Saturday morning, 8:30AM

You know, I'm almost starting to appreciate the nauseous, dizzying feeling of waking up waaaay too early and not really knowing where I am. Almost. It's still hard to wake up in a bed I only sleep in during breaks, and not my bed at Hiram. And I'm really not an early morning person. Like Dad and my sister Liz, if I wake up too early I feel simply ILL, and by ill I definitely mean nauseous--which would be worse if I was worried about morning sickness, because I'm paranoid like that and as a biologist I'm always monitoring myself for such things--silly ain't it? Yeah, so I had to get up at 8:30 on a Saturday, to go to an estate auction over on Wind Ridge. My first auction ever ever.

This was a trip planned by my Grandpa Garvin--hence the early wakeup time. Mom and Grandpa G love to get up at 5AM or so (it must be the old farming family heritage or something like that). We made the long, winding drive past Cameron, WV and into Pennsylvania. It takes about 30 minutes. We get there before the auction starts, so there's the opportunity to scope out the goods beforehand. I decided I definitely wanted to participate and buy something, and the natural choice was glassware. I'm a sucker for shiny things, and they had beautiful candy dishes made of carnival glass (carnival glass can be many different colors, but they all have an iridescent sheen like oil in a puddle). So I found a gold-color candy dish and settled on that as my target, as well as a tin jewelry box with some neat canadian coins inside.

As soon as the bidding began, so did the rain.

It was cooold and Don, Mom, Grandpa G, and myself were all pretty soaked, but for all of us but grandpa this was our first auction and the caller had us pretty awestruck. You see those television and movie auctions where they have a guy talking really fast, and you think--naaah, it can't be like that in real life!. But it is. It took us ten minutes at least to figure out the bidding process. The guy would start off high and bring the bid down until someone would flip up their yellow card and nod. Then, back up the price would go--it was so fast that it was hard to tell what the final price would be sometimes. But then my jewelry box came up for bid, in a big flat with an inflatable mattress, paint stripper, and some coke bottles. I bought the whole thing for 4 bucks, and was quite pleased with myself for being adventerous--at least more so that mom and Don. Then my candydish came up for sale, in a flat with two others. I was worried because there was one lady there who had been buying up all the glassware, and I had told Don to hold me to ten dollars. But of course the bid flew up to 10 easily, and it was back and fourth until I won the lot with 14 dollars. When I got the flat, it also had 3 old-fashioned pocketwarmers (which look like big, flat lighters the size of your palm) and 16 brass spoons with rosewood handles made in Thailand. I was pretty psyched.

Don bought a printer for 30 bucks, which also was exciting, except mom tried to take over my bidding at one point. Darn her. Oh well, we paid our money, hauled everything out, and went to lunch in Waynesburgh, PA at a little diner where the waitress had some of the worst english I've yet to hear. But she has a job and I don't.

Drove home, went to sleep till 8PM, watched a rerun of the Martha Stewart Movie, and played Zoo Tycoon. A saturday night and there's not much going on.