Our first fundraiser: a yard sale!

Hey everybody. JJ here. We had our first fundraiser last weekend: a yard sale! I wish we would have sold our yard (so I wouldn't have to mow it), but alas, this sale was not quite that literal.

Seriously, though, some fantastic friends donated items to this sale to help raise money for our adoption -- HUGE hugs of appreciation go out to Marcelo Chisholm, Cat Henneberry and Micki Heckman, Alicia Teasley, Erika Livingston, Kelsi Mason and Lake Hankal for their generosity.

Our super-awesome buddy Emjae made it a joint yard sale venture; she came over Thursday night to help get everything organized and in some sort of logical order.

Here is Emjae:

Emjae is a yard-sale guru. She has this process down. From the tagging to the sorting to the haggling with customers. Seeing Emjae work a yard sale is like seeing mid-90's Michael Jordan hit a pull-up jumper in the playoffs against the Utah Jazz. Most of us sorta dread the idea of sitting in the heat all day in our driveway, hoping to negotiate an extra 25 cents from a lady who is (for some reason) interested in that used, ceramic, giraffe-shaped ashtray. Not Emjae. That's her idea of an awesome Saturday afternoon. So we were happy to have her around for this one.

Emjae manned the ship for us Friday while we both were at work. We were pleasantly surprised to see a good steady stream of folks out yard-sale-ing early Friday morning before we left. We made nearly $200 Friday morning alone.

Our big-ticket items: an electric lawnmower, a table saw, two tv's, two Gazelle workout machines, tons of women's clothes and shoes, over a thousand CDs, lots of books and a large dresser/mirror set. And a driveway full of weird random things.

On day two, the morning was especially busy. Apparently yard-salers like to get out as early as humanly possible on Saturday mornings; I guess in hopes of getting to the good stuff before it's all been picked through.

Business started dying down around noon, and by 1:30 or so, Ash and I were ready for lunch and growing tired of sitting there by ourselves in the driveway.

So we closed up shop, dragged what was left back into the garage, then added up all the totals and were THRILLED to be able to deposit nearly $500 into our adoption fund account. This fundraiser will be a huge help in starting the process!

We had enough stuff left over from this sale (and more generous souls who have been offering more items to us) to warrant holding another fundraiser sale soon. It will most likely be sometime in October; not sure yet exactly when. We'll keep y'all posted so you can swing by. Be sure to bring a few extra bucks when you do -- you never know what other ceramic animal items we might be peddling. ;)