It’s ALL ABOUT ME!

Jennifer and Kelly are trying to raise money for their honeymoon. What better way to raise money than a yard sale? You go through your house, pull out unwanted items, spend a week pricing them, put them out in your yard, and attempt to make your “trash” another person’s “treasure.” Sounds easy enough, right? Jennifer and I worked for an entire week going through every nook and cranny of the house looking for “treasures.” What we found, combined with items from Kelly’s house and Kelly’s mother’s house, gave us plenty of yard sale items. Maybe our items were not “prime” sale items (prime being anything baby oriented), but they were nice.

Last Saturday morning we got up at 4:00 a.m. and carefully arranged all our marketable merchandise. Kelly and Jennifer went around the neighborhood and put up the obligatory signs. Then our sale opened — with little fanfare and no customers. And it went downhill from there! I’ve had yard sales before, but that was the worst one I’ve ever had. Jennifer and I talked it over and decided that our lack of customers must have been a combination of location and the holiday weekend. During the previous week while we pulled out and priced items, we repeated over and over that after the yard sale everything left was going to charity. That quickly changed. Realizing our lack of sales and knowing that we had good items to sale, we decided to try one more time.

Kay was nice enough to offer up her house for our next yard sale attempt. She lives in the city at what we thought was a prime location. Once again, one week after our sucky yard sale, we got up at 4 am and put out our merchandise. This time, we said, everything left really was going to charity. Our sale opened at 7 a.m., and at 6:30 a.m., customers started coming in. We had a tremendous start and it went uphill from there. During the entire day, from 6:30 to noon, we had a steady stream of customers. There were never fewer than 5 customers at a time from 6:30 to 11:30. Things slowed down a bit at 11:30 and we closed things down at noon.

We did end up giving away a lot of stuff in the end because we had some customers who came after the sale had closed and we offered them anything they wanted for free. All of our leftovers, save 3 boxes, were given away and we only had to carry off the 3 remaining boxes. All in all, it was a wonderful day!

Our first yard sale netted 125.00. Today’s gross take was right at 400.00. Kenny and Kendrick had some items in the sale, around 65.00. Jennifer and Kelly’s take was right at 340.00. Was it worth all the work? Absolutely! Am I having another yard sale anytime soon? NEVER!

I was talking to Daddy tonight and he told me, as he had in times past, of hitchhiking home from Auburn. When he wanted to go home, he would hitch from Auburn to Berry - a distance of about 225 miles. These days, we cannot even fathom hitchhiking. It goes against everything we’ve been taught. “If you hitch, only bad things will happen to you.” So it takes some real thought to imagine your parent doing just that 50 odd years ago. Daddy told me about this one particular trip where he got a ride from Auburn to Montgomery (with a “real nice lady”) rather easily and a ride from Auburn to Prattville just as easily. He said in Prattville he waited for hours for the next kindly stranger. Three or possibly four hours. When he found a ride, it was only to Tuscaloser. Once in Tuscaloser, he called his Daddy who, along with his uncle, came to pick him up. Daddy got home late on a Friday night and had to leave early on Sunday morning to catch the bus back home. Why come home for such a short time? In a nutshell, because he was homesick!

I asked why he didn’t hitch back, and he said that he just rode the bus. I suggested that maybe he took the bus because his parents gave him money and he agreed that it was probably the answer. We talked about him going to Auburn and how his parents afforded to send 4 children to school on a minister’s salary. He says that to this day he still doesn’t know how they afforded it, but they did. They paid tuition, room, and board. Room and board in the dorm at that time was 145.50! And that included three meals a day! WOW how things have changed!

I love the talks I have with Daddy. I must get back over there and have more garden time, as we have great “garden talks!”

I sure miss you.

Christopher left this morning at 4:15 a.m. on his way to Texas. We enabled Verizon’s “Chaperone” service which allows a parent to track a child via the GPS locator in the child’s phone. It worked very well. Jimmy and I tracked him from my house to his destination and mapped his progress along the way on a Google map for Kay, Sue, and Grandpa to monitor. Kay said “gee, you could really stalk someone like this” and Jimmy named the map “Stalking Chris.” We had great fun watching him all day (even seeing his MPH) and being sure he arrived safely. He made the trip in record time: 11 hours and 45 minutes.

When we sold Granny’s property, I took some purple flowers that Granny had planted in her yard. Actually, the neighbor suggested I take them and Sue dug them up for me when I expressed my disdain for getting dirt under my fingernails. I planted the flowers in my front flower bed (wearing gloves, of course) and they come up each spring. Every year, they multiply and become fuller. Since they bloom around my birthday, I think of them as my birthday gift from Granny.

Gay, Dennis, Jennifer, Kelly, and I went to a local BBQ cookoff and festival today. It was the usual fare at a BBQ cookoff: BBQ, beer, and live entertainment. Tonight’s headliner was Aaron Tippin. Jennifer, Kelly, and I were not staying for the entire event. We walked around for awhile and had some beer and some BBQ. We went to the stage area with Gay and Dennis to set up their lawn chairs for the evening entertainment and, after setting up their chairs, we sat and talked for a bit.

I was watching the crowd as I usually do. Just people-watching. There was a man standing over to our right that looked familiar. I lifted my sunglasses up a couple of times to get a closer look. Jennifer, noticing what I was doing, asked “What are you looking at?” “Nothing,” I replied. We talked with Gay and Dennis a bit more, then said our goodbyes. As we were walking toward the car, I told Jennifer that I saw a guy standing near the edge of the crowd that looked like Aaron Tippen. She said “It might have been him” and we dropped it.

About 10 minutes later, as we were driving home, I got a text message on my phone. “I KNEW IT WAS HIM,” I exclaimed excitedly. Jennifer and Kelly looked at me for an instant and Jennifer understood. “I knew that was Aaron Tippen” I explained to Kelly and showed him the text that I had just received from Gay:

I talked with Gay later. She said that when she went and asked Aaron if she could take a picture with him, he said “Sure, but I’m his cousin.” A quick check online confirms, via the tattoo on his arm, that it is, indeed, Aaron Tippin!

**Update: Per Gay, the local radio station announced that this was, indeed, a double. Oh well, it was fun!