summer sales

It's the season for yard sales or garage sales. (My dad can be heard saying, "Look, they're selling their yard/garage!")

I'm not a yard/garage saler. I feel like those who are have a "sense" about where to find them. There can be little to no signage and if you set it out, they will come. It amazes me. It's as though they can smell it.

I'm not making fun, I'm actually getting to the point that those who do hold yard/garage sales need to work on their signage. I'm not a graphic designer, but I did go to art school; please make better signs. No one can read your thin-lined sharpie attempt at "Yard Sale". You may as well be whispering it. Bold letters people. Go over those lines several times with the fattest marker you can find. Then, tape it on the the wall across the room and back up until you're twenty feet away.

Can you read it now?

Good, now run past it because cars are usually going five times faster than that and if your letters are bold enough, and large enough for you to read standing in your living room, the driver of the car may have a slight chance of realizing there's a yard/garage sale down your street and can safely turn without causing an accident because they had to come to a complete stop to read your thin-lined sign.

But it hardly matters because they can find the sale blindfolded due to that "sense". I'm the only one who doesn't appreciate the under-bolded (I just made that up) signage.

Wait, I have a better idea, hire me! I'll make your sign. Give me a sharpie and I'll make it stand out so it can be read from space. (Not really, but cars coming down the road won't miss regardless of their yard/garage sale sense.)

Monday, the last full day of vacation

On Monday, Bill, Heather, Judy and I went up to Mt. Charleston. Here are a few pictures.

 There was a fire right after we were there two years ago.

On our way up the mountain we saw the fire damage.

 The view from the scenic overlook.

 That's the tippy-top of Mt. Charleston. I don't know if you can get there via skis or rock climbing, but we didn't make it to the top.

 We made it to this point, the ski area. Which is closed for construction. 

And because there's not enough snow.

That night Bill, Heather, and I went to the Neon Museum. It's located on the far north end of downtown Las Vegas. They are restoring these signs, one at a time, and currently six of them are on the scenic by-way. Driving that route after 10pm is not recommended. We will have to try viewing those signs at another time, perhaps earlier in the evening. 

Here are my pictures from the Neon tour.

 The museum sign pays homage to notable Vegas signs. 

Trivia time: can you name the four signs that the four letters represent?

 The museum/gift shop is the lobby from the Hotel La Concha. The architect, Paul Williams, was the first prominent African American architect.

He also designed the cathedral in Las Vegas. We attended mass there a few years ago.

 It costs a lot of money to restore these signs. Any sign on the strip is grandfathered in (like there are any original ones left…) so they don't have to be updated to modern standards. If a sign is taken down, it must then be updated to modern electrical standards. Which means all the signs here have to be modernized (the wiring, not necessarily the lighted part) before they can be lit. 

There is also a lot of broken glass and signs that are heavily damaged. I just wanted to explain why many of the signs are being lit with uplighting instead of lighting up themselves (I'm sorry for that confusing sentence about lighting). 

 Did you know that all neon light is still hand-blown? I did not. Which means the yucca neon light in this picture was all hand-blown. I'm sorry I didn't get a close-up of all the curves. 

 Here's the bottom of the yucca neon sign.

 G.R. stands for Grand Rapids

 The lamp was part of Aladdin's and to the right is part of the Stardust sign. That sign was so huge, I could not get a good photo of the entire word, "Stardust". 

Here's the LaConcha sign which cost around $50,000 to restore. Hence the reason that not all the signs are restored. This also required a load of concrete underneath the sign to hold it up.

I'm thankful for historians for their dedication to saving things. These signs are amazing and I hope we can go back in the daytime to see the artwork. But the night tour was equally cool.

Answers to the trivia question about the museum sign: N = Golden Nugget, E = Caesars Palace, O = Binion's Horseshoe, and the E = Desert Inn.