Little House and the Big Garage Sale

On Friday Elle and I are going to leave for a short road trip to Walnut Grove, Minnesota and DeSmet, South Dakota.  We'll be visiting some points of historical Laura Ingalls Wilder spots.  We recently (last night) finished reading the books and we're very excited to see some of the places the books talked about.  Well, I'm excited to see them.  Elle is excited because I told her we could pack a cooler of food and that I would make cheese sandwiches.  She has not stopped talking about those cheese sandwiches for days.

One thing we needed to do to get ready for the trip (other than the buying of the cheese, oh my god the cheese) was to have a garage sale.  We've been needing to have one for a long time and since we needed the extra cash for our road trip I decided to bite the bullet and just do it.

Maybe I should have bitten an actual, literal bullet because garage sales are the freaking worst.

It would be far easier to just walk into Walmart and announce over the loud speaker "Will all the weirdest, stinkiest people please come over to my house and root through my personal possessions?  And then can you turn your nose up at them or find insulting things to say about them?"  Then I could have saved myself the trouble of pricing, moving and organizing everything.

I hit upon what I thought was a pretty brilliant idea though.  I advertised the sale as "almost everything for a quarter" and then I put a big sign up front that said "EVERYTHING IS A QUARTER (unless otherwise marked)" and I really did have most stuff unmarked and ready to be sold for a quarter.  Sometimes it pained me a little because I knew that stuff was worth a lot more but I really just wanted it all gone.

Of course the fact that people were getting nearly new kid's clothes for a quarter didn't stop them from trying to talk me down on the price. "Will you take $1 for these 17 things?" or "This one shirt has a stain on it, can I have it and this electric heater and these wind chimes and these shot glasses and that bike and this scrap book and this pair of cleats for fifty cents?  Because this shirt has a stain."  One guy gave me a hard time because the perfectly functioning bread maker that I had IN THE FREE BOX no longer had the instruction book with it.  When he told him he could look the instructions up online he responded as though I had suggested he engage in sexual relations with the bread maker.  "I don't do THAT!"  At last he agreed to take the bread maker but as he left he said in a threatening tone "If this doesn't work I'm going to throw it away!"

In the end even though we sold most things for just a quarter we made $195.65 (plus $241.75 selling stuff for other people because I'm that big of a sucker).  That was enough to cover our trip hotel costs PLUS our cheese sandwich budget!  Or at least it was until we discovered on Saturday afternoon that all four tires on my car needed to be replaced.

So now we're back where we started from only less so and there's a good chance an angry guy with soggy bread is going to throw a small appliance through my window some night.  I can deal with it though.  Instead of staying at the historic bread and breakfast located in a building that used to be a bank where Ma and Pa did their banking we'll be staying at Bob's Discount Hotel and Taxidermy Shop where kids eat free on Thursdays.  I hope they have cheese sandwiches.

(And because I've been asked for an update on the surrogacy situation let me just say this: AAAAAAAAAAUUUUGH!  I'm at a loss for how to describe how things going without going into too much personal detail or swearing or speaking in tongues but oh my lord, it is a test of patience and perseverance and uterine fortitude.  Let's just leave it at that.)

One year ago today I introduced my dad.
Two years ago today it was twin time.
Four years ago today someone tried to hurt me.
Six years ago today Joseph "liked" sports.