I’m traveling with the fam until Wednesday, so I don’t know how much blogging I’ll be able to squeeze in over the next couple of days, but at least I don’t have to go to my personal trainer until Friday. That, my friends, is a good thing.

You know what’s not a good thing? A garage sale.

We had a garage sale about three years ago, and we put in hours and hours of effort to net about 50 bucks. I swore on the grave of Abraham Lincoln that I would never have another garage sale.

Well, with apologies to Abe, we had another garage sale this past Saturday. And for the life of me, I don’t understand why.

We live on a cul-de-sac, and we had a huge communal sale with everyone else on the block. So we stayed up sorting through crap and putting meaningless price labels on everything, which is just a starting point for hagglers.

Cheap, cheap, weenie hagglers.

I mean, come on, people. If a children’s book is marked at 50 cents, are you really making the deal of the century by offering a quarter for them? Would it kill you to cough up the full two bits? When you read the thing to your kidlets, do you think they’re going to be impressed with your miserly business savvy?

We did better on this sale than we did on the last one. We probably took in about a hundred bucks. Which is about half of the tax deduction we would have gotten if we’d just hauled all the crap down to the D.I. (That’s Deseret Industries, the Mormon version of Goodwill, for those of you outside of Zion.)

It’s not that we lacked customers. Cheapos from all across the Wasatch Front swarmed over our collection of detritus, and they walked away with plenty of broken toys, ancient electronics, and farm implements of some kind. What always cracked me up was the old guys who came around with specific requests.

“Do you have any antique photography equipment, coins, or jewelry?” one treasure-hunter asked.

“No, but we have a Little People Playset and a cracked HP Printer with no power cord!” I answered back.

I didn’t make the sale.

Mrs. Cornell had much more fun than I did, and at one point, she said, “This is what we’re going to do when we retire – spend the whole weekend rummaging through garage sales!”

I dearly love Mrs. Cornell. My golden years will be very lonely without her.