Over the last two weeks I have been pulling stuff out for our yard sale. To the point that my entire dining room was packed. When Jenny mentioned that it might rain two days before the sale all I could think about was that this crap needed to leave my house, even if that meant driving all of it over to the Goodwill.

Friday turned out to be really pretty, so late in the day Jenny drove some of her items over and I started to bring stuff outside. We tarped it so it wouldn’t get dewy — one of my many yard sale pet peeves. We drove around and put up signs and we both seemed to be getting pretty excited about having stuff leave our lives. Over dinner I looked outside, and then my phone started buzzing with texts reading “OMG WTF IT’S RAINING.” After about 15 minutes it stopped raining and I just figured that it would all work itself out. It had to!

Sat. morning at 6:30 AM it was really pretty, I was sadly still pricing stuff, but I was feeling pretty confident until I saw the scary folks next door pulling out stuff to have a yard sale.

I called Jenny and started freaking out. “I am not going to have any folks drive by and see that crap and think that’s the sale – they’ll refuse to come back to our sale at 9:00!”

So, I started to drag everything I had outside and after getting almost of all of it outside, it started to drizzle. Thinking fast I piled it all together and put the tarp over it. About twenty minutes later Jenny arrived and it seemed like it was going to clear up, so she started to unload her car. The early birds started to arrive. We kept telling them we weren’t ready and they would just hang around watching us unload and asking irritating questions. “Got any electronics? Got any furniture?” Of course Annoying Jewelry Guy came by, calling out “Got any jewelry?” from his car window. That fucker is lazy. Can’t close his doors or even get out of the car.

One guy rode up on his bike and wanted to buy some chairs that Jenny had in the sale. She said something to the effect of “we aren’t open, let us set up. Or make me a crazy offer.” He said he didn’t have any money, but that he had a check for $6000. When we told him to go away he started calling us lesbians and kept telling us to “be nice” and “you need to watch the three Back to the Future movies to learn how to be polite.” In the end both of us were yelling at him to fuck off while he was getting on his bike to pedal away. Wow, is this what the whole morning is going to be like? It’s not even 8:00 AM!

My next door neighbor (on the opposite side) came to the rescue with string and a huge tarp. She MacGyver’d up a tarp canopy over most of our stuff in under 10 minutes. Both of us were rather impressed.

The whole putting the tarp up seemed to make my crazy neighbor even more nuts and he wanted to have some early bird move his car from in front of his house. He started getting more and more upset, saying “I am having a yard sale too. I guess you don’t respect that. That guy is in front of my house waiting for your sale.” Ehg. I honestly hate them. Of course when I went up to the guy and asked if he’d move his car, he refused and sat there waiting for the sale to start for over 45 minutes.

Karl showed up with a few things to sell and helped us finish setting up. We were both feeling a little stressed, but had to laugh when we saw he had brought along one of our favorite signs ever: Nice Quality.

By 8:45 or so, there were about ten early birds just standing around. They kept moving in closer and closer. All of a sudden it was like they simultaneously decided we were set up enough, and they all started poking through our stuff. Rather than try to fight it, we just gave up and decided we were open for business.

This one guy … well, I will let the picture speak for itself.

Keep in mind that it was raining out. How could he not realize?

We really hadn’t gotten to set up in any kind of organized way and we ended up just piling stuff up in the driest locations. We kept joking about how we had accidentally ended up having a “digger sale.”

I wish I had taken more pictures of our stuff, although Jenny pointed out that a lot of it can be seen in our trunk photos. There was definitely some major yard sale catch and release program activity going on.

After a while it did start to clear up, so we spread out stuff into the uncovered areas.

But then it would start sprinkling again. We’d quickly cover stuff up and condense it as much as possible. To add extra excitement, big sloshes of water would occasionally leap off the canopy. The rain was driving us nuts, but we did the best we could. People kept mentioning that we had the best sale around and we’d say “we’re the only people stupid enough to have a sale in the rain.”

Up until noon we really hardly had a time without people looking. A few friends stopped by and a few regular diehard sale people we knew. And a couple of kooks. This one lady stayed for like twenty minutes, holding up clothes one piece at a time and asking what size things were. Karl kept saying she was mentally insane. I personally thought she was on drugs. This was based not only on how she acted, but also on the fact that she was wearing workout clothes, but also toting around a cup of coffee, cigarettes, and a pack of wine coolers. Eventually she bought a sweater for 46 cents and then took off up the street. She then came back realizing she’d left her cup of coffee at the sale, and walked away in the opposite direction.

Around 12:30 we started moving more and more items to the free pile. We were pretty much ready to call it quits, but a couple of women showed up. I told them they could fill a bag for five dollars. This worked great since it got them to take more items away. Once they were done, we moved everything under the tarp and put up a big “ALL FREE” sign. We went inside to work out the money and I ended up making over $400! Jenny made about $150 and I have no idea what Karl raked in from his box of crappy records and other few items. We went out to get some lunch, feeling pretty happy. When we came back, we packed up what was still left and dropped off the dregs at Goodwill. For a sale that almost got rained out, it ended up being not bad at all.