How NOT to have a Garage Sale

1. Choose the first rainy day in months and don't watch the weather reports enough to know that it will be raining.
2. Get up super early to get everything set out, while thinking how warm and beautiful the morning feels.
3. Try to sell lots of books and games and things that looked really great before the downpours started...and continued...and started again, but look a little less than ideal as the morning progresses.
4. Carry lots of heavy boxes of books into the garage and back out of to the sale and back into the garage and back out to the sale...
5. Find every possible cover you can to hide all the treasures you were hoping to sell so the few brave souls with umbrellas have to play hide and seek in order to shop.
6. Be amazed at how things that were part of your home just days ago look like junk when you set them out on garage sale tables and then look like soggy, wet trash after they have been drenched.
7. Watch grown people fight over who grabbed the child's guitar first. Try to mediate and then give up, figuring that they will come up with a solution, all the while knowing that the lady who is holding the guitar is not the one who had it first. Finally remove the guitar from the lady's hands and hand it back to your daughter to put back in her room so that the fight can somehow end. Let the man who should have had it in the first place pay for it secretly and come back a couple hours later to pick it up. Do all this for a $3 guitar, people.
8. Steeply reduce the price of everything within minutes of starting your sale because you realize that a quarter is better than watching it get ruined in the rain or having to carry it back into your house.
9. Promise your daughter ahead of time that you will give her a $20 cut from the earnings if she is willing to part with some of her treasures and then realize that those treasures did not bring in more than $4.
10. Use all your clean towels to dry each individual item off before boxing it up again in defeat.
11. Do it all alone.***

***So, I had a garage sale today and did items 1-10 on the "How NOT to have a Garage Sale" list. Luckily I knew better than to fall for number 11. I got to have all the fun with my family, so we had some laughs, had the adventure together, and now have the memories of this crazy April showers garage sale to laugh about for years to come.