Come Hell or High Water: Yard Sale in Review

Despite all my best efforts to reverse-psychologize the weather into NOT RAINING and BEING BEAUTIFUL, it did rain and was totally ugly. Muggy, wet, nasty. It didn't actually rain during the sale, for the most part, I'll give the oh-so-NOT-FUNNY Mother Nature that. But when we woke up, between 5 and 5:30 that morning, the sky was completely broken, downpouring rain with thunder and lightning, the whole shebang. What to do about this, I wasn't quite sure. After a good half hour of denial and internal hand-wringing, I cleared off the front porched, which is covered, and swept off the rainwater. Then, J.Lo got up on the roof, in the pitch-black, pouring down rain to rig up a tarp over the back deck. When my in-laws arrived with their things to sell, the canopy borrowed from erinhjones was constructed in the side yard. This thing was going to happen, come hell or high water, I was determined, even though I knew it was pretty much going to suck.

After all was said and done, we broke $150? Which I have to say I'm happy with, even though I feel the profits would have been way better on a sunny day. We didn't get the Mom Traffic (key to a really profitable yard sale, or (dare I say it?) the Mexican Clown Car traffic. I mean, I'm not trying to be an ethnocentric asshole here, but the illegal immigrant sect does tend to frequent the yard sale circuit, showing up in beat-up vans filled with more people than seems possible. And they get the deals, so more power to them, living here in the good ol' generous USA. They must not like the rain, though.

So we had all of The Lo. Co. stuff on the back deck, my in-laws took the canopy, and Good Lauren and Jason camped out on the front porch. People started coming a little late, thank heaven, because we were a little late getting all the stuff outside and set up after the rain stopped. Some old guy right away bought an armload of nutcrackers, and our random success continued from there. One coffee maker went, the printer, the wireless router, all the VHS, some rugs, some Christmas decor, a few books, the ghetto china set. What didn't go: some vases, the baby stuff, coffee mugs, clothes, an end table, craft stuff.

The Rescue Mission was scheduled to pick up all the leftovers afterward, on the condition that it could not be wet. So clearly the sky needed to open up again minutes before I planned on dragging everything inside, absolutely drenching us. Weeeeee. I hauled it inside anyway, dried it all off, and the stuff that couldn't be dried off, I shoved in some trash bags with some dry stuff on top. Sue me. I was not bringing that crap back into my house and having to get rid of it some other way. That was the whole point of the yard sale, to get rid of everything THAT DAY, and THAT DAY ONLY. And I did. It all went away, poof, and the huge weight of the extraneous was lifted. Sayonara, junkola.

We made enough money for: the kitchen paint and supplies and a sundry trip to Costco, as well as some rare take-out. I was brave, resolved, disciplined in forgoing entirely the Library Sale, but I had been graciously allowed to peruse both of our co-salers' book selections and take whatever I wanted for free! So I've got a ginormous stack of books to plow through anyway. Clearly it was the best of both worlds.