My brother, mother and niece came to spend the weekend with us, to help and add to the excitement. My niece, Hazel was teething so she was tired and semi-cranky. Here is a photo to illustrate her mood:

We were not so motivated the first day because we didn’t sleep much the night before. My family was supposed to arrive at our place around 11:30pmish but were delayed in getting on the road and actually didn;t arrive till about 1:45am. We were waiting up for them and we watched the movie Cloverfield while we waited, it was an interesting movie! It sure kept us awake.

After the family arrived I didn’t get to bed till after 3:15am and we awoke Saturday morning for the first day of the yard sale at 5am! We were a bit lazy on the merchandising and displaying of stuff in our sleep deprived state.

Dixie’s previous owner, Maiden53, came out to our yard sale to check things out and visit with Dixie. It was a good visit and Dixie got lots of good play time in with her old buddies.

Also, we had lots of compliments on our signs and had some great traffic! We made $225 on the first day and ended up closing up at about 1pm since it began to pour rain. We were thankful for our E-Z UP tent when the rain came.

Unfortunately for us our E-Z UP tent was defective or something, as we were taking it apart we noticed that the un-reinforced supports were warping or bending. It was like the screws were tightened too tight when it was assembled in the plant or something because the aluminum supports were bending and caving in.

This was a bummer because we paid like $400 for the tent for my craft business and this is only the second time we have used it. After closing the thing (following the manufactures instructions) it looked like this:

After pulling our hair out about the E-Z UP tent we tried to relax and move on to happier things. We got to observe and enjoy the elk in the meadow a few blocks from our home. My family was amazed and fascinated by them. Here is a photo I shot of the elk:

That evening we swung by the motor home we are going to pay for this weekend so my mom could see it and get an idea of what we still needed for the trek.

The next day we started the yard sale later and were more focused on making the products we were selling look nice. Here is what Sunday’s display looked like:

We made a total of $378 for the weekend and are rid of most of our little knick-knack stuff but none of the furniture or bigger items sold… Sunday’s crowd was considerably smaller and we made less but $378 is better than nothing.

After many yard sale visitors comments about how they would take certain things for free if they didn’t sell we decided that we wouldn’t be freecycling the bigger stuff if we could help it. It’s kind of rude of people to expect to get it for free anyway.

If we are selling it we need the money for it right? Assuming we’ll just give it away for free at the end was just sort of insulting for us… We really could use the extra cash for the move and we need to sell as much as we can as opposed to just giving it away so if you can’t pay the piddly $10.00 we are asking for a dresser you could have bargained for a lower price- we want to get something for it but no we will not give it to you for free when it doesn’t sell. Ugh! I am not going to go on about that much longer, it will just make me mad.

So all in all we made good progress in our moving preparations! Oh and if you are in Flagstaff, AZ and are looking for a good carpet cleaner give SOS Carpet Cleaning a call and tell them I sent you! We just had Kevin (the owner) out for a price quote and are really happy to be doing business with him, he is so friendly and is a great guy!

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I specifically need a digital camera that allows me to change the lens for different types of photos. I really want to be able to shoot macro shots and other close ups on things. I already have a digital camera and I take many photos of the pets and of the garden. It’s nice to be able to capture those special moments! Like this one where my brother is wearing my mom’s sweater (because he is cold) while he is watching me get my first tattoo that my other brother was giving me.

I found another photo that made me laugh so hard when I looked at it. This one is also during the tattoo process.. I was drinking Southern Comfort directly from the bottle a bit and looked very silly, I am wearing mom’s sweater now! It was cold and I was a drunkard.

My tattoo was supposed to be a small star (all us siblings were going to have stars tattooed on us) but the needle broke during the tattoo process. Here is what my finished tattoo looks like, it is a line not a star.

I always take the memorable photos and make a photo collage or a scrapbooking page to give as a gift to those who were in the photo. Memories are great gifts especially when you capture priceless ones! My current digital camera is great and it has captured many fun photos and movies but I am ready for an upgrade maybe a digital SLR camera with some lenses or a nice camcorder that can hook up to the computer! Wink wink…

Here are some videos from the weekend! A video of a chicken pecking my butt at the ranch the day before I got my tattoo and a video of my brother tatooing himself… Enjoy!

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