Rained Out

Last Saturday was our neighborhood garage sale. Every year, some lady organizes it and sends a flier around. She puts an ad in the paper, and then everyone who participates pays for part of the ad. We skipped it last year, so this year I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Sigh.

Garage sales are a lot of work.

Brandon and I spent several hours this past week going through our junk and dusting things off. I went to my mom's to borrow tables for the event (my mom's a semi-pro at garage sales!), which also took some time. We ended up going to the temple Friday night (more on that later), so I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to set everything up in the garage. I was counting on Saturday morning to get out there and set up shop before the early birds started to arrive.

Well, I first heard the thunder at 5:55 Saturday morning. My heart sank. Who wants to do a garage sale in the rain?!? I barely want to do one in the sunshine, to be honest! I stayed there in bed, for an hour and a half, on the fence. On the one hand, I was exhausted from being up until 1:00 a.m. after our temple trip the night before. Going back to sleep sounded good. Plus, it was pouring down rain. On the other hand, my dining room was full to the brim with garage sale items. One way or another, it was going to go out the door. Might as well try to sell some of it.

At 7:30, the rain had stopped. I looked out the window and saw our neighbors opening their garage door. Sigh. I decided to git 'er done.

All this procrastinating made for a less-than-organized start to our sale. People were showing up before we even had all our junk - er, I mean, stuff - out of the house!

It proceeded to rain off and on all morning. And when I say "rain," I mean RAIN. It poured!

Complete with impressive lightning and loud crashes of thunder. Mason is not a fan of thunder. Here he is, with my shooting range earmuffs on, to muffle the sound:


The rain definitely affected the turnout. And I suspect a lot of neighbors chickened out as well - only 8 families participated. This, of course, made my portion of the ads a lot more expensive than anticipated! Bummer. I will say this, though - there were still a fair number of people, given the horrendous weather. I guess some people are serious about their garage sales. And I guess I'm not one of those people. :-)


All told, I spent about 10 hours on this project and netted about $90. And now my garage is half full of junk - er, I mean, donations - waiting to be taken to Good Will.

I think I just might pass on the neighborhood garage sale next year.