Saturday 29 March 2008

Did you know.....

....there are two 5 o'clocks in a day? Apparently there's one at a crack of sparrow fart as well.

My friend Nettie and I got up at this forsaken hour this morning to go to a Car Boot sale to raise some money for Greyhound Gap. I love Greyhound Gap and I'll do anything a lot of things to raise some funds, but please, please please don't ask me to do a car boot sale ever again. It's soul destroying. You sell good stuff so cheap and still people haggle you to drop the price. You'd have though we were asking £100 for stuff, not a £1. Seems it must be a matter of principle at these things not to pay the asking price.

Just pleased that we managed to raise £150 and that, given the weather here over the last week, that it didn't rain.

11 comments:

  1. We have mostly yard sales and garage sales in my part of the U.S. If it's held inside a church or on church property, it's called a rummage sale. If you have the goods inside your house, it's still called a yard sale or a garage sale, but you put INSIDE and an arrow on your homemade sign.

    In the southern part of the U.S. and other places, they have what they call swap meets. You pay a fee to set up a table in a long row of other tables. But you park your car elsewhere.

    To me, "I bought this from a man who was selling them out of the trunk of his car" is another way of saying "I bought this from a man selling stolen goods". It's equivalent in meaning to the oblique sentence "It fell off the back of a truck".

    People always haggle over used goods. Once I was manning my half-sister's yard sale when two ladies brought over to me some tiny item and said, This is marked a quarter, we'll give you a dime for it. I was struggling to hold back a desire to tell them to stick their dime where the sun doesn't shine when my half-sister appeared behind me, took the item out of the lady's hand, said the one word NO, and walked back into the house.

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  2. I know exactly what you mean! Well done for what you did though. A worthy cause if ever there was one.

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  3. Sounds like a combo of a swap meet/garage sale. Never my favorite. When we moved, and down-sized, I absolutely refused to have a garage sale to rid us of the things we wouldn't bring with us. I gave it away, either to friends and neighbors, or to charity.

    Good for you for doing the "right" thing.

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  4. 'Crack of sparrow fart' - that is the funniest thing I have heard in a long time.

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  5. Ditto to Beckie!!!

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  6. I love the crack of sparrow fart 5 am. It's my favourite time of the day, although maybe I'm just weird.

    Did you bring dogs with you and also solicit donations, or was this just from sales? I was at an outdoors event in the States a few years ago and a greyhound rescue group was there. They had a few dogs with them, and the dogs had little fishbowls around their necks (like a St. Bernard with a brandy keg).

    Undignified, you might think, but they were raking it in. Everyone wants to pet a pup and when he's the one asking you for money, well, how can you say no?

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  7. That does my head in that people actually haggle over items selling for £1 or 50p! Bah :[]

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  8. I had a garage sale before we moved out of our little house in Tulsa a couple of years ago. I hadn't had one for years. The thing that surprised me most was that most of my customers couldn't speak English. But they sure knew how to haggle.

    My mother taught me that haggling is part of the song and dance when you have a garage sale. I set my prices just a touch high and haggle from there. Works brilliantly.

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  9. crack of sparrow fart??? that is a new one for me.
    I'm going to so use that quote. ha ha.

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  10. Hee hee, farting sparrows. And I so agree with the carboot thing.

    Carbooter: It's 50p.
    Customer: Will you take 40p.

    Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

    I hate it so much.
    You did really well to get £150 though. That's an achievement.

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  11. You must have incredible hearing! I guess I'm kinda happy I can't hear a bird fart. :)

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