Garage Sales and Mini-Vacations

The first garage sale was a big success. We borrowed almost 30 long folding tables from the library, and filled them all. The driveway was lined with furniture. We started the sale at 7:15 am, and we were done by 12:30. I couldn't believe it, but almost everything was GONE by then. We filled a couple of boxes to take to Goodwill, kept a couple of boxes of stuff to try and sell again, and threw a couple trash bags full of junk away. One of our friends was a missionary in South Africa for several years, and he and his family just moved back to the States, so they came over and took a bunch of furniture and games for the kids.

The coolest part of the day happened when we got rid of all the stuffed animals. My mom had this HUGE collection of teddy bears (hundreds of them) and we tried to give them away to various charities, but no one could take slightly used stuffed animals. We gave some to her friends and sold a few at the garage sale. We had just put all the remaining ones into two or three huge trash bags to try and resell when a car pulled up and a man hopped out asking if we still had stuffed animals left. He said that one of his relatives was an EMT, and that they gave hurt kids stuffed animals in the ambulance rides. He didn't care if they were slightly used, so he took all of them off our hands for $10. It was awesome.

We have another sale planned for Labor Day weekend, and then the house will be empty. It's such a relief to be getting close to done. We've spent 8 of the last 10 weekends working on the house, and it's really exhausting. Hopefully only two more to go, though, then the house will be put up for sale! We did find something last weekend that made all the work worthwhile... I'll post pics sometime soon (our motherboard crashed a couple of weeks ago, so no digital photo action for a while until we get the new computer built).

We're really looking forward to this weekend - we're going up to Seattle from Friday through Wednesday to visit some friends from college. We'll stay with one of our aerospace classmates, who married one of my best friends from my schol hall. My roomie for two years is coming up from San Francisco with some of her post-college friends, and there's another girl from our schol hall who lives in the area that we hope to see, too. We haven't seen my roomie for several years, and she's been through a lot in those years, so it will be really nice to see her and catch up with her. We're going to celebrate Jeff's birthday one day early at what we hope is a really great restaurant - Canlis. I've been perusing their menu and wine list today, and I'm just drooling with anticipation! Anyway, it will be nice to get away from taking care of the estate stuff at my mom's house for a while, and spend some time with good friends. I'll be sure to post some pics when we get back.