THE BIG YARD SALE IS OVER – YAAAY!

We’ve had a busy week since the last post. My Dad celebrated their anniversary by having a couple of seizures. They think he had two strokes, a minor in the morning and a more serious one in the afternoon. His vitals including blood pressure, O2 level and heart were fine. His surface temperature was high though. It has been years since he’s had warm feet but that evening his feet were very warm. His external temperature was back down a couple days later. Regardless of what happened, he has lost ground and it will be difficult to regain. One thing that did come out of it was that I got to see Becky, my youngest sister and the only one of my seven siblings I hadn’t seen yet.

Aileen and I spent much of the week helping get the yard sale ready. I did five signs for the major road intersections and Sheila put an ad in the local paper. We had a huge number of people through on Saturday and got rid of lots of “stuff”. We decided to leave the signs up and try again Sunday and we got rid of lots more. Sheila kept bringing more out of the house and if people were looking for something specific, she would see what she could find. It was a lot of work but I think it was pretty successful.

I bought Photomatix Light online one day last week and have played with a few images so far. The program groups a series of images that you take with various exposures and creates a blended version. The idea being that for highly contrasted scenes which are impossible to correctly expose for, you shoot at a middle exposure, an exposure for the highlights and one for the shadows then the program blends them. From there you can make further adjustments. It should prove interesting. I have seen some great results when other people have used it.

I took Mom to her art group last Wednesday and stayed and visited with Larry, the man of the house. I peeked in on the ladies part way through and was pleased to see Mom was actually doing some art. She was sketching a horse from a post card or something and it was looking pretty good. I was under the impression she didn’t open her art supplies anymore, only visited with her old friends, so this was good to see. Perhaps the new medication is responsible. It was sad to think of her losing her artistic abilities after it being her hobby for so long. She has hundreds of pictures hanging on people’s walls. All of her offspring have several each as do most of the grandchildren and she sold at the local market and other venues for many years.

Chas and Sheila treated us to Vietnamese food for supper one night and it was very good. We went to the Mekong River Restaurant at the east end of Parksville who have only been open a few weeks. They owned a restaurant in Nanaimo for 16 years and were bought out by someone who made an offer they couldn’t refuse. Chas remembered the guy as they had eaten there several times as it was next door to where Sheila worked.

I took the trailer to the dump station on Friday as I didn’t want to risk having the tanks fill up over the weekend while the access was blocked in front of our trailer by the yard sale items. Aileen stayed with Sheila and they slaved away on the pricing which has to be the hardest part of a yard sale. Aileen had given Mitzy a bath earlier so I took her (Mitzy) for a long walk down at the park where I dumped. I was surprised at the number of tent campers in the park. They must have good sleeping bags as we’ve had lots of frosty mornings. Sheila and I went to the local Home Show Friday evening as Chas and Aileen were too tired.

On Mother’s Day, we had a barbeque here at Chas and Sheila’s with all Sheila’s family. Most of the group ate in front of the TV cheering on their Vancouver Canucks. I guess it was worth it as the Canucks won.

I kept busy yesterday. First off, I sorted all the left over yard sale boxes that were outside. About half went to the steel pile down behind the barn, some to the burn pile, some to garbage and there were only two boxes I thought to be good enough for a thrift store. After that, I started dismantling Dad’s old fence which was well inside the new property line and fence. It had become an eyesore and was quite a challenge to get down. I worked by myself all morning and had most of the staples out. I had to prune some roses near the road to get at the last two posts. Aileen helped me after lunch. She hooked the chain around the posts which I then lifted out with the loader. I kidded her about thinking her choker setting days were over. We rolled up the wire after and put it with the steel pile.

Today Aileen gave me a haircut after going to light up the burn pile. Then we took three loads of the yard sale leavings to Parrot World who have just opened a thrift type store as a fund raiser for the facility which takes in abandoned parrots. A young guy from close by came and took three pickup loads of old doors and windows that were left over from the yard sale. The yard and garage are completely empty of everything we had in the yard sale.

The weather has been really nice mostly for several days getting up into the high teens C (high 60’s F). As I’m sitting here, a mature bald eagle is attacking some ducks in the field not far away. We’d rather he was taking some of the geese instead. We have a resident Great Blue Heron visiting several times a day also