Photo of the Day

Delectable Decorated Strawberries & Truffles

Photo by: Rachel
Photo taken: June 8, 2009
Chocolate Goodness made by: Rachel

Yard Sale Success!

Today I had my first yard sale. Everything happened so fast and unorganized that I am surprised at how well it turned out. Yesterday I haphazardly sent a text message to my old roommate (and owner of the townhouse I am living in), Jessica, to see if she had at all thought any more on the subject of having a yard sale like she once mentioned several weeks ago. In return I received a phone call with a very stressed and lost sounding voice on the other end. Jessica had just discovered that she had a 3-day weekend but didn't know what to do with herself with the options before her. After some talking and weighing the pros and cons and viewing things in a different perspective she all of a sudden burst into excitement with the idea of earning money selling her things at a yard sale rather than spending her money by going with the other option. It was set - a Saturday Yard Sale!

But wait? It's Friday. This is where the 'fast and unorganized' part comes into play.

Jessica arrived in Rexburg yesterday evening and in a short amount of time the house was in a chaotic mess. Unfortunately our energy puttered out after only a few hours. In that short time we managed to pile all of the things we wanted to sell in the middle of the living room leaving only a small pathway mazing through our belongings. It would be a task to sort through the next day but there wasn't any pressure because we were having our yard sale on Saturday. Or so I thought...

As Jessica and I tucked oursevles into bed last night Jessica expressed her desire to take advantage of both Friday and Saturday by having a yard sale on both days. As I was thinking that an afternoon yard sale would be just fine Jessica piped up saying that the best garage sale shoppers start at 7 or 8am in the morning and so she wanted to be out there with the early bird shoppers. *silence* My first thought went to the big pile that lay in heaps downstairs. My next thought went something like this, "Riiiiiiiiiiight." I think Jessica was underestimating what it would take to host this yard sale.

As I awoke to Jessica getting up at the crack of dawn this morning and wrestling through the things downstairs I rolled over and tried to get in a few more minutes of sleep. Finally unable to drift off to sleep I slipped out of bed and joined Jessica downstairs organzing the mess we had made the previous night. My objective was to organize things in groups and then go through and price each item. I soon came to realize that Jessica's objective was completely different. She just wanted to get everything out on the lawn - priced or not - because with each passing car driving by was one less potential yard sale shopper and one less potential sale. After having quite the discussion about our difference of opinions I began helping Jessica load the back of my truck.

Cars started stopping and yard sale shoppers began emerging from the cars while we were still unloading the truck. This made both Jessica and I very panicked and frazzled as people asked one after another, "How much are you selling this for?" "What about this?" With a dumbfounded look on our faces our responses consisted of a lot of 'ums' and stuttering as we rambled off the first number that came to our head. After the first flood of people fizzled out, with one item of ours each being sold, we quickly scrambled to set everything up and put price tags on everything before the next wave came.

Our yard sale was different than most yard sales. This wasn't the typical last-effort-before-hitting-the-DI yard sale. The things that we were selling were quality items and we priced them as such. Many people were surprised at the prices, but one of our customers truthfully commented, "Wow, it looks like you brought everything from your living room out here!" "We did!" I responded. We held strong to our prices, only letting them drop a few dollars from our original set price.

With the last minute decision to do our yard sale today we didn't have time to make or put up any advertisements. But when I had to make a quick errand I noticed that a "garage sale" sign was posted at the end of our street with another sign posted just down the street from where our yard sale was located. So, THANKS to whomever posted those signs and SORRY for taking away some of your shoppers!

The wind started blowing pretty hard around 1:30pm and so we decided to close shop just after one last good sale. Jessica sold about 90% of her things and earned a good amount of money. The number of things I had was significantly more because I included all of my old textbooks from school in with everything else. Not selling a single book I still made out better than I thought I would. And including the sale of my Lov Sac from last week it felt like an even more success.

Since we were able to sale the majority of our things we decided that there wasn't a need to have another yard sale tomorrow. We were satisfied with what we sold and were content with giving a lot of the remaining things to DI. The big things that I didn't sale will soon be posted either on Craigslist or eBay.

A few extra bucks in this girl's pocket and a smile on her face is a good way to end a Friday.

Scenery Complete

After a year the scene is finally complete! I didn't realize how much of an eye-sore the big white block was where the missing panel of my wall mural was supposed to be until after putting up the last piece of the mural this afternoon. It looks so much better! It looks complete! Although it was a challenge to place the last panel on the wall by myself, with it not turning out as great as all of the other mural panels (of course oblivious to the non-perfectionists out there), it still feels so good to have something in my life complete - even if it is just a beautiful scenery on my wall. Now I can thoroughly enjoy this beautiful God-created place completely.

Freshly Grounded

When I worked at the cannery several weeks I ago I snagged a couple cans of whole wheat grains in anticipation of my newly owned wheat grinder. Running out of bread before my Colorado trip I decided to make my own whole wheat homemade bread with freshly ground wheat instead of going to store to buy some bread. To say the least, I can hardly keep my hands off the loaf of bread. It is extremely delicious, soft, and moist!
















I have done some reading in the past about the health benefits of sprouted breads and flours verses non-sprouted grains. I have found it very interesting and would love to give homemade sprouted bread a shot. An educational challenge indeed.

Downsizing & Decluttering

I inherited the pack-rat disease from my father. It's a disease that takes up every inch of your closet, bedroom, box, storage space, and nook and cranny of the house (and anywhere else it can squeeze in). It even spreads itself abroad to different locations. My disease currently stretches from Idaho to Texas. I was finally able to take Arizona out of the picture - thanks to Julius and Adria. The great thing about this disease (if there is such a thing) is that it is pretty manageable and easy to control for the most part. It when I try to rid myself of this disease that all chaos breaks loose and it really becomes uncontrollable - things are everywhere and the piles never seem to get smaller or disappear. I guess that is why pack-rat disease is very hard to rid myself of because it's so much easier to have it!

Several weeks ago I came to the conclusion, for one reason or another, that I needed to downsize and declutter. There are a lot of things that I have that I don't need or use and could go without. I haven't managed to climb down into the crawl space and go through the many bins of things I have down there yet, but I have done a few things so far. One is selling the school books I have (that won't be bought back from BYU-Idaho) online. I haven't sold as nearly as much as I would have liked or thought I would have, but slowly but surely one by one they are disappearing off my shelf.

I just sold my Lov Sac today. :(... I have wanted a lov sac for a really long time before I was able to purchase one for my bedroom as part of my fantasy room. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I loved my Lov Sac but it's not a necessity and is something that I can do without until I have really established my roots in a home somewhere and am more financially secure. As I sit on the floor in my bedroom where its home once was I know it will be missed.


Now all I need is the motivation to go into the crawl space and sort through the things down there to see what else is sale-able or DI worthy. I will even be joining my old roommate in a garage sale in a week or two. Someone else's junk is another person's treasure!

Colorado Getaway

For an extended Memorial Day weekend I met up with my friend Stephanie in Colorado to traipse around the state as much as we could. Like most places around the United States, Colorado got dumped on with rain, which prevented us from doing several of the activities we really wanted to do. We still managed to get in quite a few fun adventures in despite the gloomy weather. Here are the highlights of the trip:

Denver, Colorado Temple
Getting to Colorado late Saturday night this was the first place we visited on Sunday after church. Because of the looming storm clouds everyday the lighting was awful for outside pictures, but we did our best to capture everything as best we could.

I forgot my water in the car and we happened to be
standing by the temple's fountain....

There were a variety of different pretty flowers landscaped around the temple. I don't know what these are called, but they were my favorite because they were in the shapes of hearts.

This is the view from the front of the Branson's vacant house where we stayed. The mountain in the distance is Pike's Peak - a well known mountain in the United States and one of the only mountains that you can drive a car to the very top at 14,000 ft. They have lots of bottled oxygen on hand. We weren't able to go to the top because of the snow Pike's Peak received.

GARDEN OF THE GODS

Effortlessly holding up a 16 ton boulder.
What you don't see is my super-woman suit under my clothes.

Stephanie sitting under the 16 ton boulder praying an earthquake won't happen.

Stephanie and I taking shelter under an overhanging rock from the rain and lightening strikes of the storm rolling over Garden of the Gods.

One of the many red rock towers that were jetting out of the earth.

A side view of what most of these red rock towers looked like. Bewildering!

Climbing up, on, and around the many crevasses we
found throughout Garden of the Gods.

Stephanie taking in the adventure and challenge of climbing the red rock.

What a view!
What a perfect and fitting name for this place.

Stephanie and I at the end of our trek around Garden of the Gods.

ANASAZI CLIFF DWELLINGS
(Mom you would have LOVED this)

View of almost all of the cliff dwellings there that were occupied up until 1984.

It was really exciting for me to visit these cliff dwellings. They have a personal meaning to me and are more than just ancient dwellings.

No, this is not a dog house but an oven for baking loaves of bread. I think up to 16 loaves could be baked at once in this oven.

This was where some of the food/cooking duties that the men had took place. There was a place in there that looked like there were several manos and matats used (a round rock and a rock slab to grind wheat and seeds). Very cool.

A Tipi (tepee) - one of my dream homes.

Stephanie playing and dancing right along with Mr. Kokepelli.

I thought this was another very interesting part of the dwellings. This is one of the back rooms that served as a garbage area. The Indians would throw their scraps that were unburnable/unusable into this room. And during the winter when the ground was too hard to bury somebody they would place the body in this room with the garbage where it become perfectly mummified because of how dry it stayed.

Sitting on the second floor of a two small-family dwelling.

A middle section of the cliff dwellings which all ran together.

CAVE OF THE WINDS

A bear near the entrance of the cave of the winds.
Just wrestling it down. No big deal.

This is the ceiling of a part in the cave. We decided to go on the Lantern Lit tour of the caves. It was really educational and interesting, but we didn't have much opportunity to take many pictures of the cave as we would have liked. The pictures we did take were our desperate attempts to capture some of them as we were on our way out of the cave.

The wall and ceiling of the cave near the entrance we came in.

Beware: I'm as fierce as a bear. Grrr.

FOX RUN PARK

Fox Run Park is a nearby park to the Branson's Colorado home. It was a pretty nice little park with lots of trails spurring off from the main one around the lake.

A little squirrel friend we met as we strolled around the park. He was quite tame.

COWS!!
(This is for you Grandma & Mom)

I spotted these cows as we passed a ranch on one of the many
country roads we were driving down. I had to stop to get pictures by them!
Cows forever and for always!

Don't worry, these cows aren't coming home anytime soon. ;o)
(Bunches and bunches, forever and ever, til the cows come home!)

The sunset on our way home the last evening we were in Colorado.

I think I went to or through Colorado when I was younger, but I don't remember it at all. I am glad that I was able to venture out and visit it again and visit the places that we did. It is a very beautiful state and makes me want to live out in the country. Hopefully next time it won't rain every day and I'll be able to go on some of the original planned adventures. But all in all, it was a fun getaway! Thanks Stephanie!

Look at more pictures from our Colorado Adventures on my Photobucket