More stuff

After already having complained about the cleaning not going well, I'll tell you about the last couple of days, and you'll see one of the reasons why I have so much stuff.

We like going to Goodwills, other thrift stores, estate sales, and garage sales. This is not something that I did at all growing up, unless the garage sale just happened to be on my street. I did not go to Goodwill or anything like that. Mostly, the idea of buying someone else's used stuff totally baffled me. If someone else didn't want it anymore, why would I want it?

On the other hand, for my husband's family, going to Goodwill and estate sales was like a full-time thing. One of my in-laws got really good and finding "the good stuff" and is now an antique dealer. After we were married for about a year, my husband talked me into doing this side business of going to sales and buying stuff to sell at flea markets, on the condition that if I didn't want to do it after a few months we would stop. It wasn't so bad as I had imagined, I did give it a chance, but after a while (at least six months) I decided that I'd had enough of spending most of our weekends at the flea market, most of our other free time at thrift stores, and most of our house being filled up with junk (junk that wasn't even "our junk" that we intended to keep), and that we were making some money but most of the time not that much, and if we really needed the money we should do something more traditional like me going back to work or him asking for more hours. He said that he didn't remember telling me that we would stop whenever I wanted to, and that he wasn't going to stop, and he just made me feel bad if I didn't keep helping him with it. So we continued to do this thing that I didn't want to do anymore for another eight years, and mostly stopped because we had to move into an apartment and didn't have the room for all kinds of junk. At that point he decided that focusing on used books would be a good idea, as you could get a lot of books in a box compared to say, a lot of dishes, and the books probably wouldn't chip and such. So the apartment started to fill up with books (mostly book that weren't even "our books" that we intended to keep), and eventually this lead to him selling books on amazon and a few other odd items on eBay, and he had to rent a storage unit to put all of the stuff in, as it really was a small apartment and we didn't have the room. This mostly ended about four years ago (and not because he really thought it was a good idea to stop or because he was being nice to me, just he got distracted with other things and the business just sort of stopped after that). But there's still the odd thing around the house that he means to sell, and we still go to these thrift shops and such to look for things that we want.

After all this time buying things to try to make me feel better, I've decided that most of it doesn't make me feel better, and that I shouldn't buy so much. But even as I am saying that, even after the disappointing week of trying to get rid of junk and mostly not succeeding, in the last two days we have managed to go to at least three thrift shops while we were out running errands.

I have tried to be more particular about what I buy. I bought a skirt that I am going to make something out of. I bought two large containers that I am going to store leftover cement in. I bought four skeins of yarn. It seems like I bought something else, but I can't remember what. And my husband found for me most of an AeroGarden.

Okay, at some point I really wanted one of these, but I can't see paying a hundred dollars or more for one. So we found part of one in the lamp section, but it didn't have any light bulbs in it. I'm thinking that it's going to cost another twenty dollars or so to get the light bulbs to see if it works. And the bowl or whatever is missing, and at the time that didn't seem important, but now I'm not sure.

So, anyway, if you stop going to thrift stores and such, you don't find part of an AeroGarden for five bucks. And it's fun finding an AeroGarden for five bucks.