Saturday Sale-ing

My god, it was a long day!

Friday night I went to sleep around nine(?)--and woke up around midnight. I thought I'd go back to sleep, so I lay in bed...and then it was four a.m. and I had to be up at 5:30. I ended up getting just under five hours of very broken up sleep.

We got up, got dressed and headed out to my aunt's house about 6:30. We wanted to be there by 7:00 to help get set up for the day's yard sale-ing. My aunt lives about 30 minutes away--but we stopped for breakfast burritos before hitting the road. (Yes, we were a bit late.) We ate our burritos (mine an egg, potato, bacon, cheese, and red chile) on the way. I had a big, icy, diet Pepsi for the caffeine.

Once at my aunt's, we helped set up for the day then we waited. A woman who had bought a half dozen pieces of pottery on Friday came back and bought a half dozen more. It seemed to set the pace for the day, pottery-wise. If someone bought one piece, they bought eight--but there weren't that many people buying pottery to begin with. (We still sold a fair amount, but it was to, like, five people.)

Things were lagging early on, which is not the usual yard sale pattern, so Dave and went out to check the signs that my aunt had put up. Turns out the signs at the main road were missing (my aunt lives a ways off the main road) so Dave and I went and bought some poster board and rigged up some new signs. I also splurged on a couple of helium-filled mylar ballons to add some pizzazz to the sign.

That drew in some people and business picked up for awhile. There was a big rush of parents with cute kids in tow. One little boy about three or four years old came from across the street clutching his new puppy to his chest. When my aunt asked what the puppy's name was, the mother said her name was Honey but the little boy called her Pickles. He and his brother bought some gaming cards (maybe Yu-Gi-Oh! cards?) from my brother. Another little girl, Mia (about the same age as Pickles's owner), walked around chatting with everyone and looking at everything. When I stood up from a chair that I had been sitting in, she asked if that was my chair. I said yes it was, and then when I turned back to look, she was kicking back in my chair with a children's book that my aunt had given her.

We hung out and chatted and sold some junk.  My brother came by and almost immediately headed off with Dave to pick up some lunch (pizza and salad) for everyone.  While my brother was gone, a young man and his grandmother started looking through a big box of CDs and DVDs that my brother had put out. I asked them if they were finding some good stuff and the young man said they were. I said something like, "Oh, good. Those are my brother's. He went out of town, so I'm selling all his stuff." They gasped like they believed me, so I laughed and told them I was joking. I'm not sure they believed me about that, though. (They bought three CDs and a DVD.)

Just before Dave and my brother came back with lunch, a bizarre thing happened. There is a ridiculously long back story, so I won't tell it, but someone from the very distant past showed up completely unexpectedly at the yard sale. She was with her husband of 20 years, but that didn't stop her from talking to my aunt and mother about her relationship with one of my uncles (who died a long time ago). I was in high school the last time I saw this woman and had I never laid eyes on her again, it would have been just fine with me. She was a dull-witted, conniving, awful, pathetic leech then--and she is still all of those things, only now with thirty more years of experience.

My brother, Dave, and I hung out inside my aunt's house, thinking we'd wait until this leech left before we went back out again. Over two hours later, I got tired of waiting and just decided to go out and start packing up. (It was already after 4:00 p.m.) This person and her husband left as soon as we started packing and cleaning up. I was in a foul mood by then and had to bite my tongue to avoid "getting attitude" (as my aunt puts it). It took about an hour to get everything packed up and put away, including the tables and chairs we had dragged out. We also returned the tables and clothes racks we had borrowed from my aunt's neighbor and we helped my aunt haul in her stuff.

Dave and I caravanned back home with my brother, helped him unload his stuff, then came back to the casita exhausted. But--I was craving sugar, so after Dave called his father to wish him a happy birthday, we went out to the grocery store so that I could get a candy bar. That and a bowl of the soup I had made on Friday morning was my dinner.

Pretty soon after, I changed into my pajamas and hit the sack.

It was an exhausting weekend, but fun in bits, and we did sell a bit of our old stock of pottery off. My aunt found out about an auction site that's local to her, so we're going to take a bit of pottery there and see if they'll take any of it to sell. (They handle everything and keep 20% of the sale price. So we'll see how that goes.)