"Where've You Been, Woman???"

Okay, so I fell off the scope for a bit.

This week was pretty darned busy for me, so a couple things had to fall by the wayside, the blog being the first thing. Photographs of my life were next.

Then paying attention to my boys, the poor babies.

This past weekend I had a pretty big yard sale. So for the 10-14 days leading up, I had been working room-by-room, assessing and clearing out extraneous crap.

Sometimes they were old items, like books Dave and I had both read. Our Lazy Boy chair with a gaping hole in the upholstery right at the crotch. The too-small Crock Pot. The Rival 2-cup Hot Pot from college. Air Force BDUs, stripped of the patches (10 -- count 'em -- TEN sets!).

Sometimes they were things we'd outgrown: infant toys, size 2T clothing, double jogging stroller, diaper pail/changing pad (YES!), baby monitor

Some of our items were simply excessive: Did I really need 3 tricycles?

But many of our things for sale were items that I didn't trust would make it through another move. Several of our Little People play sets, for example. They were large and I could see many of the plastic pieces getting crushed between here and Nebraska.

How about one of those garden hose wind-up reel thingies? Wouldn't make it to Nebraska, either!

Anyway, Saturday was the big day, and we ended up making over $300! I was impressed! $50 of that is a wash because of my hefty advertising budget: online, print and signage in the neighborhood.

Next weekend is the neighborhood yard sale and I'll put the remants of the stuff out this Saturday for a little bit...everything else will go to a local thrift store in Fuquay-Varina.

So I've been busy with all that.

The realtor was here over the weekend, also. She and her partner did a walk-through and made some suggestions on how to stage the house appropriately. I was disappointed to hear that they prefer all my horizontal surfaces (dresser tops, mantle, tabletops) EMPTY...I'm currently putting away my Asian knick-knacks and Hummel figurines.

We also took down our swingset. It was an illegal swingset. We bought the house with the illegal swingset, then about a year after we bought the house, we received a letter from the property manager indicating we had an illegal "improvement" to our property and it had to be removed immediately. Dave appealed the letter and eventually got approval for the structure, but the letter of approval states that the swingset needs to be removed when we sell the house.

So as not to mislead any potential owners, Dave solicited to some of our yard sale customers that the swingset was theirs for the taking if they could help remove it and haul it away. In about an hour on Saturday afternoon, it was gone! Wow!

What of the Weather Station that was mounted on the swingset? It's still in our backyard in an alternate location. The data is still pretty accurate, except the wind measurements are taken about 2 feet closer to the ground than before.

As of today, I'm finally calming down a little. This week I can relax some...it's too soon to start the uber-cleaning cycle before the house goes on the market (why bother? the kids will dirty it up again!). By this weekend I'll be ramping up again...

Ta!