Mostly Vultures

And lonely people and window shoppers and people looking for that special treasure, that's who go to garage sales!  I had well over 500 people, and often a quarter or dollar at a time, pulled in over $1,200.  I really expected to sell more junk.  A full box of nails cost me $50 twenty years ago and I had half full boxes for five bucks and still have them!  What surprised me was I sold a lot of metal art!!!  I have attempted in the past to get people one by one over to my shop/garden/studio and it just hasn't worked for some reason, but put them in a crowd in a garage sale atmosphere and something weird happens!  I sold a lot of it and have some potential clients for the near future!
    The selling of the junk was sort of fun.  It began the very first night with the theft of a large cabinet!  This was a gaming cabinet with ten drawers I made years ago for my kids to keep their games in.  It has been in my garage for years, in the way and swelling a bit from being in an unheated space.  It took me and my helper and a dolly to get it out and we left it in front of the garage.  The next morning it was gone!!!  This has never happened to me before!  No thefts of any kind, not around here.  Apparently my neighbor, a single mother and her sons thought I was going to haul it away to the dump!  they struggled with it and got some help from other neighbors and took it home!  I awoke to a very apologetic note on my front door!  After she got it home some other neighbors said I was about to have a garage sale and she thought it was going to the dump!  It was just too heavy to return and what did she owe me?  Ha ha, I "sold" it to her for a plate of brownies!  and we didn't have to move it again!
   I would some kind of junk on a table with maybe $7 dollar price on it and someone would always say, "would I take $4?"  some times I would say yes and sometime no and once I said, yes, but only if you take two of them for the four dollars!  It was really about getting rid of stuff as it was about the money!
   I feel as though I won the lottery, an unexpected windfall.  This summer I may go to San Fransisco! I do have a Tom-Tom you might remember!  My daughter who lives 3000 miles away in Washington DC is going to California to a wedding of a friend this summer and I may meet her there and have a road trip back to Oregon,
that would be so much fun, a road tip with my daughter!
   Oh, and I got a job out of the deal too!  I will spend all day today in the shop welding, making a big table for a local restaurant.  I am not sure how I will get it off my welding table when finished, it will weigh over 400 pounds!  That will be a problem I will deal with when I get it finished!

THE Garage Sale!

So I decided to have a garage sale.  Nothing from inside the house, my wife would disown me, but I will tell you what happened.  It was a series of happenstance, not just  a simple situation, no single decision.
    I am not sure where it all began, there is no order to this.  It may have begun with a leaky roof.  Most of the roof over my studio/shop is very steep and the rains fall freely and fast.  That roof is 20 years old but good for a few more years I am hoping. The roof section, about 300 square feet, over my office and a storage room isn't so steep and sits under a fig tree that drops its unpicked fruit upon the roof.  That is hard on a roof and it was leaking.  My initial reaction was buckets.  That is pretty much a lazy man's way to fix the problem but my wife will not allow me on the roof!   That is difficult for me.  I built the damned house and shop and have put roofs on them twice in the past, three times actually for the house!  When I had cancer it turned me into a ninety year old man, pretty weak and feeble and although the cancer is gone and I am stronger I admit I am no longer the young lad I once was.  However, she went to Texas a couple weeks ago to visit my daughter and no one was here to reign control over me!  Should I have a party, invite lots of hot women over while my wife was gone?
Well, I am not in that good of shape but I could certainly put a roof on while she was gone!  I did have a helper and the roof was a little worse than anticipated.  Reminded me of the time, ten days before Christmas I had the simple task of replacing a dishwasher!  Simple except that I discovered some rot in the floor causing me to remove all of the lower kitchen cabinets to repair!  So, anyway, I had to replace a section of the roof, pulling damaged sheets of plywood off and allowing me, for maybe the first time in 20 years to actually look into my storage room from the height of the open roof!  I haven't been actually able to get in there for years but now I was looking at it from the top down!  Way too much stuff!
   I have many outbuildings on my property.  Attached to my greenhouse along the North wall is a shed that is supposed to contain my rototiller, the lawnmower and only a few rakes and shovels.  For years these have been put some place else and this area too has become a "catch all", so full of stuff "that I may need" that you couldn't get into it!  Just too much stuff!
   The final element to the decision to have a garage sale, well the penultimate reason, there is one more, is this lousy economy!  I am not only not selling my metal artwork, I can't get any one over to even look at it.  In the "old days" a few years ago, I could place an ad on Craigslist and get 15 phone calls, half a dozen people would drop by and I could make some sales off my lot.  Today I don't even get a phone call.
So I am thinking if I had a garage sale maybe someone might drop by and I will meet new customers?
    Finally, retirement is not as easy as it is made out to be.  It is a huge transition and rethinking of priorities, requiring a different evaluation of time itself and a sense of what is important.  Maybe I don't need 16 boxes only half full of specialized fasteners?  So, in going through all of my stuff the main rule I gave myself was if I haven't used it in the past two year it would go on the block!  The area from the front of my house to the back of my shop is 160 feet.  It is full of tables and displays and piles all along the way!  If I am talked down in my pricing that will be okay, as long as they take two!  I want to be rid of it all.  Open space and near empty rooms are appealing to me.  I will just have to refrain from filling them!  Wish me luck.

A Nice Day!

Wow, yesterday was so nice, almost 80 degrees, blue sky everywhere and my garden is screaming for attention!  I think we only get one day of this and we are in for mid sixties and cloudy for the next week, but clearly Spring is very near.  I have been doing my Spring Chores! and that means dump runs!
One load to the steel scrap yards, this time unloading scrap from my shop to their yard.  I didn't buy anything which is not usual for me.  Most often I unload my scrap and then pick up someone else's that I found more interesting!  The economy is so bad at the moment I can't make any more stuff from steel because I know I will never sell it.  Discouraging, for sure.
    The snow only a couple weeks ago took out a lot of branches from my trees so I made a trip to that recycling yard also.  What a great place that is!  Whatever you give them they grind it all up and sell it back to you as mulch.  Love it.  Then, with a little sadness I made a trip to the landfill, the "dump" where it is not recycled but added to the height of a mountain.  A mountain of trash.  One day we will find something to do with this stuff and it will be mined.  I hope.
    I bought and planted 36 "wave petunias", two to a pot and eighteen pots!   Most are elevated and placed on pedestals around the front entrance of my garden.  You have to walk through a wall of flowers to get to the garden itself.  I have trimmed my Trumpet Vine that covers the archway to my garden, so that will be beautiful should you ever visit me!  The garden itself is still too wet to turn the soil over and prepare it for vegetables but my tomatoes are waiting in the greenhouse enjoying the sun and warmth that comes through those windows.
   I am returning to "MyBook"!   Slowly and with a little different approach although still stuck on the same story.  Mostly because it is true and easy to remember.  You can find MyBook HERE. I am really after comments and considerations, criticisms and any ideas or surreptitious routes and suggestions!