Garage Sale Days Revisited
This weekend officially begins the garage sale season. Or as Strongbad puts it, the ‘gar-bage sale’ season. This season will be different however as the misses and I are actually planning on hosting one of our very own garage sales. Ladies will be required to wear extravagant big hats to the event and everyone will be rewarded with huge glass pitchers of Mint Juleps and a chance to enter into the afternoon Bocce Ball tournament. There’s no official date yet for this ‘not-to-be-missed’ sale but trust me you will kick yourself if you don’t come. I’ve got a collection of half burned down candles that I know you are just dying to buy. It’s really going to be a winning situation for all buyers. Hell, just throw whatever you bought from me on ebay and include a note that you bought it from world-class and internationally respected blogger, afrojet. Surely the value of said item will launch bidding wars from Nova Scotia to Zanzibar. I’m actually thinking I might include the old Solid State Hi-Fi in the sale. It’s not that I don’t use and love it still, but it is a heavy beast and the thought of hauling it around to any new location that we move to makes my lower back hurt just thinking about it.

Several neighbors on the block are running their own sales today and through the weekend. Too bad for them it’s raining horizontally and 40 degrees outside. One neighbor whose garage is perpetually overflowing with junk (mostly children’s outdoor plastic crap, dozens of signs warning back alley traffic to slow down so they don’t run over their yappy little offspring and hundreds of woven baskets and other ‘home accents’ that were picked up on sale at TJ Maxx and Tuesday Morning and have overtime become frayed and greasy). They have ceremoniously draped the entire alley with hanging ropes of connected triangular plastic flags that alternate blue, yellow and red – transforming our alley into something resembling a children’s go-cart course. I’m pretty sure that to prepare for their garage sale they randomly put small denomination prices on post-it notes, walked into their garage and threw the notes in the air allowing them to cascade down on their dusty treasures. I’m worried they are setting a tone for the whole block, one that will leave a bad taste amongst the hard-core garage sale set and cast a dark cloud of doubt on the future and success of other garage sales – namely ours. Competitive Garage Selling: the blood sport of the new millennium.

Also, a few of the fine reads that I found on the library shelves of Canoe Bay: Color : A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay (More on Victoria Finlay here and here), Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World
by Simon Garfield, and The Book Nobody Read : Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich (a fascinating memoir of Gingerich’s inquiry into whether anybody even read Copernicus dissertation, De Revolutionibus, which posited among other astrological finds that the Earth actually revolves around the Sun).