Answer: Ask me to hold a Garage Sale.

Since February Florida had seen so little rain that fires were burning everywhere, some days, depending on which way the wind would blow, we couldn’t even see the house across the street, the smoke was so thick. For months people were praying for rain, but nothing was happening, that is, until I planned my first ever garage sale…

Garage sales are not my “cup’a tea”, I don’t go to garage sale nor do I enjoy holding one. For weeks you empty closets, attic and cupboards and pile things in the garage until you create a maze of junk into which you can easily get lost. You have to put up with this junk until the day of your garage sale, hoping that crowds will rush to your house and buy all of it, so you will make enough money to repay you for all those weeks of hard work, breathing dust and bravely diving into boxes full of forgotten junk and dead bugs. I would diagnose this behavior as delusional, it ain’t gonna happen, you know it, your friends know it, but that does not stop your from hoping it will happen….

Since Florida had been enjoying months of good weather, Garage Sales were a popular way of spending those sunny and mild Saturday mornings, making you feel so good because you are “saving money”. (Explain to me how the act of spending money
suddenly transforms into “saving money” when it comes to garage sale shopping). Having less money in your wallet at the end of the day should be a clue that somehow, something unorthodox happened to the “saving” part of it?

My way of dealing with junk normally had been very efficient; everything that still looked good that I had’nt use in the past 5 years went to Goodwill, everything that was nicked, didn’t work anymore or was plain broken, went to the trash. That sometimes, was the subject of heated discussions between Bear and me, because we don’t always agree on what is “still good” and what is not.

I’m babbling….

The point of this story is, after 4 months of drought, the Saturday of our Garage sale, we had a Tropical Storm, it rained the whole time the garage sale was on, that is from the moment we left the house to go put the signs up 6:30 AM, until the end of the sale at 3 PM. After that, the rain stopped, the wind picked up a little bit, and washed all those clouds away. Sunday was a glorious day, no rain, just sunshine, of course, by then, the garage sale was over and we were left with piles and piles of junk…..

A few brave souls, the die-hard garage sale addicts braved the bad weather to come and spend their money on our stuff, only the hard core ones did though , because mildly addicted never thought anybody was crazy enough to have a garage sale on a stormy day.

The people at the Goodwill store were very happy that it rained on Saturday, they ended up with all the remains of the garage sale, 3 trips to Goodwill later, we could finally see the floor of the garage, which made me think that frankly, had I had my way, this would have happened a lot sooner, Goodwill would have had a little more stuff, we would have been a little (very little) bit poorer, but a lot less exhausted.

The bright side, we got the spend the day with Debi, Kimmie and Shane, and that was fun, they helped a lot, actually they did all the pricing, selling, counting and the negotiating, I hid myself in the house each time someone would show up, simply because I had not clue how keep a straight face and make people believe that they were getting a good deal and they couldn’t live without my junk, since I was so darn happy to see it go in the first place…

Anyway, it is done, we now have space to store the “good junk” the one we really want to keep, the one we will get out of the boxes when we move back into the house in a few years. For now, we have to concentrate on packing our “indispensable stuff” into the motorhome and start living our dream.

In not too long, it will happen, the countdown is on, we are leaving on June 18th.