"Will you take a nickel for this?"...

... was how our garage sale started on Friday and wrapped up Saturday afternoon.
Here are the highlights:

1. Total profits for the Libutti Family: about $180, all of which is going towards our new camera. (See post about our vacation to see why a new camera is needed.) Not bad for getting rid of stuff I didn't need anymore in 25 cent to 2 dollar increments.

2. Michaela and Jenna were less than thrilled about giving up some of their 6,785,537,931 stuffed animals that are scattered all over the house. Even though we had spent an entire evening the night before Michaela's first day of school going through all of them, separating them into "Sell" and "Keep" piles, and everyone was on board with the plan to ACTUALLY NOT KEEP THE ONES MARKED "SELL", when they saw me unpacking the 67 bags of stuffed animals THEY WANTED TO SELL, they screamed in disbelief:"Why is THIS HERE?!?... This is my SPECIAL (fill in the blank with doggy, kitty, rabbit, bear, froggy)!!!" and then somehow attached a special event to each one: "This is the bear that Daddy got me when he went to (fill in the blank here with Texas, Michigan, Chicago, Hartford)!!! I can't get rid of THIS!!"
My dad, who dislikes getting rid of things in general and often shops at his own garage sales, took much mercy on the girls and literally BOUGHT BACK some of the stuffed animals for the girls.

3. The funniest thing from the garage sale was watching my parents' neighbors watching us. The garage sale was at their house and the neighbors are mostly non-English speaking Chinese who actually run a Chinese restaurant in town. They have a bit of a staring problem in general, as if we are just fascinating creatures to behold, and often during the summer would stand on their back deck and just stare at us swimming. For like 10 minutes at a time. Barely blinking.

Well, you can imagine the curious stares we got when the driveway was set up like a storefront and all these people were milling around. They looked at us with incredible bemusement and wonder, like "How did you get all this stuff? What are you doing with it? And how did these people know to COME HERE??" They wandered over to our driveway several times, nodding at us and smiling- they really couldn't be more pleasant- and at one point stood about three feet in front of the card table where my mom was sitting, taking the money, and stared at her. For like five minutes. So my mom just smiled and waved and they seemed kind of startled, like "OOOOHHH! You CAN see me here! I guess I'm NOT invisible!!"

4. Some of my more longtime readers will remember that last year at our garage sale, a woman asked to use our bathroom-"It's an emergency!" she said- and when she emerged from the bathroom announced, "I stunk up your bathroom! Your house is real nice!"

We didn't have anyone like that but did have a guy who walked around the sale for about 45 minutes, asked for a bathroom scale and when I brought one out he told me the scale doesn't work, which in fact it does. It turns out he was trying to weigh some silverplate serving trays which actually were kind of pretty and certainly useful but my mom didn't want anymore.

He brings about five trays up to the card table checkout area and says, "How much do you want for these? They're junk and nobody wants them."

Wow. There's really no need to insult the merchandise.