I can’t believe that it’s almost Christmas and the New Year already!
For our household it’s a time to dream of making a lot of money by selling goods on the internet. It started a couple of years ago while living in Florida. Matt use to go garage sale shopping on weekends with an elderly neighbor friend. Matt bought these little curios that he thought were antiques and worth a lot of money. After trying to explain to him that it’s not easy to recognize real antiques I even bought him a couple of informative books and told him to read them so he would know if what he was buying was really worth anything. Well, the only thing all his garage shopping got us was a lot of junk that took up a lot of room that we didn’t have in our small trailer.
His next big idea was buying some type of Sesame Street character doll that was the rage a couple of Christmas’ ago with the kids. Matt thought that if he got up really early in the morning and waited in line on the Friday after Thanksgiving sale he could make a bundle on selling the doll on the Internet (he heard a lot of people making a lot of money doing this on a local radio station). But that didn’t pan out and he wound up returning the dolls back to Wal-mart for a refund. The next year it was a couple of laptop computers which he returned one and kept the other. Then when we moved to Phoenix and he saw the 99 cents only stores he was in “get rich quick” nirvana. Almost every weekend he would buy a book, nick knack and toy or we’d go to consignment shops and he’d buy something that he thought was worth a lot more money.
A couple of web sites later and still maybe one or two sales (I think he broke even with the postage cost) we packed the items in boxes and littered our small apartment with them. Then we made the mistake of going to the Phoenix Art Museum where Matt became fascinated with abstract art and just knew he could do as well if not better himself. He hung his monstrosities, uh, I mean “masterpieces” around the apartment and actually did sell one of them for a couple of dollars. When Thanksgiving rolled around this year we decided to have an apartment garage sale and put ads on the Internet as well as in the two laundry rooms at our apartment complex. Needless to say that no one showed up. But the toys didn’t go to waste because I donated them to the Toys 4 Tots program that they have in the lobby of our office complex here. At least some needy children will enjoy the toys for Christmas. I guess during these tough times at least pipe dreams keep us going; that and a lot of prayers.
I worry sometimes while I’m at work that I don’t come home and find that he got a real good bargain on our Siamese cat! Oy Vey!
