the day after

The garage sale is over. We had variously advertised it for 9:00 or 10:00 to 1:00 or 4:00 but one old girl still arrived at about 7:20. I was walking to the house to get the coffee pot so I just ignored her. She turned around and left. Then about 10:30 she arrived back and I saw her talking to Marilyn. She was madder than a wet hen at that point. Apparently she wanted to buy that stupid patio swing set that we used to have on the deck in town. The cushions on it were completely shot and the top for it blew off several years ago in a wind storm. We put a $10 price on it thinking that maybe somebody would be stupid enough to save us the bother of hauling it to the dump and sure enough, somebody was. But the old girl was convinced that she had missed the bargain of the day. How she thought she was going to transport it in her Taurus is another question.

Our customers covered a wide spectrum of humanity. Later in the day we had more residents of the reservation but we had everything from hardcore garage salers who arrived before 8:00 to the likes of Ferd who just came for a visit. We didn't make a fortune but we sure got rid of a lot of stuff. Although you would never know how much we got rid of if you were to look in the house.

Late in the afternoon we had a rookie cop show up to see about renting the house. I don't know whether they would have been serious about renting it because we ended up phoning them later in the evening and telling them that there is no way we could have it ready on their schedule. She gets posted to Nipawin starting on July 17 at which time we intend to be in the middle of our summer in Mara. If we were going to rent the house we would have to at a minimum hang drywall in the master bedroom and redo the floor covering in that whole end of the house. That simply isn't going to happen before we leave for Mara and we don't want to rent it badly enough to put off our trip to BC. We told her that if they are still interested in renting in September then they should give us a call.

Sometime this week we will start heading west. I've got some calls to make in SW Sask and Marilyn is going to spend a week writing for Alison. We will head out sometime toward the end of the week and camp at Kincaid for a few days and then move to Airdrie for a few days before heading for Mara. Alison and Camiel want us to cater a pitchfork fondue at the end of June which will dovetail nicely with Marlan's graduation. We'll get settled in at Mara and then come back for the fondue and graduation. Then we'll spend all of July at Mara and maybe part of August.

The only downside to this plan is that we will likely miss the raspberries. They are shaping up to actually have a small crop this year. I don't think we'll be missing a lot but they look a lot better than they did this time last year. Of course last year they got frozen off on Victoria Day weekend and never really recovered.

We hired Fred to mow grass and he was here all Saturday morning. He seems to enjoy the mower - it's like a real tractor and I'm sure he's never driven a real tractor before. He's not as fast as he could be but he seems to be careful. I ended up finishing the mowing in the afternoon. I'm well pleased with the new tractor and particularly with the mower. I had one of those Land Pride mowers when we were on the acreage west of the river. They build really good stuff. I can do a good job of mowing with the tractor travelling at a faster speed than I am comfortable sitting on it at so that is about as good as it gets. I think I could mow the whole yard starting at 8:00 and be done well before noon which is a huge change from the way we used to do it. I like having the yard looking nice but I resent yardwork when it gets in the way of lake time.