The Chronicles of Ordinaria

Today I called my hand doctor, because I had a question about my new thumb problem. I was wondering when I had seen him and realized I could check my blog. That's when I realized that all this stuff that's been going on has gone unchronicled. I thought, "Well, what if I want to look this stuff up a year from now?" I can't imagine I would want to, but you never know. So basically this post is just putting down information for my future curious self (ha ha I typed "elf" like I'm going to have a future curious elf!) so you probably won't want to read it and it's going to be VERY long. I found it all tiresome at the time except for the kitty.

Let's see, okay, we got back from the beach very late on Saturday night, June 21st. I rested for a day and a half. Monday night, My Sweetie went to pick up his Mom so she could spend the night with us (a first!) and go with me to the house to help out on Tuesday. She was very helpful and organized all the jewelry (there was a lot!) in the nice big jewelry box by value per shelf. She also had lots of advice about stuff. Oh and we stopped on the way over there to do the newspaper ad for the estate sale. On Wednesday after MOW I went back to the house and worked for 5 hours organizing and displaying things. Thursday night, My Sweetie and I went back to the house and worked together for several hours. Friday I went to the house early. I stopped to get bubble wrap and a few other things and worked for a while, then My Sweetie came over after work and we worked late into the night putting the price tags on everything. I don't even remember what we did for dinner, but my guess is he ran out for Taco Bueno.

We rode home together (I left my truck at the house) and pretty much went straight to bed. The alarm went off 5 minutes later and I pretty much had just enough time to shower and get ready. The newspaper ad and Craig's List ad said "10 to 6." What part of "10 to 6" do people not understand??!!? Oh yeah, the "10" part. We pulled into the driveway at 9:40 and some man ran up and I said, "The sale starts at TEN." By 9:50, there were about 15 people piled onto the front porch doing that hand over the brow thing looking through the glass door like crazy people. I had a sign-in sheet on a little table in the entryway. The entryway was my post. I could check people coming and going, had a clear view of the jewelry, and we both had our Home Depot aprons on for money. (I had come up with that idea when my brother and I did my Dad's estate sale.) Well we opened that door at 10:00 sharp and an insane man ran in like he was being chased by a bear and refused to sign in. I was pretty pissed off and yelled " 'Sweetie' that man didn't sign in!" Actually, he ran a scribble across the page, but that's the same thing. The other people could see I was mad and they all signed in. Some of them told me they recognized him from other sales and they hated him too. I still hate that guy.

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The entryway got pretty crowded and crazy with people stacking stuff and coming and going. People were saying, "Can I put my stuff here?" and I don't have good people recognition skills, so my brain was going all "Crazy polka-dot shirt, there. Guy with ugly beard there." And I was also adding stuff up on the calculator and trying to get people in and out. Once a lady leaned over one of the piles and I said, "That's someone's stuff." and she looked at me weird and said, "That's me." or something like that. My brain is wired funny. After what I thought was 3 hours, things slowed down and my in-laws showed up so I asked my MIL to watch the jewelry so I could step out for a smoke. I looked at my watch and only an hour had passed. AN HOUR! I seriously thought 3 hours had passed. After that it went in stages of busy and not so much. We met Delbert and Shirl who have been back many times and keep buying stuff. I just met with them last night again. Delbert reminds me of Danny Glover's character in Grand Canyon. He's even a mechanic. They are awesome people. I also had this really annoying Irish guy with really bad teeth keep coming back. He kept buying weird stuff that was missing stuff. He was tiresome. I was SO GLAD when it was 6:00. We didn't have too much to do to get out of there, but I was exhausted and not only didn't want to drive, but thought it would be a good idea to leave my truck there in case any of the random people thought the house would be empty that night.

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Sunday we went back to gather some things and get my truck and meet with Delbert & Shirl again. And Crazy Irish Guy came back to get something. Oh and speaking of crazy guys, there was this giant dude that was bouncing all over the place on Saturday and he yells out (from my daughter's old room) "I found a girl's diary in this closet!" I said, "Put that back and close that closet door." Then I told My Sweetie to put a sign on that closet saying "nothing in here for sale" because she had left some other stuff too. So on Sunday I went in there to get her journal. And there was no journal. How gross is that? We stayed for quite a while and packed up all the little valuable things to bring home. I was so tired that Monday morning I slep right through a phone call from MOW asking me to train someone on Wednesday. I called them back and said yes.

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I got to the church Wednesday a little later than I had said but there was no one there. Well there was another regular MOW guy but he said he had seen no one. I called MOW and they said they had talked to her that morning. I was getting irritated because I was going to have her pack everything to learn the "hands on" way but decided to start without her. I did some basic stuff and then went back outside to see if maybe they went to the wrong entrance or something. This little car pulls up with TWO blondes in it and one yells out "Are you 'Geewits'? " They're all, "We got lost!" Ha ha ha to that when they told me where they lived. They live like 3 miles from there. WTF? I figured out how we would all fit in the car and had them pack the rest of the stuff up. They were very ditzy and obviously had not paid any attention to their initial training at the MOW office. One of my personality quirks is I respond to the company I am with. These ditzy blondes turned me into a dry Bob Newhart sort of person. They thought I was hilarious. We were going throught this one area and I said, "Was that Staghorn or Shagbark?" referring to the street names. Then I said "I guess they were reading Tolkien when they named these streets." To them that was the funniest thing ever. I don't think it's that funny. I was trying not to roll my eyes (since I was in the backseat - there's a mirror up there). The one that really killed them was when I said, "I met my third husband at work. It's probably good I don't work anymore." I don't get it. They went nuts for that and kept bringing it up. Maybe it was my delivery.

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I was supposed to go back to the house after MOW and I was so burnt out I just decided not to go. Friday night, (4th of July, ya'll!) we decided to do something different and take a walk to see what we might see. We headed out of our neighborhood and were walking down 157 when I noticed that church up there was up on a hill. We walked up there and saw three different sets of fireworks. It was pretty cool. Perspective-wise, the closest one was about like holding a softball at arm's length and the furthest more like a golfball. Saturday was a rare day where I wanted to jump in the shower and go out to lunch. On Sunday my daughter showed up for what I thought was get some mail, but as she's talking 90 miles an hour about a big fight with her boyfriend, her girlfriend comes around the corner with a cat wrapped in a towel. I don't want to go into details but, she didn't think her cat would be safe at the apartment. So I said, "Sure, he's an innocent creature. I will watch him. What's his name?" She didn't even have a name for him. After 3 weeks. Well, I named him Thomas. He was so cute and crazy. He so brought out Barney's inner kitten (Barney's only a year old) and it was fun to watch them play but the size difference was crazy:

She picked him up the next evening and everything had been resolved. (Yay!) I told her Ihad named him Thomas and that he was responding to it, but being the rebel that she is, I imagine she will never call him that. But he will always be Thomas to me.

I'm pretty much caught up now except I didn't mention the Craig's List stuff and that I sold a bunch of stuff last night and more things are moving on Saturday, but this has been long and it was tiring enough when it all happened and reliving it has just made me tired again. I'm not even going to proofread this. At least I get to sleep in tomorrow. And now I have it all down for my future elf.