ya wanna buya watch? my sister and i used to mimic that line from sesame street, pretending to open a trench coat and look around like a black market dealer on the street corner. ok, how about some legos? surely you need a little bunch of mangled fake flowers for… something?
tag sale, yard sale, garage sale, whatever you may call it… there is a big one coming!
it is truly astounding how much stuff one can fit into a single house. and how much can be accumulated in 21 years. thanks to help from Kate, i have made a large dent in the mess in the basement. let me rephrase that: only because of Kate have we made progress in the basement. i now have a garage full of stuff to sell in the subdivision yard sale in a couple weeks. of course it's not organized or priced yet, but it's moving along.
my rule is that once it gets to the garage, it never comes back in the house. either i will sell it in the tag sale or it will be craig's-listed or donated. i know there will be a second tag sale, both to get rid of stuff that didn't sell the first time and to allow me to get rid of stuff i haven't gotten to in the house yet. there's a good chance i will be disappointed with the results of this first one, since i'm imagining everything gone and that's not very reasonable. so there's a very good chance that if you show up at my house at the end of the day on august 6th, i will be giving away tons of stuff. just saying...
as before, i'm of two minds on this whole thing. most of me wants to get rid of as much as possible. this is completely contrary to how i've been my whole life, since i am a bit of a, shall we say, collector. but there's a small part of me that fears i'm jumping a little fast and being a little bit extreme about the desire to simplify and get rid of everything. what if i don't get accepted? should i be keeping and storing some of these things rather than getting rid of them? will i regret letting some of it go?
for example, there's an entertainment center and tv downstairs, along with couches, coffee & end tables, a vcr, a baker's rack and small phone table, etc. and of course the game table and dart board. except for the couches (long story) i could get rid of all of these things. should i? it'd be good if i may actually be leaving in october (still hard to believe that is feasible). but it definitely would wipe out that area of the basement. one area alone is not such a big deal, but when you add to it getting rid of stuff throughout the house, it starts to add up.
do i take advantage of the hoped-for draw of a subdivision's collective yard sale and throw it all out there? or do i get rid of the stuff i truly don't need even if i were to stay and worry about the rest later, at a lesser and last-minute tag sale? or somewhere in between?
it should be noted here that my mother is a tag sale/flea market/resale/consignment shop expert. one would think that'd come in handy at a time like this, but… no. she insists on living over 700 miles away. which brings me to my backup plan: everything gets stuffed into a ginormous truck and sent to her house for her to deal with it. hey, it's better than the other plan that was proposed – burning everything in a large bonfire.
as politics make strange bedfellows, so it turns out does lori going to the peace corps. as we were going through stuff last week, Kate had to keep reminding me that there were some things i should keep. a problem, i assure you, i have NEVER had before. "but why?" i found myself asking, "i'm only going to use them."
