And so it goes
Jul. 13th, 2009 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valis2Okay. So here's the final summary of the weekend.
Garage sale: grah. $330. We got rid of the Couch O' Mouse Nibblings and Misery, and we got rid of the giant corner cabinets, and a some of the stuff that will always sell (pots and pans, kitchen utensils), but not a lot more, unfortunately. Little of our stuff sold; it was almost all the stuff left by Husband's grandmother. Our portion was $70, which isn't very good when you consider that I spent $80 on signs and labels and etc. for the show.
Such is life on a country road. There were lots of cars, but not many people stopped. Apparently there weren't as many garage sales as usual. And the fair people were more into the fair, I guess.
So we have three recourses. 1) Have another garage sale. 2) Call Salvation Army and have them pick everything up. 3) There was this guy who stopped by on Saturday and said he'd buy everything. I kept pointing to all of the undesirable stuff and he kept nodding. "Everything," he said, without blinking an eye.
#1? NO WAY. This is it for me. I normally like to donate, so this was an experiment, and the result? I would much rather donate, let me tell you.
#2? Hmm. I would like to do this, but I have heard from friends that the SA no longer takes everything. Plus, to claim it all, we'd need to write out a very long bit of paperwork, as there are soooo many items.
#3? I'm very interested in this. Not only would we get a small bit of money (I'm not deluded about this, there's no way he's going to give us even the garage sale value for it, considering that he has to take the good, the bad, and the ugly), but he would take everything. Magazines. Metal garbage cans. Cassette tapes. One of those plastic expandable water tanks you can go camping with, which is so filthy it's unbelievable. And before you tell me about going to the metal scrap dealer or about this place that recycles cassette tapes, well, listen, normally I would totally do this, but the point is that I have an entire garage full of this stuff. A two car garage. Yeah.
I'm leaning toward option #3. I'd get rid of everything, get a little money, and have my garage nearly empty. Seriously.
I'll even pull some stuff out of the basement. And then the basement will be on its way to getting clean, too, because I have plans to get rid of the empty boxes she had down there (had I known they were empty, I would have taken care of them ages ago, but it's one of those things where I grabbed a few boxes and they had stuff in them, so I thought that the rest of the boxes did too, but they don't). Plus, she has ten boxes of books that she wanted to go through first, and so once we've taken care of that, I'll donate the rest of the books to the library, and then I'll sort through and set up my stuff in a more efficient manner.
Monitor: By Saturday night, my monitor looked like digitized Pepto-Bismol, and it was a strain to read anything. My video card arrived on Thursday, but because of the garage sale, I didn't have time to do anything. Anyway, Saturday night I pulled out the old card and plugged in the new one. I also moved the sound card further down the card slots to give the video card more air room. And it turned out I had an extra 4 pin power supply hanging out in the case, so I was able to hook it up without having to buy a new cable.
I put it in, and it immediately worked flawlessly. I merely changed the screen resolution, and then everything was wondrous. However, no sound. I have a horrible sound card, an Audigy 2, and I reinstalled the driver, hoping that would work, but it didn't--I got the blue screen of death, and then I remembered that this happened the last time I played around with the sound card. You see, the updated driver available at Microsoft update just will not work properly, which is what happened before when I had problems with it. So I reinstalled the original driver, and now it works again.
Then my scanner wouldn't work. I reinstalled that driver, and it still didn't work. Finally, after tinkering with the drivers a little more, I installed the driver that Microsoft cautioned me against installing, and that worked. So I'm back to business, mostly, except for a couple wonky moments with the sound, but that isn't as crucial as the monitor and the scanner.
So I'm done with my little Adventures in Computing for awhile, unless something else goes wrong, and then I'll probably break down and just get another system. That thought fills me with woe and squee both. I love my giant blue computer so much. So so so much. But now that I've had the thought of getting a new computer, I'm getting a little excited. Still, I think I can use this one for another year or two.
And now I'm trying to pack and run around and find things I need. I've got a whirlwind month ahead of me. One thing's for certain; I'm absolutely overwhelmed with relief about the garage sale being over.
Oh, and there was one funny garage sale customer. He was telling me stories about belonging to a cult church as a kid, and how his parents were told that the world was going to end in 1972, so they had a huge garage sale and sold everything, and then the world, um, didn't end.
Even funnier, he came up to me and said, "One of the people whose belongings you're selling was in the military." Yep, the grandmother. "And she's an anglophile," he said, holding up tea tongs. Yep, she is. So then he started doing an impression of Sherlock Holmes (I kid you not!) and examined the remnants of tea in the tea tongs, sniffing them expertly with a thoughtful expression. "I believe that this tea was harvested on Ceylon. From Arthur C Clarke's estate."
I laughed so hard. He kept doing all sorts of things like that. I don't even care that he scammed me (just a little), because it was so damned entertaining.
Garage sale: grah. $330. We got rid of the Couch O' Mouse Nibblings and Misery, and we got rid of the giant corner cabinets, and a some of the stuff that will always sell (pots and pans, kitchen utensils), but not a lot more, unfortunately. Little of our stuff sold; it was almost all the stuff left by Husband's grandmother. Our portion was $70, which isn't very good when you consider that I spent $80 on signs and labels and etc. for the show.
Such is life on a country road. There were lots of cars, but not many people stopped. Apparently there weren't as many garage sales as usual. And the fair people were more into the fair, I guess.
So we have three recourses. 1) Have another garage sale. 2) Call Salvation Army and have them pick everything up. 3) There was this guy who stopped by on Saturday and said he'd buy everything. I kept pointing to all of the undesirable stuff and he kept nodding. "Everything," he said, without blinking an eye.
#1? NO WAY. This is it for me. I normally like to donate, so this was an experiment, and the result? I would much rather donate, let me tell you.
#2? Hmm. I would like to do this, but I have heard from friends that the SA no longer takes everything. Plus, to claim it all, we'd need to write out a very long bit of paperwork, as there are soooo many items.
#3? I'm very interested in this. Not only would we get a small bit of money (I'm not deluded about this, there's no way he's going to give us even the garage sale value for it, considering that he has to take the good, the bad, and the ugly), but he would take everything. Magazines. Metal garbage cans. Cassette tapes. One of those plastic expandable water tanks you can go camping with, which is so filthy it's unbelievable. And before you tell me about going to the metal scrap dealer or about this place that recycles cassette tapes, well, listen, normally I would totally do this, but the point is that I have an entire garage full of this stuff. A two car garage. Yeah.
I'm leaning toward option #3. I'd get rid of everything, get a little money, and have my garage nearly empty. Seriously.
I'll even pull some stuff out of the basement. And then the basement will be on its way to getting clean, too, because I have plans to get rid of the empty boxes she had down there (had I known they were empty, I would have taken care of them ages ago, but it's one of those things where I grabbed a few boxes and they had stuff in them, so I thought that the rest of the boxes did too, but they don't). Plus, she has ten boxes of books that she wanted to go through first, and so once we've taken care of that, I'll donate the rest of the books to the library, and then I'll sort through and set up my stuff in a more efficient manner.
Monitor: By Saturday night, my monitor looked like digitized Pepto-Bismol, and it was a strain to read anything. My video card arrived on Thursday, but because of the garage sale, I didn't have time to do anything. Anyway, Saturday night I pulled out the old card and plugged in the new one. I also moved the sound card further down the card slots to give the video card more air room. And it turned out I had an extra 4 pin power supply hanging out in the case, so I was able to hook it up without having to buy a new cable.
I put it in, and it immediately worked flawlessly. I merely changed the screen resolution, and then everything was wondrous. However, no sound. I have a horrible sound card, an Audigy 2, and I reinstalled the driver, hoping that would work, but it didn't--I got the blue screen of death, and then I remembered that this happened the last time I played around with the sound card. You see, the updated driver available at Microsoft update just will not work properly, which is what happened before when I had problems with it. So I reinstalled the original driver, and now it works again.
Then my scanner wouldn't work. I reinstalled that driver, and it still didn't work. Finally, after tinkering with the drivers a little more, I installed the driver that Microsoft cautioned me against installing, and that worked. So I'm back to business, mostly, except for a couple wonky moments with the sound, but that isn't as crucial as the monitor and the scanner.
So I'm done with my little Adventures in Computing for awhile, unless something else goes wrong, and then I'll probably break down and just get another system. That thought fills me with woe and squee both. I love my giant blue computer so much. So so so much. But now that I've had the thought of getting a new computer, I'm getting a little excited. Still, I think I can use this one for another year or two.
And now I'm trying to pack and run around and find things I need. I've got a whirlwind month ahead of me. One thing's for certain; I'm absolutely overwhelmed with relief about the garage sale being over.
Oh, and there was one funny garage sale customer. He was telling me stories about belonging to a cult church as a kid, and how his parents were told that the world was going to end in 1972, so they had a huge garage sale and sold everything, and then the world, um, didn't end.
Even funnier, he came up to me and said, "One of the people whose belongings you're selling was in the military." Yep, the grandmother. "And she's an anglophile," he said, holding up tea tongs. Yep, she is. So then he started doing an impression of Sherlock Holmes (I kid you not!) and examined the remnants of tea in the tea tongs, sniffing them expertly with a thoughtful expression. "I believe that this tea was harvested on Ceylon. From Arthur C Clarke's estate."
I laughed so hard. He kept doing all sorts of things like that. I don't even care that he scammed me (just a little), because it was so damned entertaining.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-13 11:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 05:20 pm (UTC)