Saturday Oct. 30, 2005

With Cindy recovering from oral surgery I decide to restrain myself from my weekly Saturday yard sale habit. Through a thick blanket of pain medication she still manages to insist that I get rid of my old desktop PC that has been gathering dust on the floor of our guest bedroom. Not wanting to argue with a recovering and highly sedated patient I haul the machine and its components down the street to my friend Terry’s long-standing professional yard sale. Terry who has been mentioned several times in this site has been hosting a sale across the street from the Flying Biscuit on a regular basis since last spring. A local milliner Terry is also a professional reseller who gleams goods from yard sales, curbsides, thrift stores or wherever she can find something that someone else will buy. Her ongoing sale set up in the yard of my friend David’s home uses the superb retail location that is at an important neighborhood crossroads and also across the street from where idle brunch seekers are waiting for tables.
The PC, the very computer that I used documenting and posting my yard sale activities did not move. Terry told me I should have come last week when several people inquired about computers. Having witnessed so much unsold technology over the past years I should not have expected it to sell. But I did hang out at the sale a while.
Terry who plans to move back to Indiana in the weeks ahead told me this was her last sale of the season. So I thought that even thought this is a professional sale and not just the usual pile of some strangers clutter that I would report on it anyway, especially since my care giving was keeping me from examining what was at the real yard sales wherever they might be.
Since this was set to be the final sale of the season David and Terry had arranged for Hub Cap City to perform at their sale. Regardless of the professionalism I am eager to laud any sale that has either live music or serves drinks. Unfortunately they were only doing the former. The ambient noise ensemble of Hubcap City provided the perfect sound track for clutter seekers perusing the gathered resale items. Terry provides something for all taste with several racks of clothing (complete with a dressing room set up on the porch), a selection strange home décor and, two tables of books and assorted media, a number of “it could be an antique?” type things and lots of odds and ends. Today David who crafts colorful, hand painted bas-relief animals out of scrap wood had his work presented for sale as well. The sale continued on through Sunday. At the end of the second day I find my computer has not sold but I give Terry a hand in packing up her unsold goods. I then determine an important equation for yard sales: the ratio of folding tables to stuff for sale multiplied by the number of disassembled ceiling fans is an indicator of professionalism. Terry has no less than seven folding tables and no ceiling fans.