1-800-junk from the past.............will you give me a quarter?????

~ Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. ~

Charles Dudley Warner

Today was the day....

off color family had their annual garage sale, which was about five years over due....

If you remember earlier this summer,

I wrote a post that started...

"Who put this shit in my garage?"

I've been sorting and pricing all summer long...

and

I promise you...

I had not seen the concrete floor of our garage for at least...

four years or so

and

this year

it became so badly packed

that I swear

I think the neighbors who did see inside

may have been tempted to

call

1-800-a hoarder lives next door.....

I know you do not believe me so

here is a pic of

what the place looked like when I started in June...

Do you Believe me now?

Bad with a capital B.....!

Over the summer, off color daughter and i sorted and priced and sorted some more,

but we never seemed to get our steam up to have the

full-fledged garage sale.  Big Daddy has always been the yard sale king---selling and bickering and talking to anyone who would listen....

he was waiting us out this year.

Off color son....seemed to stay out of the picture this summer....

seems he was not interested in

partaking

in the fun

until it came time to count our earnings of the day!

Big Daddy got me up at 4 am today...

put on some double dog coffee

and

invited me to

make some signs and put them up...

with carefully given directions of course as to which way the arrow needed to point to get the optimal

traffic flow to the

off color family house.

We lined the driveway with years of

our

trash----I mean some one's treasures.....

We had clothes of just about every size imaginable,

scattered all about on a huge camping tarp...

shoes in various colors and degree of wearing,

half used lotions bottles (yes people actually buy this! yuck!)

lamps, games, books, magazine...

shit..

and

more shit....

Big Daddy opened the gate and

before long

there they came...

carloads and truckloads of people

walking in our yard, up and down our driveway...

hands touching our stuff...

quarters passing hands...

Big Daddy yakking in his salesman

induced high....

bargaining and chatting

and

sounding like an auctioneer of sorts.

Off color daughter and I got us

a camping chair,

diet Pepsi,

and

we sat staring at people

as they

stared at our stuff

People of all sizes and shapes and dress came,

cultural barriers were crossed,

languages of all kinds were interested in our

stuff.....

Off color daughter and I would

make up stories

and

bet on which items people would buy.

They....the proverbial ...they

say

another man's trash is someones treasure...

oh my....

We made almost 250.00

on our crap....

Funniest thing was when people speaking Spanish

would come

and

talk to each other thinking we could not understand....

...

At one point,

a Latino/a family stopped by...

it was at the end of the day

when we were boxing things up for the tree lawn

and

good will...

Big Daddy explained that anything in the boxes was theirs for free,

but that the tables were not for sale...

The Latina woman,

kept looking and Big daddy thought

she asked him how much....

He started talking really loud...

waving his arms

and talking

at

slow speed...very slow speed....

Off Color Daughter was laughing...

she said...

That woman said in Spanish...

that crazy American man thinks we are just stupid

Mexicans

who can't understand anything....

stupid American....

Big Daddy did not have a clue.....

In the end,

Big daddy told some kids riding their bikes down the street

they could have anything we left out

as long as they did not make a mess....

and

the neighborhood kids flocked our sidewalk

much

to the dismay

I'm sure of their parents...

we watched a boy carry a bar stool on his bike

while the brother carried

another along with

a hot pink lava light lamp.....

little girls loaded up their backpacks with

purses from off color daughters' stash....

We can now see the floor of our garage...

no more

1-800-we have junk...

well we still have a bunch of stuff to go through...

I found our old high school year books and

baby pics of

off color daughter and off color son...

really cute one's...

we looked at the treasures of our past

one

last time

and

we passed them over...

simplifying our lives just a bit....

and

clearing out a space...

for

the good things to come...

I hope your day was as much fun as mine....

we celebrated Big Daddy's sisters birthday with a home cooked meal by Mama Dee...

oh my...what a treat after such a long hard day...

I'm now on my way to

bed...

closing the door

to things of days gone by,

saying good by

to junk I no longer need...

It feels good!!!!

May you have a great weekend!

Hugs and Blessings

from

the

less junky off color household!!!!