My plans to liveblog the entire garage sale fell by the wayside, obviously. I didn’t have time to jot down all the stuff that happened.

Here are a few bits I remember:

• My comics were left virtually untouched until late on Saturday. Then, about an hour before we packed up, there was a run on them. Three people simultaneously decided to pick through the boxes, crowding each other, searching for Star Wars comics. I made $48 in just a few minutes.
• On Friday afternoon, Lane stopped by. Lane has been reading foldedspace for about a year, but we’d never met. He chatted briefly on the front sidewalk before Kris and I excused ourselves to go eat. (We were starving after a long day.) As we sat in The Bomber, waiting for our food, we realized we should have invited Lane to join us. (Lane, you’re welcome to drop by any time, by the way, just to hang out and chat, to give us the history of the neighborhood, etc.)
• Because I spent Thursday and Friday working the garage sale, I was hoping to do yardwork on Saturday. I figured Kris would take my place in the driveway. However, she seemed to repel customers. Whenever she joined us, the customers would vanish. Whenever she left, we’d get a fresh rush of people. It was strange. And frustrating. I know I was just being superstitious, but I let Kris do her thing, figuring I could mow the lawn in the evening.
• In the evening, though, I was too tired to mow. Instead, we went to dinner at Cha!Cha!Cha! with Mac and Pam. (I didn’t care for Cha Cha Cha the first time I ate there, but I’ve come to appreciate it. The Mexican food is good, and best of all, it’s cheap. For $4.50 I can order six small tacos. It’s a good meal.)

When the garage sale was finished, we had collected $555. (We earned $123.50 on Thursday, $206 on Friday, and $225.50 on Saturday (nearly all of which came between noon and four).) Courtney claimed $25, Pam $35, Mac $57, Kris $135, and J.D. $304. I made big money because of my comic books and compact discs. It’s sad to think of how much money I poured into these two items over the past twenty years (thousands of dollars), but it feels good to have purged some of this stuff while getting some cash in return.

I actually earned a bit more for the weekend. On Friday, I took three boxes of books to Powell’s. The book buyer was stand-offish at first, but soon grew talkative. “You’ve got a lot of good stuff here. My games manager is going to be happy. These are great chess books. And we hardly ever get go books. These are great.” He answered questions for me about the book-buying process. He explained why certain books are rejected. (I thought they’d buy my baseball books, for example, until he explained that, for whatever reasons, their system is glutted with them right now.) When he’d finished, he said, “Yowza! That was a good buy.” I left with $192 in store credit (which sounds keen until you realize I spent hundreds of dollars on those chess books ten years ago).

My total earnings for the weekend were $496.

I planned to mow the lawn on Sunday morning, but a storm passed through Saturday night, leaving the ground wet and unmowable. The sun came out briefly in the early afternoon, and perhaps I might have mowed the grass except that we joined Andrew, Courtney, and Henry for a Portland Beavers baseball game.

“I might be able to get the lawn mowed this afternoon,” I told Andrew in the middle of the game. “The rain seems to have held off.”

“It looks stormy,” I said to Kris as we walked back to our car. We stopped near the front gates of Lincoln High School to watch a squirrel with a treasure: a half-eaten apple. Just then, the rain began to fall.

It rained heavily for several hours, and is only now just letting up. I suspect the lawn will remain unmowed for a couple more days. It’s going to be ugly tall when I get to it.