Today was a big day for the whole family. You see, today was the day that Roselyn decided to get rid of a lot of our junk by having a garage sale. A garage sale is where you get all the stuff you’ve collected over the years, dump it in the driveway. You then hope that passers-by want to part with some cash and take it off your hands.

I slept fitfully the night before the grand event so when the alarm went off at 7am this morning two things happened. My wife got up and I thought it was the end of the world. Seriously, I doubt that even God’s awake at 7am on a Saturday morning…..but I was wrong about that. You see, God had arranged for a host of buyers to be waiting out the front of the house at 8am, even though we’d explicitly said that the grand bazaar would commence at 9am.

So after emptying the contents of our garage into the driveway, the “fun” of haggling with buyers over a couple of dollars for something that I would just as happily given to them commenced.

The problem was that my honour was at stake. Why give something away when you can have so much more fun negotiating with a complete stranger. There’s nothing quite like honing your bargaining skills over an old packet of light bulbs to see if you still have what it takes to get a good deal.

At one stage, I found myself in the odd predicament of digging in my heels by refusing to come down from $17 to $16 for something that I was actually prepared to put in the garbage can. In the heat of the tussle between the buyer and myself that $1 seemed so important. In hindsight, what amazed me was that the buyer was willing to pay anything for the items!