Flea Market Finds

I went to the Hollis Flea Market on Sunday.  I was mostly there to see friends and actually hoping not to spend any money.  Well, fiat.  You know...

So there I was digging through a pile of TSA confiscations and having a grand conversation with a new friend.  The way we were chatting the folks running the table thought we'd known each other for years!

Among the government stolen pocket knives I picked out four little Victorinox classic size folders that came home with me.  I've always had a soft spot for a good quality pocket knife.  More than a year ago I got my Victorinox Mini-Champ from a bucket of knives much like this one at an antique shop on some property in Hillsborough I was interested in buying actually during the showing!  It now goes with me everywhere I go riding in its custom fitted 'magazine pouch' in my pancake cellphone holster.  I didn't find another in this pile unfortunately.  The closest was a new-to-me Rambler.  The others are an Escort in purple advertising Nexium (whatever that is...), a vintage Classic in blue with the old big P Piper Aircraft logo and no key ring/lanyard loop, and a standard red scaled Rally with a straight screwdriver instead of the current Phillips and a nail file without the screwdriver tip. 

At Mum's friend 'the movie man's' table I bought a book on antique kitchen stuff.  That will come in handy as we restore the B&B's kitchen to reflect the period when the house was built.  That may be a bit of a challenge since the entire kitchen was gutted and replaced with modern cabinets and appliances.  Well, many of the appliances have gone AWOL, but fortunately the original wood kitchen stove is still there waiting to be restored.

Back to the flea...

The only other thing I picked up was a pair of cufflinks.  They're marked 14K.  The guy who sold them to me pointed that out and said that he didn't think they really were.  I bought them anyway. because they are both little working abacuses.  I used to actually use an abacus every day at work.  Back when I was drafting 'on the board' I would frequently need to add up a series of dimensions to work out the over-all length of a part.  As a check I would first do the math on my calculator.  Then I'd re-do it on my abacus.  If there was ever a discrepancy it always turned out that I'd fat-fingered something on the calculator.  I can't think of an instance when I'd screwed up on the abacus.  With that you can actually see the numbers as you are working the math.

So I looked around on-line and found several sellers who had the same set of ofcufflinks.  All were being sold as real 14k gold.  For grins and giggles I weighed them up and checked the price at Kitco for scrap 14k.  My $10 cufflinks, if real, would fetch over $200!  I have no intention of scrapping them.  What I need now is a shirt that I can wear them with.  :-)

So that was my weekend at the flea.