How I Spend My Free Time - Part I

Every Saturday morning I go yardsaling for four hours.
Yardsaling.
It's a verb.

Sometime between 7:30 and 8 I pull out of the driveway, ,cellphone to ear, right hand extended turning on the gps. At the train tracks I call my friend Jess. "I'm crossing over the tracks" and she's out the door within 30 seconds. In hand she carries a list of yardsales, carefully culled for choice items, entered into Google Maps to mimimize trip time, and charted in terms of start time, location, and maximum benefit. I drive North about 3/8 of a mile to Honeydew, where I get coffee, and while I'm in there she plugs in the first 3 stops. Then off we go.

Every week I swear I'm not going to spend much. She keeps silent. Not because she mocks me, or doesn't believe me, but because she's too smart to say the same. She knows, and I know, that the pickins are good when you live next to rich towns, with formerly affluent moms, in a down economy.

We catch our share of goodnatured grief. Some may think "I'd never" while others think "I can't" One has said "Who has the time?" while others vouch they surely have enough.

Me? Meh. I live in a tiny house with just enough plus 3 toys - none of which have ever been bought retail. By me anyway. And while she diesn't have it all - by golly, she has all she could want. But i'm ok with it. Beacuse it's limited to one room, and when I bring IN, I also send out.

Our finds are spectacular.
Beautiful wooden easels, ikea tables, stand up pianos. Little tikes, smaller trikes and today, oh joy oh rapture. A dollhouse.

I wasn't looking, I'm not gender biased but she..well, the girl child loves - and I mean loves - her retro 1972 Fisher Price schoolhouse and her 1974 Sesame Street General Store ($7 and $2 respectively). So when I saw the dollhouse, ok, the two dollhouse combined WITH all the parts....I didn't negotiate. How much? Um, sure.

I felt a twinge about the money, more about the space. Until I got it home.

And one little girl played for hours on through the night. The tree went in the house, the boy into the bed, the baby in the swing. She has no use for the Mommy and Daddy doll, nor the sinks, or kitchen. But the cribs? It was baby heaven.