Parking and Polishing

"A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works." - Bill Vaughan

I know, last spring, I swore on this very blog that I wouldn't do the rummage sale at my mom's nursing home again but even as I said it, I knew I would probably get sucked back in.  The sale that's normally held before Christmas was advanced to next weekend this year.  So for the past two weeks, I've been trying to get things ready for the sale.  The truth is that I've been working on this sale for the last five months.  Because we had so few donations the past couple of sales, I didn't want to be caught again scrambling for something to sell to make the residents happy.  So for months, I've been buying grab bags of used jewellery from Value Village, never quite sure of what I'll find but optimistic that there will be enough to create a solid inventory after I've spent hours cleaning, sorting, repairing, pricing and displaying the pieces.  It has actually been quite interesting.  You would be amazed by what people toss into a Value Village bag without any seeming clue of its value.  I've bought $6 bags that contained about $2 of salvageable goods.  And I've bought $2 bags that contained a $100 dollars in goods.  Apparently many people aren't familiar with silver polish.  I've found many sterling items - chains, lockets, earrings, rings and bracelets that required little more than a dip and a polish to restore them to their original beauty.  One pair of earrings were set with lovely, genuine amethyst stones.  There have been lots of Swaroski crystal items and many, many watches that people decided weren't worth the change of a battery.  Each new bag is like a treasure hunt.

After these months of collecting, I came to learn that in the last couple of weeks, a whole lot of donations have come in.  Some of the pieces are very old and very beautiful.  Most needed a fair bit of work.  Someone passed along a whole lot of Mexican silver, all great pieces and all in need of serious cleaning.  So today I headed to mom's nursing home to put in a day of sale preparation.  The weather is terrible and in my haste to get from my car into the building, I forgot to put my parking permit on the dashboard.  When I remembered a couple of hours later, I braved the hurricane winds and lashing rain to run back to my car to put it out.  Too late.  There was a ticket on my windshield for $69.75.  It took some grovelling to get that ticket cancelled.

Tomorrow I will head back to try to finish things up.  I feel terrible about it, but I won't be at the sale on Saturday to help Nan.  Months ago I planned a long weekend trip with some friends to Las Vegas.  I want to get as much done as possible to set everything up so Nan can just put it out.  It's going to be hard enough for her to manage selling without me.  She will ask a friend to help her out but we've done it so many times together now, that we're like a well oiled machine.  And the sale is always frenetic.

I'll be wishing her luck on Saturday and hoping for a little of my own.  Shopping, a couple of shows, good meals and time with some girlfriends will make me feel like a winner whether or not the slots pay off in Vegas.