Cleaning Brass and Other Metals

In a household bursting at the seams with everything under the sun, I expected to find Brasso.  Seems like there's always a can of Brasso tucked away somewhere in every house, garage or workshop.  I was a bit bothered when I couldn't find any, so I pulled out every substitute I could find.  And I decided to try them all.  I had always thought that only Brasso could clean brass, and it seems like I'd tried other things in the past.  But today is a new day, so I started with the two products

Going to an Auction: What You'll Need

How do you get started?  We thought that was a no-brainer.  Go to a few auctions.  Don't plan to buy, but carry money.  Okay, we did that.  Tips for getting started begin with this piece of advice:  Avoid this activity in the dead of summer.  But if you're like us, and no longer in control of the way your universe is currently spinning, you may find that the hottest part of the day is a good time to research up-coming auctions. 

Our first trip out to bid on storage auctions we learned a few things.  Such as, if you insist on going out buying in the summer, then you'll want to take along an ice chest full of drinks.  Mostly water.  Lots of ice.  And remember basic things, like ice melts.  If you freeze a couple of those bottles of water the night before, you're far more likely to still have an ice-cold drink at the end of the day.  (That's something everyone who lives or plays on

Finding Local Auctions and Sales

Once we decided to start going to auctions, and realized that first we had to find out where and when, I settled into the business of putting together lists of sales.  I don't know how other people do it, maybe they start by tagging along with a friend, but what we got was a tip that U-haul runs all of theirs on the same day every month.  (It turned out to be the wrong day, but at least it gave me a place to start looking.)  So I immediately jumped on the Internet and started searching for random notices, and that's how I discovered that we had been told the wrong days. 

We keep a storage unit at Public Storage a block from our house, so next I started looking for facilities that I was already familiar with.  Don't ask me why.  But when that didn't pan out I started making phone calls.  The female voice on the phone at the first Public Storage I called told me that they advertise all their auctions in the Nevada Legal News.  So I make a regular practice of going to that site and paying my