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.

Maybe We Have Enough?

   Our Economy is based on Consumerism.  We ourselves are the engines that keep it going.

   We are caught up in a "chicken or the egg' argument.  Business can't hire if we aren't buying and

we can't buy if we aren't working!  That is a difficult egg to break.

   I don't know the statistics but Billions and Billions of dollars are spent to encourage us to buy new

stuff, the latest and best, new and improved!  More is better and we are induced to buy stuff a dozen at a time.

   This is trickery that has worked for the last 50 years or so.  It is the secret to the SUV success.  We needed the bigger automobile to haul the bigger stuff and more of it.

   I have made my living for the past forty years because of this desire for more.  I made houses bigger,

adding rooms and pushing out walls.  More room for more stuff.  My customers would have to work harder to pay me and pay for the added stuff they needed.  It is an engine.  Keep feeding it and it grows.

   Happiness has even been connected to material possessions, even Spirituality with eight story Mega-

Churches.  Bigger, taller, closer to God.

  It is the Garage Sale Season and it is pretty amazing.  I see fat people selling three exercising machines.

Three of them.  I see poor people with boxes of CD's or the old VHS tapes, hundreds of them originally purchased for five bucks each!  Falling apart furniture less than five years old is pretty common too.

Kitchen gadgets, small appliances are pretty common.  No one cleans a microwave any more when it is easier to just buy a new one.  Maybe a better color too.

   I look at all of this stuff.  There is seldom anything cool from grandma there.  This is stuff they worked for,

saved for or charged to their accounts and paid dearly for.  Something they needed.  Happiness on sale.

Now they are selling it by the pickup load, yard after yard, block by block, all over this town.

   Somehow or another all this seems to be okay.  It is expected that whatever we buy will be used up, sold or thrown away.  We get rid of our possessions like we were changing light bulbs.  The paint fades, it has a scratch, the color isn't right, it doesn't fit.  It isn't what I thought it was.  It doesn't make me happy!

   So we do it again!  We work hard, give our best third of the day to some job, come home tired and maybe think of the weekend and shopping!

   It is interesting though.  It is an engine with one cog broken.  No job, no buying.  No buying, no job.

I am going to get a bumper sticker for my truck:  "I would rather be fishing".

this website is free, you can join me HERE

230 Brushes!

I am not really a painter, I am a welder. A welder who plays with paint.  I have never had the proper tools to be a painting artist. I paint with house brushes, whatever I can find.  Moving paint around with bits of steel from the shop floor.  I mostly paint on steel or sheets of copper because that is what I can find in my shop.  I paint on inappropriate surfaces.
   Yesterday I went garage sailing out of boredom and felt like a bumble bee flittering from flower to flower,
one sale after the other, hunting for nothing in particular.  Just looking.

 paints and brushes from garage sale

   Mostly it was just junk.  Years of accumulation, some broken and some still in boxes, never opened. I have never really understood garage sales.  Everything, a whole life, put out on tables for the public to peruse, grapple over and barter with, a rummage sale.  Junk for sale and pieces of history, stuff that once was important to you.
  I stumbled upon a great find, serendipity, finding something you were not looking for.  Who could know what mysterious forces would drive me there?  To a garage sale with no sign.  Not even open.  Still organizing table after table, to be officially open to the public not until tomorrow!  I was two days early.
   Lucky me, you won't believe what I found.  A big box of brushes!  230 of them, some never used and all well cared for.
Exotic and plain brushes.  Imported brushes with fine handles.
Skillfully made from the hair of wild animals and modern brushes from from nylon zoos.  Some really old brushes.  The lady selling her stuff was 82 years old and some of the brushes belonged to her mother!

 Just a handful of the pile I found!

   And there must have been a hundred tubes of paint!  Not so old, soft and pliable still with well sealed caps.  And palette knives and tools of the trade I have yet to discover.
   Did I mention the canvas?  A starving artist's dream!  Three feet wide and almost 150 feet long, an entire roll of canvas weighing over 150 pounds.  I could barely get it into my truck.

 Bucket of paint brushes!

   And then I found the bucket.  It is a tool bucket and I already own two or three of them but they are for tools, pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, chisels, that sort of thing.  Little compartments to organize.  For now it is perfect for my brushes.  They are upright and safe.
   Well, you must be curious as to what this costs?
$100. for everything.  Now the only excuse will be me.

My art site is HERE.