Singin' and the rain
Usually twice a year, our town holds a townwide garage sale. Not one where everyone gets dibs on a little space in a community lot or anything; the idea is just that tons of people host sales all over the town on the same day, rain or shine, and it's a big draw for bargain-hunters from all over the area. The Chamber of Commerce makes up a little directory of locations and hands out maps and gives balloons to everyone who signs up (and pays, a modest amount) to hold a sale that day.
So, the spring 2006 sale was on Sunday, and we signed up as participants, largely because my sister and brother-in-law who moved to a new house last summer had tons of crap they wanted to sell. So we planned to have a nice dinner on Saturday night, and do a slumber party and get an early start on Sunday, making some money, schmoozing with some neighbors and enjoying the lovely spring weather.
Mission accomplished, except for the weather, which was pretty much all rain and no shine, all weekend. So we drove to dinner instead of walking -- no biggie, and we had an amazing meal at our favorite little Thai restaurant, and my brother-in-law footed the bill, so even better. And then we came home and the Smelmooo built a fire, which was perfect, and we played board games and drank and ate Easter candy and sang karaoke.
A quick aside on karaoke: Kenny Rogers was on Ellen the other day (he didn't do an interview, just performed, which was a shame, because I wanted them to talk about his crazy plastic surgery), and at the beginning of the show Ellen had the audience members pair up to sing "Islands in the Stream," and it was absolutely hilarious. My new mission is to secure that song on a karaoke CD before our next gathering; that may even merit a second microphone for more compelling duet performances.
Anyway, we were fairly raucous during the karaoke segment of the evening; I was wearing my favorite pink pajama pants and rocking out to pretty much every song. Around 10:30, my sister and I were having a grand old time singing a duet from Grease when....
What? Tell you more, tell you more? Okay, then...the doorbell rang, and we just froze. Could the neighbors hear our singing? Should we be more embarrassed about making too much noise or about our choice of songs or our complete inability to carry a tune?
Now, I'm normally no big fan of assumed traditional gender roles, but we all turned to the Smelmooo for door-opening duty (I was wearing pink pants! I couldn't open the door and be yelled at!). It turned out that our neighbor had noticed that we had a power line down in front of our house that was hanging into the street, in the rain; the guys who did our siding, it turned out, did a lousy job of reattaching the wire when they were done with that part of the house. So not a huge biggie, and the neighbor didn't mention our bad, boisterous singing, but the whole thing was kind of a buzzkill, so we packed it in.
We got up early on Sunday morning to rain, rain, rain. Not thunderstorms or huge downpours, but a steady, bone-chilling kind of heavy drizzle. We put up a little tent, which the Smelmooo had luckily gotten earlier in the week, and lay down a tarp, but we still spent a good portion of the morning trying to bail out the roof of the tent, which we put together a little unevenly, so there were pockets of water pooling up and leaking on our merchandise. It was a little pathetic, really:
We ended up having a fun time, despite being a little soggy; we pulled in an okay amount of money, and my normally reserved brother-in-law was enjoying chatting up the customers and spewing these absurd, over-the-top sales pitches out of nowhere: "Look at those beautiful sunglasses! I think you need them; they have those little shields on the sides that really block out the glare on days like this!" Most of the customers appreciated him, although a few sort of looked at him like he was nuts and hurried away.
Our best sale of the day? The infamous Kiss shirt. Hallelujah!
So, the spring 2006 sale was on Sunday, and we signed up as participants, largely because my sister and brother-in-law who moved to a new house last summer had tons of crap they wanted to sell. So we planned to have a nice dinner on Saturday night, and do a slumber party and get an early start on Sunday, making some money, schmoozing with some neighbors and enjoying the lovely spring weather.
Mission accomplished, except for the weather, which was pretty much all rain and no shine, all weekend. So we drove to dinner instead of walking -- no biggie, and we had an amazing meal at our favorite little Thai restaurant, and my brother-in-law footed the bill, so even better. And then we came home and the Smelmooo built a fire, which was perfect, and we played board games and drank and ate Easter candy and sang karaoke.
A quick aside on karaoke: Kenny Rogers was on Ellen the other day (he didn't do an interview, just performed, which was a shame, because I wanted them to talk about his crazy plastic surgery), and at the beginning of the show Ellen had the audience members pair up to sing "Islands in the Stream," and it was absolutely hilarious. My new mission is to secure that song on a karaoke CD before our next gathering; that may even merit a second microphone for more compelling duet performances.
Anyway, we were fairly raucous during the karaoke segment of the evening; I was wearing my favorite pink pajama pants and rocking out to pretty much every song. Around 10:30, my sister and I were having a grand old time singing a duet from Grease when....
What? Tell you more, tell you more? Okay, then...the doorbell rang, and we just froze. Could the neighbors hear our singing? Should we be more embarrassed about making too much noise or about our choice of songs or our complete inability to carry a tune?
Now, I'm normally no big fan of assumed traditional gender roles, but we all turned to the Smelmooo for door-opening duty (I was wearing pink pants! I couldn't open the door and be yelled at!). It turned out that our neighbor had noticed that we had a power line down in front of our house that was hanging into the street, in the rain; the guys who did our siding, it turned out, did a lousy job of reattaching the wire when they were done with that part of the house. So not a huge biggie, and the neighbor didn't mention our bad, boisterous singing, but the whole thing was kind of a buzzkill, so we packed it in.
We got up early on Sunday morning to rain, rain, rain. Not thunderstorms or huge downpours, but a steady, bone-chilling kind of heavy drizzle. We put up a little tent, which the Smelmooo had luckily gotten earlier in the week, and lay down a tarp, but we still spent a good portion of the morning trying to bail out the roof of the tent, which we put together a little unevenly, so there were pockets of water pooling up and leaking on our merchandise. It was a little pathetic, really:
We ended up having a fun time, despite being a little soggy; we pulled in an okay amount of money, and my normally reserved brother-in-law was enjoying chatting up the customers and spewing these absurd, over-the-top sales pitches out of nowhere: "Look at those beautiful sunglasses! I think you need them; they have those little shields on the sides that really block out the glare on days like this!" Most of the customers appreciated him, although a few sort of looked at him like he was nuts and hurried away.
Our best sale of the day? The infamous Kiss shirt. Hallelujah!
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