"Welcome to Walmart"

If you were lucky enough to attend our neighborhood garage sale you would have been lucky enough to have been greeted by my ruggedly handsome husband. "How you folks doing this morning?" It was like he was practicing up for his future retirement job, "Good morning, welcome to Walmart." It was great, I was expecting to hear, "anything I can help you shop for today?" but I didn't.

You might say, a garage sale, you've only been married five years, how much stuff could you have possibly accumulated? Well.. enough. I still had rubbermaid containers in the basement that had not been unpacked from our move two years ago. I was also thinking that, with another move imminent, I didn't want to move more than necessary. One could also argue that I was trying to find ways to fund my ever growing clothing addiction.

Among the crap, were 20+ picture frames from high school through my college years. Apparently I went through a "stage" and bought frames for every photo. We also had some clothes that I'd never worn, decorative pillows, an old bike, rugs, and my old computer from college, the 2nd generation iMac. It wasn't until we had kids showing up and asking what it was and begging their parents to have it that I realized this computer was made BEFORE these children were even born. I, at the age of 26, own an antique, who would have guessed? I'm guessing this is the way my parents felt when they had to explain what a record player was.

Things started to slow down early on Saturday so I began to get desperate and stood at the road with bags yelling, "all you can stuff in this bag, five bucks!!!" I think Ben was a little embarrassed because his proper greeting went out the window when his wife began chasing cars down the road yelling. But I will say, the women came in droves, it really did prove that women will buy anything if they can get a good deal.

Among all the junk, Ben and I decided, on somewhat of a whim to put a for sale sign in the Honda to see what would happen. Our neighbors scoffed. Joke was on them though, we sold it two hours later. Our neighbor bought it for his sixteen year old son who will get his license this summer. It all happened so fast I'm not sure what we even got for the 'ol girl! Once we got it all cleaned out, yes, we hadn't even cleaned the thing, the kid got in it to drive it home, and to our surprise it wouldn't start. A tad embarrassed, we tried again. Nothing. So we decided to hold his check and take it to our mechanic to check it out to ensure we weren't passing on a lemon.

A few hours later after we banked $200+ on our first garage sale, the car started right up and we drove it down to the shop. Monday our mechanic calls and tells us we need a new fuel relay somethingorother, and it's done, fixed. Ben calls up our neighbor, and, to our surprise, he backs out. I say it's his loss because this Honda will last forever, and now he'll have to explain to his kid why he's not getting an awesome car. His explanation was something about doing business with your neighbor is like doing business with family. BAH! I'm fully planning on putting that for sale sign back in the window and parking it outside to let the offers start rolling in. Maybe this time we'll actually clean it.