Tag: yard sales

From The Night Before The Yard Sale


We held the yard sale, and easily raised enough money to pay for supplies for the next yard sale, when we decide we can’t put off holding one any longer for some reason. My love’s parents came up the night before, to bring and price stuff they wanted to sell, and they stayed the night. So the night before we had this conversation with my love’s father:

“Do you have hair shampoo in your bathroom?” he asked.
“As opposed to rug shampoo?” asked my love.
“Yes, I just wanted to know if you have shampoo for washing your hair.”
“We have. There’s a bottle of … blue … with conditioner, and there’s another that’s yellow that’s shampoo and conditioner in one.,” I said.
“OK. Well, I don’t need it, because I took care of my hair already.”

And there the topic ended, and I suddenly knew what it was like the week Vic and Sade was written by George S Kaufman.

In point of fact, the yellow bottle turns out to be just conditioner, for some bottle of yellow-colored shampoo we didn’t buy, and don’t think that hasn’t been bothering me relentlessly since I discovered my mistake Sunday morning.

From the August 2016 Scraps File And Yard Sale Bureau


I have my usual bunch of text I couldn’t use for something or other in August. Mostly writing. But it isn’t going to be free to a good home this time. We’re holding a yard sale this Saturday, for the usual reasons: there’s no space for it in our garage. The mice are holding their Squeak Olympics in it this weekend, at least until the International Olympics Committee hears about it. But the floor space is full of purpose-built stadiums and tracks and a mousethropology exhibit space and all. There’s no sense our interrupting that for our meager needs. Plus it’s so hard winning a bid for the Squeak Olympics.

But there’s other good reasons to hold a yard sale this weekend. For instance, my love and I both hate going through our belongings figuring out what we want to sell. And we hate trying to figure out prices to put on them. And we hate getting up at awful hours on a Saturday to haul stuff out onto a dew-lined lawn. And we hate hour after hour of free-form interactions with strangers. And we hate strangers who’re yard sale divas come over to lie to us about the making of a water pitcher we marked for $2.50 because they want to get it for 25 cents less for crying out loud. Looking it over, maybe we’re just misdirecting our anger. I guess it’s better we do yard sales rather than, like, drive or vote angry. We’re getting less fond of our lawn too. Anyway, here goes.

If you missed last week’s, then let me summarize. You should wash your hands when: (a) You have to. (b) Your towels are too dry. (c) You want to. (d) You need to. (e) Some other reason. (f) No, you really, really need to. It’s okay. We’re not judging here. — cut from the second piece I somehow spun out of hand-washing because I used this same joke in a piece I wrote for my undergrad newspaper in Like 1990 and there’s easily one person out there who might, conceivably, remember it. And sure, I expanded on the joke, but did I make it new enough? No. You can try it on an unsuspecting audience for just $1.75.

you have to check your door at the door. it’s part of our open-door policy. if you can bring your door down here then it’s pretty sure to have got opened. of course there was that time last year when rick brought the whole thing door frame and all, unopened. that’s why we don’t talk about or to him anymore. — cut from my major expose on doors that I’ve figured would be good now that I found something I wrote around the same theme like twelve years ago. $3.50 obo.

lumber yard // 84 lumber //lumber miller // architectural salvage — cut from either notes I made while talking to my father about how to get a new screen window for the living room or from my failed attempt at Beat Poetry Night down at the hipster bar. It was actually karaoke night. $1.50 or your Zippy the Pinhead fanfic.

bake or boil or simmer or broil or maybe just let it sit and think about what it’s done until it’s ready to make amends — cut from a hilarious expose of recipes that I had to drop because I don’t really care about recipes or much about how to make food. Don’t mind me. I’m recovering from the discovery I’ve been making at least some kinds of Noodle-Roni all wrong for years and never suspected. $1.25 or $1.50 if it’s still on sale by suppertime.

statistics saturday: ten moments from the yard sale that didn’t make me want to curl up inside our pet rabbit’s hutch and die — cut because how can I write this when we haven’t even had the sale yet and my memories of last time are faint enough we’re going through it all over again? $0.75 no haggling.

the jute mill is exploded! — cut from Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic, the 20th of October, 1954, because it was just a dream Churchy La Femme was having. $4.00 because it’s in a hardcover book (the most recent attempt at Complete Pogo reprints) but you’ll have to hack my limbs off to get it away from me. “Jute” is too a thing.

We’ll be set up on the lawn from 9 am to 3 pm or whenever we’re sick with how much rain we’re getting on our heads. Tickets for the Squeak Olympics are going fast, because the mice are still shy.

Statistics April, Concluded


Yesterday’s mutterings about my suspiciously absent audience is enough of that. May started with my blog at 16,472 views total, which isn’t bad at all. The most-read posts of April make for an interesting bunch, to my eye, because … well, here:

  1. Statistics Saturday: Nations of Europe Ordered By Length, which was popular because people like lists of countries, and some folks were wondering just what I was getting at with all this.
  2. Betty Boop: Musical Justice, again not a surprise to me because it’s a weird and rare bit of Betty Boop arcana. This was one of her two live-action appearances.
  3. When We All Stopped Watching Deep Space Nine, a Caption This! item featuring that first-season episode where gamers from the Gamma Quadrant invaded the show. That inspired the question of “Allamaraine, is this worth the trouble of watching?” Fans of the show say yes, it got a lot better after this. Maybe so. Every time I tried watching it was a time-travel nonsense or a Ferengi Comedy Episode and I don’t need either of those in my life, thank you.
  4. Power Challenge Of The Week, drawing on everyone’s giddy delight at insulting Brutalist architecture.
  5. Betty Boop: Dizzy Dishes, another unsurprisingly popular piece because it’s got what’s always credited as the debut of Betty Boop. Betty Boop is more complicated than that, but what interesting thing isn’t?
  6. Betty Boop: Sally Swing, the debut of Betty Boop’s final redesign and the oddly stunted experiment at creating a new Betty for the swing era.

What most intrigues me is that the Betty Boop pieces are never popular the day they come out. The WordPress statistics are pretty clear about that. The number of page views on days when those are posted is lower than that of the day before or after. But they’re fun to write, and they clearly endure. It probably helps that each links logically to others, so they invite archive-binging. My normal major pieces for the week, where I report what I just read and what silly things it makes me think of, don’t.

Well. Now the other popular part, listing countries. The United States as ever sent me the most number of page views, at 585. Canada came in second at 34, the United Kingdom third at 27, and Germany fourth at 22.

A single reader each came from Algeria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, the Palestinian Territories, Poland, and South Africa. The repeats from March were Finland and Italy; Italy’s on a three-month streak. India was listed as sending me only two readers, which can’t be right, considering how much I’ve been doing to publicize it the last couple Statistics Saturdays. The “European Union” was also listed as sending me two readers. I don’t know what this designation means, since countries within the European Union are separately listed.

I did, finally, have some interesting search terms the past month. Here’s some:

  • dear penelope, i have been so tied up with work during the last week that i have not had a chance to get near a desk to write to you.
  • math comic strip clipart
  • crazy.bolle.com
  • funny pea soup cartoon
  • funny boss yelling at employees for productivity
  • spiderman newspaper boss
  • yard sale statistics
  • corny jokes about the milky way
  • reverberating voice cartoon
  • the king of jazz delbert cobain
  • math jokes on binomial
  • j. wellington wimpy character

I can understand why some of them would draw people here, but “crazy.bolle.com”? And I confess knowing nothing of Delbert Cobain. The most of what I know about yard sales is that if you are holding one, you should double what you think fair prices on all the things you’re selling, and then cancel the yard sale. You’ll be happier that way.

Statistics Saturday On An October Day


So, now, September 2014: by pretty much all the reader-count-based measures there are this was my most successful month as a humor blogger. According to WordPress’s statistics page I had somewhere around 825 views from 467 unique visitors, which is well above August’s 682 views from 369 visitors. It’s also the first month I’m aware of where I had at least ten views every day, and for that matter, twenty views most days. I’m not sure what lead to this steady popularity, although I imagine part of it is I’ve felt like I’m writing at more ease lately. (Of course, this did come to an average of only 1.77 views per visitor, which is the lowest monthly average WordPress has for me, but we can’t have everything, can we?)

I got to my 8,691st reader this month. If I have another month like this, I should reach a good round 9,000 around mid-October.

The most popular articles the past month, and I’m glad to say they all had at least twenty views each, were:

In the ever-precious Nations of the World report, the United States once more sent me the overwhelming majority of my readers, 701, even though I try to use “humour” as an equally valid tag for my posts. I think that’s working, too, since the next-most-common sources of readers were the United Kingdom (33), Australia (19), and Canada (16), and I notice that India has consented to send me eight readers the past month, above even the six that I saw in August. That’s not as good per-capita as Brazil (eleven readers), although it does edge out Singapore which sent me no readers the past month, which kind of hurts since I know some folks from Singapore and follow them on Twitter and everything.

I have a bunch of single-reader countries this time around, though, among them: Albania, Barbados, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, and Turkey. None of them were single-reader countries in August.

As for search term poetry, nothing much this month either, I’m afraid. I do seem to be a destination for people searching for “compu-toon”, at least, and of course “can you enter a snail in the indy 500”. “What percentage of the world like saturdays?” captures my imagination, as does “percentage of pages taken up by each letter in a dictionary”, though, and I hope I was of use to the person looking for “what did twain title his story an awful ____ terible middvil romance”.

Statistics Saturday: Things Found While Cleaning Up After The Yard Sale


The squirrel was marked for $3.50 o/b/o; it eventually went for $3.25 along with a couple of ironic potholders.
The squirrel eventually went for $3.25 along with a couple of ironic potholders.

Bonus recreational puzzle: Identify when I figured out a tolerable way to do lettering while drawing on my iPad.

Ahead Of The Yard Sale


So my love looked over my list of reasons I was not putting a book into the yard sale, and asked if they were all true reasons. I admitted that no, actually, some of them were made up.

“The one about inspiring a fanfic was real wasn’t it?” Actually, no, there aren’t any books that got me to actually commit to writing fanfic so that’s technically speaking a pure joke.

“You made up the one about the Family Ties book though?” Well, no, that’s real and true: I have a book that’s an original adventure based on the beloved-yet-not-actually-watched-anymore series Family Ties.

“Why do you have a book based on Family Ties?” Why would you not buy a book based on Family Ties if you saw one in the used book store?

“Well, you might have bought it back when it would make sense to buy a Family Ties book.” When would it ever make sense to buy an original novel based on Family Ties? Even when the series was on the air it’d still be a novel based on Family Ties.

“Hold on. You have an ironic book collection?” Well, not if the yard sale succeeds.

Make an offer. You can only get books like this by trying.

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