Who needs dental when you've got this?

(c) 2007 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com

Mr. Kluges works for a company with many branches and divisions, one of which does publishing. We recently found out about a very cool perk which we will thoroughly enjoy. You see, about 3 times a year, the company has a "damaged goods" sale here in the area we now live. Apparently, any damaged books, ends of runs, whatever get sold at two bucks a book to employees. Yup, $2 for everything from kids' books to cookbooks to gardening how-tos to coffee table beauties.

This morning was the first one we knew about (and of course Mr. Kluges attended). You have to have a ticket to get in, it's employees (or their spouses or both together) only, no kids allowed, and Mr. Kluges was advised to bring a wheely suitcase.

He said it was a big old dirty warehouse with 75-100 pallets of books. No obvious rhyme or reason, books stacked up to 3 feet high with no regard to topic, aisles packed full of people. He said you could walk past a pallet and come back 10 minutes later and see all new titles that had been unearthed from the stack.

He came home with 30 books.

Actually, not all books - they have some books on CD sets, of which he got Lord of the Rings. Yay! That'll make the long drive to MN go a little faster this Thanksgiving! Some other highlights include several Sandra Boynton books for Pumpkin, the Charles McRaven books we didn't already have, How To Build Bat Houses, lots of garden books including one about restoring American gardens with heirloom ornamental plants from 1640-1940, a couple of cookbooks... it was like Christmas come early!

So yeah, they're upping how much employees have to pay for medical and dental and all next year, but hey, we got BOOKS!

(And I get to be the one to go to the next book sale! Wheeee!!!)