A new look (template)

I've changed a few page elements and so thought I would freshen things up a bit overall with a new template.

We're getting ready this week, after a bit of a break, for the Sun, Sand and Swing celebration right in our own backyard here in Treasure Island. It's only a mile away from home - what a treat! And so we're shaking things up as far as what we're bringing to the show. We're debuting a $5 table, with selections taken from our original inventory of items that came with the purchase of the business. Something for everyone, we believe. I'll be making up an eye-catching sign for the table to help draw attention to it.

In preparation for this weekend we had the chance to really go through most of our inventory - several hours worth of work, but very satisfying as there were odds and ends that were in bins that we had forgotten about; so they'll get to see the light of day again. It's interesting to take a fresh look at these things given our accumulated experience of having done a few months' worth of shows, and having gone to estate sales, and auctions. It really helps you see what you have with new eyes - sometimes more discriminating, and sometimes with more appreciation.

What we're surprised about at the moment is the number of garage sales in the area at any given time. There hasn't been a weekend when there wasn't an enormous choice of sales, whether they were church rummage sales, community sales, multi family sales, estate sales run by professional appraisers, or people who just dragged all their contents of their garage out to the front lawn and stuck a sign on to a telephone pole with some duct tape. You can always find a good 10 to 15 sales going on within several miles of where we live. We've never had to go beyond our county limits.

A lot of it has to do with where we live, geographically. You can hold garage sales year-round, unless there's a hurricane bearing down on us. No danger of being frozen out, or often, in this years-long siege of drought that we've been in, rained out. So we don't have a season when people are clearing out their homes - it's more of a perpetual happening. I've already done my haranguing about the garbage versus garage sales that goes on, but I'm thinking that's a cultural happening that I just hadn't been exposed to before. Kind of in the same department as the guy next door who you never see wearing a shirt, and you wished to god that you could cover him up, because it's not a Chippendale moment when you lay your eyes upon him! It's just what some people do, put it all out there, because, well, they can. It's a free country, ain't it?