Wow, was today a bad day to sit in my garage all day or what? If you’ve never had a garage sale, you totally should, if only for the cultural experience part of it. Garage Sale-ers are WEIRD! Do you know what sold first? USED PERFUME. What? People buy used perfume. For $1 per bottle. Hello?!?!? IT’S USED. I marked the bottle of Colors (by Benetton, circa 1990) down to 50 cents because the bottle was only 1/3 full, but judging by how fast it sold, I could have put it at $5. Someone also paid $1 for a mostly-full bottle of some kind of Gucci perfume that I think I took from my mom when I was in 5th grade. That perfume sat unused for 20 years for a *reason* you know.
And everyone has a story. Not only that, but everyone wants to tell you their story. Many of them want to tell you their story more than they want to buy your old tchotchkes. Even if it is only 35 degrees Fahrenheit, all of these people will stop by to tell you about their home businesses or how their husbands hate their collection of monkey statues. Fascinating and horrifying, and sorry if I sound like a snob.
Anyway, I came away with $120 and a less cluttered house. Now I’m can buy that iPod Shuffle I’ve had my eye on. OK, I was going to buy it anyway, but now I have justification. A garage-full of crap traded in for a digital music player the size of a pack of gum. There’s beauty in that, isn’t there? Too bad I also have to spend $99 to upgrade my sorry-ass operating system, since the iPods won’t work with Windows 98. Oh well. Welcome to the 21st century I guess.
Now I have to go warm up with a nice cold beer…