Bankrupt On Selling

The other days I shot some pictures of a storage unit auction. That’s where the renters of the unit can’t pay the money they owe for rent, usually for several months, so their stuff is auctioned off. The rules of the auction are simple: the buyers aren’t allowed to enter the unit or touch anything inside. They can only look in from the threshold to try and judge what’s inside. Even a knock on the side of a piece of furniture could determine whether it’s fake. People buy units hoping to find buried treasure. Antiques, collectibles, art, tools, whatever they can turn around and sell to make a profit.

These two guys make a living going to various auctions, buying things, then re-selling them on Craigslist or eBay, or at flea markets. They say that 90 percent of the time all they come away with is crap. Baby pictures, old clothes, furniture, nothing that people will really buy if they try to re-sell it. The men will take pots and pans to the scrap yard instead of trying to sell them because they make more money that way.

But even when they think they’ve got a great find, it might be a false hope. Gary Holmes said he was once up $1,500 on a unit because he saw two steel-guitar cases in the back. He backed out of the auction, though because he was afraid they would be empty, and they were.

That’s another problem the buyers have to deal with. The men told me sometimes the owners of the storage lots will enter the units before the auction and go through boxes and take things of value. L.V. McNall said one unit he bought had a couple gun cases in it. When he opened them up the guns were gone but the foam still had impressions in it.

By All Accounts (Today Was A Disaster)

Originally written on 6/23/2008

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I’m an intern. If my boss tells me to stand in a parking lot for an hour in 95 degree heat, I’ll do it with a skip in my step because I know that I’m the bottom of the food chain and that’s what I’m there to do. My job is to take the menial tasks from the staffers so they can a) have a break and b) focus on the more important assignments.

But sometimes doing what my boss assigns me is hard to do with so much as a smile.

I don’t think disappointment aptly describes what I felt on Friday. Here’s why:

Laws Against Sleep

This lady was riding her bike when it started to rain. She stopped under the awning of this abandoned building to rest while the rain passed.

I’ve been periodically working on a story about a girl going through ACL surgery (I wrote a post about it a while ago but never published it. Maybe I’ll do that.) This is her dad watching her go through her first rehab after the surgery

Guess who. Also, there’s a full moon tonight if anyone’s interested.

So Long, So Wrong

It’s been a while. The well has run dry, so I’ve been doing a lot of hunting, including two rain features in the past two days. Water is wet, especially when it falls out of the sky.

Here’s some stuff from the past few weeks.

The sun rises at 6:00, but doesn’t hit the beach until, like, 7. That would have been good to know.

This guy was hunting for shells with his wife. They are from Sweden (the man and his wife, not the shells).

I think I like this one better.

Sailing camp on a lake.

BMX camp.

A car wreck I found while looking for a rain feature.

A rain feature I found while looking for a construction feature.

Look who came to visit.

Blue Burns Orange

Traffic barrel lights are really cool when they’re piled together.