Back From Garage Sale Insanity

It’s Sunday morning and I’m back from garage sale madness.  I left Thursday night for my mom’s and spent Friday and through noon Saturday trying to sell a bunch of stuff I no longer needed or wanted.  I’m pretty pleased.  I made $158.50, got rid of several things, and took the rest to the Salvation Army.  It’s liberating to get rid of stuff that’s cluttering up your life.  Of course naturally, I brought back nearly as much as I got rid off.  I sold our old coffee table and picked up the new one my mom had upholstered for us as an early Christmas present (it’s beautiful, thanks). I brought back all my size 8 and 10 dress clothes that have been living in my clost at Mom’s since I finished graduate school.  I’ve not quite shrunk back into all of them, but they are inspiration to try to be good during the holiday season.  And really, I’m nearly 30, I should keep all of the clothes that I own at MY HOUSE.  I brought back the handful of kitchen items I snagged from the garage sale: a new cookie sheet, a food chopper, new 1 cup liquid measuring cup, and those bottle pourer things you can put in olive oils (or dish soap or whatever).

A part of me felt like I should do something responsible with the proceeds, but really, there is very little in life that you do so much work for and make so little money.  So I decided to spend it on myself, picking some things off my list that I’m pretty sure no one will get me for Christmas.

I ordered 2 sets of new dishes.  On sale even, so I took that as a sign.

I ordered Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, which I’ve been wanting for quite some time, and which I intend to use when baking Christmas gifts for others this season.  I even got about a dozen disposable mini loaf pans from Mom that she’d had hiding in a cabinet for who knows how long.

To go along with the bread, and because we make a fair amount of pizza in our house, I ordered a pizza peel.  

And then I picked up a couple of YA books that I’ve really been wanting to read.  Simon Holt’s The Devouring, and Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, both of which look awesome!  I don’t actually anticipate that I will have time to read either of them until December when NaNo is over and my semesters are drawing to a close.

In any event, I am ecstatic to be home and enjoying a lovely cup of tea.  I forgot to pack all my tea stuff, which was a minor tragedy as I do not cope well with morning to begin with, and I certainly don’t cope well with my mother (the morning person) sans sleep AND caffeine.  For some reason, despite nearly 30 years of evidence to the fact, Mom just doesn’t understand that I am not a morning person. Ergo, I do not function in the morning.  Period.  I do not talk.  I can barely shuffle.  I’m not sure I qualify as human until I have had caffeine and been up for at least an hour.  She seemed rather alarmed at the massive headache I had when she woke me up at DAWN on Saturday.  This was, in part, probably due to the second day without caffeine and the fact that it’s just plain WRONG to wake up at dawn on Saturday.  Of course my grand intentions to sleep in this morning were foiled because I woke up to answer nature and couldn’t tune out my husband’s snoring to go back to sleep again.  So up at 7:45.   Oh well, I have laundry going and will be working on a grocery list here shortly.

I managed to write Thursday and Friday night, but I just couldn’t do it last night.  A grand total of 4 words.  My brain was just too tired.  I really look like I haven’t written all week because my total novella word count hasn’t changed by much.  I’ve been rewriting some scenes that weren’t working.  I’m happier with them now, so this coming week will be all about new material.  Now I just need to find a little over 600 words for today so that I make my goal for the week on the novella.  Anybody have any idea what a secret military base under a Montana mountain would look like from the outside?  Yeah, me neither.