Thank God the YardSale is Over
The baby has outgrown all of his old toys and clothes and he definitely doesn’t need his infant swing, his exer-saucer, travel sleeper, or bassinette. Plus, we had loads of junk, books, DVD’s and other stuff that was just taking up too much room in our house. So we did the Great American Yard Sale (GAYS)® today to attempt to lure suckers customers to take the junk off our hands and also give us meager payment for the pleasure of doing so.
I guess it went okay. I mean, the weather was great, we had a good location at my father-in-law’s house, with lots of traffic and visitors, and at the end of the day we had to only take home one carload of our crap instead of the three carloads of crap we took to his house in the first place.
I threw some items on the sale pile that I was convinced no one in their right mind would even want, much less pay good money to carry it away, and to my surprise, those items sold quickly. On that pile were some of the worst DVD’s to be produced by Hollywood, like Me Myself and Irene and Adaptation. Old quilts were the first off the lot. Ugly framed artwork walked after some deep discounts. An old stereo receiver that probably didn’t even work sold for top dollar.
Ever wonder what happened to the fannypack phenomena from the early 90’s? Well, they are still used by just about everyone who goes to yard sales. And what’s the deal with immigrants that want to buy baby clothes and only have hundreds? I don’t carry hundred-dollar bills around. Suspicious, I tossed those bastards out of the yard sale. “Go to the Seven-Eleven and make change, pendejo!”
My wife’s grandmother graciously donated a few excess items of hers to the yard sale too. A couple of lamps, a gaudy piggy bank, some crockpots, and a George Foreman Grill. She came to keep us company while we watched strangers pick through our junk and to play with her great grandson. Oddly, after I had to take the baby home to get a nap around noon, Granny went home and took her George Foreman Grill with her. I guess she was thinking about all that grilled chicken she would be missing out on.
One of the oddest things we experienced were the lookie-loo drive-bys. These were people that would come roaring into the cul-desac , bang a yoo-eee at near-full speed with a brood of children pressing their noses to the back window of the mini-van before roaring off again. Of course its understandable that our little yard sale wasn’t the big flea market they were perhaps dreaming they would stumble across when they piled into the mini-van at 7:30 AM. What was worse than the drive-bys were the “pull-up gawkers.” These were mini-van drivers that would pull right into the driveway and take three minutes to stare at us and inventory our piles of unwanted junk like they were health inspectors checking the greasetraps at the local Sonics. Unsatisfied with our white-trash offerings, they would throw the mini-van into reverse and speed off to the next garage sale around the corner.
The “pull-up gawkers” weren’t insulting- just a little unsettling. But they did give me and my father-in-law a great idea for fun: We plan on driving around one weekend from yardsale to yardsale, being the “pull-up gawkers from hell.” We will pull up to yard sales, survey junk with obvious disdain, and then pull off, booing the yard sale hosts and flipping the finger as we burn rubber outta there. Unless of course, they have some really good stuff.
But I am very happy to report that all of the past week’s evenings spent assembling piles of junk, pricing the items, hanging signs, dropping junk off at my father-in-law’s house and advertising on Craigslist really paid off. We pulled in 175 bucks! Ka-Ching!!!
