they may be silver also. I get a bidders paddle and wait. Prices seem pretty low - in fact the lady next to me is cleaning up on those ceramic villages used at Christmas. The boxes still have the $45-90 price tags on them and she is getting them for $6-8 each. She must have bought 30 of them. She told me she can resell them for $50 each. Fortunately the chips and coins come up within an hour. I am pretty sure that the auctioneer ran me up because what are the odds that there was another collector there other than me?? Anyway, I got the chips for low book value of the Hilton chip and get the other $30 in face value for free including that nice protech token. I then get the 5 casino tokens for $4 since I was the only bidder. I then get the foreign coins for $12.50 since he described them as tokens instead of coins. I am hoping that the coins will have enough silver in them to cover the cost of everything I bought there. Talk about a long day of yard saleing! I started at 6:30 AM and got home at 6:30 PM! Well that just sets the tone for next week where I am going to the Rollercoaster yard sale in KY (it is about 200 miles long). Then the next day there is another sale that starts in Louisville and heads along the western KY border. Needless to say I am forcing myself to stay at Horseshoe in Southern IN one night and will end up at Tunica for the weekend. It is a rough job but someone has to do it.