Name your price, because it's got to go and WE ARE WILLING TO NEGOTIATE, but bring your own beer

Tonight is Friday and it has been all about talking and laughing and yummy Chinese food and a couple friends who came over for a visit, and then the real topic: GARAGE SALE TOMORROW. Whenever I'm on the eve of a garage sale, I always wonder what in the world I am thinking. It's beyond strange to have people touching YOUR STUFF and looking at you with dead on seriousness and asking if you will sell that particular Polo shirt (that is not stained and still has the dry cleaner's tag on it) for 25 cents rather than 50 cents. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Or (and this really did happen) when someone says to you that they will buy that particular item (in this case a couch) at the price you're asking, IF you give them a beer. WTF? But of course we did give her a beer that day because we were effing tired of that couch. Right, I imagine myself at Foley's trying to negotiate a new Polo shirt and tossing up "if you give me a beer, I'll pay the sticker price." Yeah, that'd be nice.

So I'm sitting here now and on this table are rolls of masking tape, a cash box with $75.03 in it (the .03 is another story altogether), and packets of price tags in five, ten, 25 and 50 cent prices, and one, five, ten and 20 dollar prices. Who made these stickers? Clearly someone who never had a garage sale because if they had ever had a garage sale then they would know that you have to have a two dollar price tag. You just have to, that's the way it is. That's what the masking tape is for. So tomorrow morning at 6:00, not only are we going to be running around like mad people putting the clothes on a line along the fence and moving five tables from the back yard to front (because apparently things sell better when they're displayed properly) and "displaying" on those tables all the stuff that we no longer want, and posting throughout the neighborhood the ten garage sale signs that we made, we're also going to be writing $2.00 on masking tape and sticking it to whatever it was that we at one time paid $50.00 for, all the while knowing that someone is still going to wander through the yard, touch all the stuff and then look up at us and say "I'll give you a dollar for this." Which is fine, we'll take it. We will negotiate, BUT THEY WILL NOT GET A BEER. Trust me on that.