getting ready for a yard sale

We have a lot of stuff. WAY too much stuff. By tomorrow night we will have a little less but I am afraid a lot of what we would like someone to carry away we will end up carrying away ourselves but to the dump instead.

We hired a kid today to help carry stuff out from the house to the big shop. When we started carrying stuff out there earlier this week I thought we really wouldn't have enough to make it worth anybody's time to stop in but I was wrong. We have two tables each about 30 feet long that are absolutely covered with stuff plus some dressers and bookcases that are covered or filled. Plus a bunch of stuff that is just sitting on the ground. And none of it is really worth anything. Its really depressing actually how much clutter you accumulate that means so little.

We've packed up the important stuff - heirlooms, books, art, pictures - whats in the garage sale is the clutter that takes up room in drawers and on shelves but doesn't really amount to anything other than wasting space. I expect at the end of the day, if we are lucky, we will have accumulated around $500 and that will depend on some of the bigger items actually selling. The little stuff is mostly $1 or $2 each so it will take a long time for that to amount to anything.

We may have lucked into a lawnmower operator though. The kid that Manpower sent this morning appears to have a bit of a brain. Yaps too much and he is grossly out of shape but he wasn't a bad worker. I've got him coming back in the morning to mow the grass. If he manages to arrive for that then that will tell me something. Let's just say he comes from a culture that has a deserved reputation for not always being completely timely and leave it at that. However, assuming he arrives on time and does a decent job then I'll make him some kind of offer for while we're away. Quint will keep an eye on him & I could leave some pay envelopes with Quint to avoid the difficult situation of paying someone who doesn't likely have a bank account and who couldn't be depended on to show up a second time if he was paid in advance.