Gator and I spent our Labor Day weekend helping his mother and father sell their stuff for some extra cash in support of their upcoming move. The yard sale lasted from Sat morning (which required us to leave Chi after work on Fri — arriving in Michigan around midnight) through Monday.

However, Monday didn’t happen, due to rains.

Regardless, a LONG weekend, and not in the good way.

Some helpful tips for when you hold your next yard sale:

• The crazy, intense antiquers will arrive at least two hours early the first day of the sale, never to be seen again. If they don’t like what they see, they will go so far as ask you to rummage around the house for specific requests. As if it’s an On Demand yard sale.
• Electronics won’t really sell. Especially old electronics that you can’t guarantee work.
• Have boxes on hand for shoppers to put their finds in.
• The older generation who attend yard sales are mostly very nice, and like to tell you in exquisite detail what their purchases will be used for, and for whom they will be used.
• No one wants the dolls.
• Have lots of change before the yard sale — that means two hours before it’s actually supposed to start (see the first item above).
• Ya can talk, ya can talk, ya can bicker, ya can talk, ya can bicker, bicker, bicker, ya can talk, ya can talk, ya can talk, talk, talk, talk, bicker, bicker, bicker, ya can talk all ya want but they still won’t buy the friggen power generator.
• Make sure you look in the portable DVD player before placing it in the yard sale to ensure there are no DVDs in it. Especially the “blue” kind. (And I’m not talking Blue-Ray, if you know what I mean.*)
• An extension of the previous tip: Review the books you put on the shelf carefully*.
• Sometimes you just have to accept $20 for something that should collect at least $60. Just because it makes the man so damn happy.

(*I should note that these items weren’t necessarily Gator’s mother’s and father’s. They have 11 kids between the two of them, so it’s anyone’s guess.)

Not really related to this post, but pretty sunset at the end of yard sale: day 2. It was our special “thank you for working so hard” from mother nature, I’m assuming.