Everything Has Its Price

Today my family had its almost annual yard sale. Yard sales at my house are a little backwards, but what isn't a little backwards at my house? At my house, instead of asking, "What do you want to sell?", my dad asks, "What don't you want to sell?" His theory is that everything has its price, the less you want to sell something, the more you make it cost, but that anything you own could be possibly sold...for a high enough price. In other words, pretty much everything we own that he could move out of the house fast enough ended up for sale on our driveway. This is how we inadvertatly sold our couch last year. He asked $1000 for it, and lo and behold, someone offered to pay that. Just to further illustrate this point, he (jokingly, I would like to think) put a $50,000 price tag on our dog, Rose. Yes, my dad tried to sell my dog at a yard sale...just wanted to drive that point home. Another aspect of my dad's mantra is that he puts EVERYBODY'S stuff out for sale, not just his. So if there's anything you don't want to sell, you have to be out there at 5 AM putting it back in the house. I dislike the whole hassle of having to go through my own stuff and salvage what I can but my sister, the opportunist she is, has seen the bright side of the whole thing--especially when my dad occasionally makes a mistake and puts out something really indispensible.

"Hey Katie, don't you hate that Dad put out practically everything we own?"

"It's ok, he accidentally put out my Bible from Confirmation and I've been trying to get him to let me get rid of it for awhile anyway."

After telling my sister that she was NOT allowed to sell her Bible, I do realize that maybe it's not all so bad. This way we end of getting rid of more stuff just because we're too lazy to put it back inside, which is my dad's goal in the first place: to get rid of as much stuff as possible. He glows with personal satisfaction after each sale.

"See, now we have practically nothing to put back in the shed!....Hey, do you think the shed would be too heavy to move out here?"

I must say though, you meet some of the most interesting people at garage sales. Even I was surprised when a clown, dressed in full clown regailia, pulled up in front of our house. Apparently even clowns need common household items found at garage sales. The clown ended up leaving with a fishbowl, for her fish "Sparkles" she informed me, and my sister's razor scooter.

Another one of my favorite people was the lady who wanted to buy all of Katie's old stuffed animals. As she was paying my sister for them she said, "You know my dog will just love these for Christmas. He loves stuffed animals because he can rip right though them. He gets them just the way he likes them, you know, rips the arms and legs off so it's just the carcass (YES, she actually referred to the dismembered body of a stuffed animal as the carcass!). As my sister got whiter and whiter, I did kind of start feeling sorry for her, but these were stuffed animals she had gotten in the past couple of years and how attached does anyone over the age of 13 really get to new stuffed animals?
What really kind of embarassed me was when the gardeners came to mow the lawn during our garage sale. I don't really like having gardeners in the first place. I feel like our house is not so big that we need garderners, only snobby rich people have gardeners. (If you have gardeners, I have nothing against you since, after all, so do we) No, we couldn't just tell them to skip this week (said my parents) and yes, we had to move everything off of the grass to the driveway. The poor gardeners had to work around us, so as people rummaged through our possessions, we were all subjected to the weed wacking happening just inches away. The best part had to be when the gardeners recognized some of the people shopping at our sale as their neighbors and/or family members. Small world, I suppose.

Update: Yard sale day two...
A few years ago we had my grandpa record all of our family videos (me and Katie growing up mostly) from the original VCR tapes to new VCR tapes that were better quality or something. My dad found the originals today and--you guessed it--decided he could sell them as "blank tapes" people can record over since we still have the better quality ones anyway. In pure theory, I guess it makes sense, but isn't it a little weird to think that somewhere out there, someone else owns a tape of me in the bathtub when I was 6 months old? Maybe this is the start of my internet porn career. I'm expecting a royalty check in the mail any day now.

It is nice to know that my dad will give anyone the shirt off of his back. His pants, however, will cost you a dollar. A guy walked up and asked my dad if we were selling any men's pants about his size. My dad said, "I'll sell you the ones I'm wearing, if you want them." NOW do you believe that my dad will sell anything? Not only did my dad sell the pants off of himself, he went up to his closet and sold five other pairs as well.