In with the new, out with the old.

- Do pilates video - check.
- Refill the cats' food and water bowl - check.
- Make bed - check.
- Pet cats and toss the mouse around to Wyatt a bit - check.
- Throw in another load of laundry (I cannot complain about laundry now that I have that lovely new washer) - check.
- Do pilates video - check
- Blog about tag sale - almost check.

Today I got home at 7pm. Miraculous! I wonder what I could do with myself if I always got home this early. I'm sure I'd be a much more prolific blogger, that's for sure.

Anyway, as promised, here is the blog about the tag sale. Doug and I participated in a town-wide tag sale, held by the Unitarian Universalist church in Dedham. Doug had been for months talking about having a tag sale and while I didn't think that we had much junk to warrant one all on our own, I thought that setting up a table at the one in town would be perfect. And it was, in a way. It cost us $30 to rent a table and a space on the green from 8am to 2pm. Our goal was to break even at this event, and we did, but barely.

Friday night we went around the house searching for stuff to sell, as we only had one small box of a few pocket books, the old kitchen canisters, and our chalk board already set aside in a tag sale pile. Doug scoured the basement while I scoured the upstairs and the first floor, looking on shelves, in drawers, in closets, in boxes, in bins, for stuff that we could stand parting with. We came up with a goodly amount of stuff, though a few items Doug was a little iffy about (like the pink bunny bank and the teapot lamp). We had some other stuff, too, not in these photos, like old lamps, one of the old end tables that I got from Ames in the Ames going-out-of-business-sale that we have no room/use for now, an old shower caddy... stuff like that.

Set-up for the tag sale began at 7:30am, and I was told by the church lady with whom I made the table reservation that to get the best spot we'd want to get there right at 7:30. So Doug and I quickly threw all of our stuff into the car and headed over to the church bright and early on that rather chilly Saturday morning and got there at about 7:40. To our surprise, there were only about 6 other tables on the green. Maybe not everyone had arrived yet, we thought. We got our table from the church guy, set up on the perimeter of the green, and got to setting up our goods. As all experienced tag-salers know, early birds are inevitable, and there were early birds at this tag sale. I mean no disrespect whatsoever to the African immigrant population who comes out early to tag sales, but from 7:30 through 9am we only had African women whose native language was not English (and they were not speaking a French dialect, either, so I don't believe they were Haitian) rummaging through our stuff. And these ladies are ruthless with their bargaining. I was selling about 8 bags - 5 pocket books and 3 tote/duffel bags. One lady wanted all 5 pocketbooks for $6, even though I posted their price at $3 each, which was a steal - I tend to use my pocket books for 6 months, throw them into my box of bags, and then never use them again. When I said no, I couldn't go that low on them, the lady put one back and then offered me $4 for the rest. Ha! I still said no. Of course, I ended up selling all of my pocket books before the tag sale even officially started and sold 3 of them for $6 to one lady and the rest of the bags to another lady for $6. Great - $12 towards our break-even goal of $30 and six hours to go...

The morning was rather chilly. Really rather unpleasant, though it was not raining. Doug and I finished setting up our stuff, making sales to the non-native English speakers and at 9:10 (the hands of time were watching our every move that day) decided that it was very cold and we needed a)something warm to drink, and b) breakfast. Here are some photos of our set-up, me demonstrating how cold it is, and us making note of how long we'd been at the tag sale thus far: After Doug finished his little mini photo-shoot, he walked over to Cafe Fresh Bagel (the one in Dedham) and got us some bagel sandwiches and him a latte and me a hot tea (I only do iced coffee... haven't graduated my habit into hot coffee). While he was gone I sold a couple more things, but business was really, really slow. I knew this was the way it would be for the rest of the day. Tag sales always, always have a flurry of activity early on (it's those hard-bargaining early birds!) and then another little flutter around lunch-time, but are pretty much dead at all other times.

Doug and I used the down time to catch up with each other, talk about where we could go next on a vacation, what was going on at work, what we wanted to do that weekend, why we weren't Unitarian Universalists (one purchaser of goods told his aging father that he should buy something that we had offered him for free because we were Unitarian Universalists. We told him we were not, in fact, Unitarian Universalists, to which he said maybe we should be. We didn't really respond. It was a tag sale, not a forum for religious discussion), and why the lady next to us was selling two giant boxes full of brand new toothbrushes, all for $1 each (and she wasn't budging on the price). We also surveyed the rest of the tag-sale land to scope out our competition.This is about the extent of the competition. Kind of sad, isn't it. Makes one think that Dedham is a pretty small and pathetic town. But the good news about this is that Doug and I didn't spend any money on other people's stuff, because there really wasn't much to pick from.

Moving on. Pretty much at each half-hour increment Doug and I tried to re-market our goods. We'd re-arrange the set-up of the table, and eventually Doug created a free zone. Our stuff started to move again once we had that free zone, but we still had to convince a lot of people to take away our stuff. "Take it - it's free!" isn't as enticing an opening line as I thought it would be. Nevertheless, by 1:20pm the sun had come out and we were down to just a couple of items in the free zone and a few things in the pay area.We ended up selling the wallet you see here and we gave away the career book to someone whom I don't believe spoke or read English at all (that's why we gave it to her for free), but we came home with the bunny bank, the lamp shade, and the teapot lamp. That's it! That's all! Poof - junk be gone. After doing the math, we determined that we sold $45 worth of stuff, but if you subtract the money for the table and space, that leaves us with a net of $15. And if you subtract the $10 Doug spent on breakfast and the $1 on the Coke we bought from the church guy, that leaves us with $4 profit for about 6 hours of work. But hey, it was fun and we purged our stuff, so we are certainly in no way complaining about it. We even thought we'd participate next year, but we really don't have any more stuff that we'd like to sell. We could sell your stuff, though!