|
|
|
|||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Letters From North America Have you ever stopped to think how many of the things that we all have in each and every house in the country? I mean you have to imagine that nearly every house has at least one bed. Most houses these days have a bathroom and a sink of some kind. So, there you have it. The basics have been met. So, what’s the point? Well, what I’d like to know is how is it that in addition to all of this stuff, we also end up with the same common items in our garage? The other day I wandered over to my neighbor’s house, while he was cleaning out his garage. Which for most average homeowners is pretty much a full time hobby. Most average Americans spend at least 32.7 weekends each year trying to figure out what to do with the stuff they have accumulated during the 19.30 weekends in which they aren’t in the garage. It seems to be sort of a national past time. Once we get the garage fairly straight and have moved things around so we can walk inside, some primordial instinct seems to say to us.. .”There is more room in the garage… shop-buy-shop-buy”. Then we go buy some more stuff for the house and move the older stuff back into the newly created space in the garage. Then we give the stuff in the garage either to some charity or have a garage sale. Now, the garage sale is a unique idea. Here, we take perfectly good items and sell them for 1/200th of their value and seem to be proud of it. “Look, honey I sold those old Ping golf clubs of yours for $15.00”.. ..Instead of being mad and upset, you are happy…now you can go buy new clubs…Then, the charity or the person that bought the stuff we had for sale takes it to some central point and the trash that you sold, now becomes valuable and is labeled as an “antique” Then you end up visiting an antique store and say… “You know we had one like that a few years ago” Then you buy it and the process starts all over again. The other day, I was working on my bookcases. Having just recently moved, I ended |
|||||||
 |
|||||||
|
For questions or comments, please contact me at pperry@austin.rr.com Designed and Hosted by The Home Page Factory |
|||||||
up with 11 boxes of books, in the garage, that I didn’t need anymore. Once I’ve read a novel, I tend to give them away or want to get rid of them since I know I’ll probably never want to read them again. So, instead of taking up room in the bookcase, and because I didn’t want to lug them up and down the stairs again, I decided to sell them at a used book store. Loaded up the truck with the 11 boxes. Drove over and unloaded all of the boxes at the desk marked “incoming". This name made me a little nervous, but I felt better after a few minutes. Anyway…the lady was very nice… spent about 45 minutes looking through the 11 boxes. Then she tracked me down in the store and told me she had worked out the ‘bid’ for me. Now, I didn’t realize that they were going to ‘bid’ on what I brought in. I guess I just assumed they would buy each and everything I had hauled in the store. My mind started asking questions…”what if I don’t like the ‘bid’…would I have to carry all of this stuff back?” No way was I going to do that. I have moved these books for the last time. She had separated these into 2 big piles. One was for the ‘good’ books and the other was for the…you guessed it…‘bad’ books. I noticed right off that the ‘bad’ pile was much larger than the ‘good pile’. She took out her pad and wrote down some number, folded the sheet and handed it to me. I opened it and read $117.00. Now, to tell you the truth, I’d have taken $10 just so I wouldn’t have to see those things again. I did however think, my ‘good’ pile should have been larger. But, not wanting to upset the status quo, It told her that it was a deal. I wondered how many people turned down the ‘bid’ and took their books back to the car or truck or whatever? Not many, if I had to guess. Anyway, the deal wasn’t exactly a total success. In the 45 minutes or so that I had spent waiting for the ‘bid’, I found 5 books that called out to me to take them home. Back to that primordial instinct thing. My mind said…"You’ve got room for more…buy these." So, I ended up paying $30.00 for more books. A net gain of about $80. Well, not really since I had 2 cups of coffee at $1.75 each and a piece of some kind of pastry for $2.50. What got me were the prices on the books I bought. They weren’t nearly as cheap as those that I sold a few minutes before. They were probably someone’s really "good" pile. Next week, I’ll get back to the stuff in the garage. Stay tuned.