It's the Most Wonderful Time...

My sweet blog has once again decided to space itself, so I do apologize. It's wonky and making me crazy, but I'm giving in. Hope you can read it anyway.

First of all, I have to say that this picture is totally cracking me up. I had literally been running around in the rain all day, and I didn't realize I looked as tired as I felt. http://whatiwore2day.blogspot.com/ has spoiled me from posing in any normal way. So that pretty much explains the picture. Kind of...

So anyway, the weekend after my birthday is usually the first garage sale weekend kick off. And boy was it. The boys stayed with Allen, to play video games until their brains leaked out of their ears, and Laney and I took off for some sweet girl time.

I just love garage sales. That's pretty well known, and obvious to boot. But here's the reasons why.

I've been dreaming of these books by Warren Weirsbe for a long time. Oak Mountain Presbyterian had a church wide garage sale to benefit adoption, and we hit that first. I got the whole set of books, and they were 25 cents each. I was so happy! They are books for each book of the Bible. I grabbed up the book on Ruth/Esther to read first, since we are already studying Esther, and it is so good! I was such a happy camper.

Laney and I found more great treasures at that sale, and we were just tickled! Laney's favorite was a Hello Kitty digital clock for her room. I love coming downstairs in the morning, and saying, "Hey sweetie, when did you get up?" and her saying, "At 7:24." Hilarious!

So we found a neighborhood garage sale on 119, and those are my absolute favorite. You can park your car and just walk from sale to sale. This one house is going down in garage sale history.

So as I walked up to the garage sale, I heard the lady say, "Well, that's $3, but I'll take less. Just make an offer. I'm willing to negotiate..." which was good to hear. I'm not good at wheeling and dealing at garage sales, really. I figure it's already cheap already, so if I don't want to pay what they have on it, I need to just move along. But, occasionally, especially if I'm buying a whole bunch of stuff, I'll ask someone, so politely and timidly, if they'd take less for something, half expecting them to say "no." But, since she threw it out there, I figured, "Why not?"

So there was this dress. Not a dress that I would normally be in the market for, but cool and interesting enough to get my attention. I have a 20 year high school reunion coming up next summer (excuse me while I fall into a dead faint) and I thought, "Ohhhh, this might be cool..." It was $5, which was more than I'd pay for a dress that I might wear one day. I guess this is a good time to tell you that it's a size (FINE, several sizes) smaller than I wear now. But, since I so desperately want to lose weight, I thought, "Why not get this super cool dress to wear, and have it like something to work towards?" Not that I have a closet full of clothes that I am "working towards" but I feel myself drifting from the whole point of this now too long story.

SO, I go up to the nice lady, and say, "Would you mind taking $3 for this?" since, mind you, she had JUST said she was taking less for everything. (This was late in the morning-close to the time that prices do start to be sliced. The thought of the items marching off to the Hannah Home tend to make people take whatever you're willing to give them for what they don't to donate for free...) I totally expected her to say, "Sure" and us be done.

But, she wrinkled up her nose, looked at the dress and heaved a *huge* sigh. I was slightly surprised, but decided to see where this was going. She said, "You know, this dress is from Cache." Yep, lady, I saw that. I can read. I guess she's mourning the fact that she and her daughter, I guess, went to the Galleria and into the kinda swanky store Cache and bought this sorta fancy dress. "It was EIGHTY DOLLARS, you know..." she went on. At this point, an old phrase that my dad used to say went flying through my head. It's not nice, lemme tell you, and there are some things from my childhood that I squelch down and some come bubbling when I least expect it.



So she says, "It was EIGHTY DOLLARS" and I thought, "Well, that sounds like a personal problem to me." Thanks, Dad. That phrase comes in handy SO OFTEN. Anyway, I pulled together a sympathetic look and waited for her to go on.

And here is the kicker.

She looks at me head to toe, wrinkles up that nose and SAYS, "Will it even fit you?"

Let's pause while you take that in.

I pulled myself up to all 5 feet and 4 and 1/4 inches of myself and said, "Well, not yet. But it will." And I looked her square in the eye. It wasn't about the $3 anymore. I was m.a.d.

She huffily took my $3, and I took that dang dress. I was close to the van before it was funny. I was home before it was really funny. I told Allen my story, and his eyes got big. He's normally a very, "Eh, what's the big deal?" kinda guy, but he was like, "Wow!" Then, I squirmed my way into that too-small dress and we laughed so hard I was crying. He said, "I can just see you going to your reunion just like that..." and we laughed even harder. Oh me. I don't know if I'll be in this dress by then, but I have two super skinny sisters that might want a really cool, super expensive dress from Cache. Oh me.

And it ain't over yet. I go down to the next house (yes, I was undeterred, the garage sale warrior that I am) and it was these very nice Asian ladies who had the garage sale. Well, they had great stuff, and I could immediately tell I had hit the jack pot. I quickly scooped up things for Laney, and then headed to the adult section. I bought tons of stuff for me, which made me so very happy. Most all of it was $1 each. So the outfit in the first picture, including that purse I love so much, was $3. Well, the shoes were new, from Target. They were $30, I think, so my outfit was $33. The sweater was the super soft, black fuzzy material. When I went to wash it, I died laughing, because the tag was in Chinese. Yep. Evidently that nice Asian lady brought all her clothes to America from China, or ordered them from China while she was here, and all the tags are written in Chinese. Oh well. Most of the stuff didn't fit, which is okay too. I put them in the Cache dress pile. Hopefully I'll be in them soon.

So, it was a great first day of garage sale season, and I was such a happy camper. Until...

I was watching the Today Show, and this frugal guy was on there, who touts himself as America's cheapest man. Fine for him. I'm pretty cheap too. But he said something that made me think. He said that Americans are obsessed with getting stuff for cheap, when what we should be obsessed with is NOT getting stuff at all.

Thanks, dude, for taking the wind out of my sails. So I had fun, got some new threads, but he reminded me that cheap stuff isn't necessary stuff. It's still stuff that I'm going to have to get rid of someday. So I'm still garage saleing with my list firmly in mind. Things that I NEED. Really. Truely. Not just more junk to junk up my life.

And hopefully I'll post a picture next summer of me, in my $80 Cache dress, at my reunion. And I'll never forget that darn dress. :)