Yard Sale!

Chris and I took some crazy pills last week and decided to have a yard sale. Actually we'd planned it for the week before, but the Times forgot to run our ad the day before. That's what they said. They forgot. The lady I talked to said that isn't that just the funniest thing and of course she owes us a free day of advertising. Lady, first of all, no it is not just the funniest thing and second, if I wanted something from you it wouldn't be a free day of advertising in your yard sale section.

The whole first yard sale attempt last week was already going badly. Chris was supposed to have the day off, a very rare occurrence on a Saturday, so we planned it about a month in advance around this phenomenon. Then sometime early that week, he found out he was going to have to work that day after all, because another city building had a function scheduled and they just didn't feel like having it there. He'd be going in that afternoon, so we let our plans stand, but I felt bad that he would have to get up early on a day he normally got to sleep in, work until noonish, grab a sandwich, and run to his real job where he would work until sometime in the AM. I was already fuming over the injustice of the world when the ad thing came up, so we just put it off a week. At least that way, Chris would have more time to get mentally prepared for a 20-hour day of hell.

In the three days leading up to the yard sale, I think we did the most heavy lifting we've done since we moved into the Dreamplex. And then, at least, we could take our sweet time doing it. I try to think back on my childhood memories of yard sales, those pleasant thoughts burned into my brain during the crucial developmental years that I must have called on in deciding that this would be a fun way to spend a Saturday morning, and I don't remember that part.

The actual sale was pretty interesting. I've always been an informal student of sociology, so I found myself studying our patrons looking for patterns of behavior, social cross-sections, buying habits, etc. I could probably write a paper on it. There were high-brow junkers, middle-class hybrids (nice cars, bad teeth), affable conversationalists (they were my favorite because they bought more and because they tended to buy things no one else seemed interested in), and of course your subsistence buyers who, whether by birth or meth, you could tell they did all their shopping in this manner. We even had one family come by that I'm pretty sure had at least five generations of inbreeding under their belts. I've never actually met anyone whose family tree I knew went straight up, but don't you think you'd know a circus clown if you saw one, even if you'd never seen one before? There were two women, one who talked too fast to be remotely understood and had weird joints that didn't point exactly the right way, and one who was large and lumbering and didn't have ankles and I swear she looked just like an urRu. They had a boy with them who was high school age and obviously a bit slow. They rode around in a compact car with strange religisms hand-painted on the sides.

What I learned from the whole experience is that while yard sales can be profitable and mildly entertaining, the same can be said of selling your body for scientific experimentation, and that doesn't usually involve lifting large appliances.