Community Garage Sale
Ever since we moved to Sitka & our household goods were delivered, Kolt & I have been filling our storage unit with boxes of items that we have realized we do not need. It has been a few years since we had all of our belongings in one place at the same time & nothing in storage. Our living situations (there have been several) over the past few years, have caused us to buy multiples of things, mostly kitchen stuff, or we had things that we no longer needed or used, like the washing machine & dryer, or we just simply no longer had room to store things, like wedding gifts from 2005 that had never been opened or used. I am NOT a clutter bug AT ALL! I do not like keeping things in the house that do not get used & quite honestly I'm shocked that we had managed to keep 2 unopened boxes of wine glasses that were given to us as wedding gifts. We don't even drink wine!!! Anyways, with all of our storage space maxed out & a baby on the way, we needed to get rid of things. The Sitka Coast Guard Air Station has an annual community garage/ yard sale inside the hangar where Coast Guard families can buy a table to set up & then the Sitka community is invited to come into the hangar & shop, kind of like a little swap meet or flea market. I didn't realize that we had that much to sell until we were setting up this morning & realized we should have gotten 2 tables instead of 1. Since we live in Coast Guard housing, they supply us with a washing machine & dryer for the laundry room & the set we had were taking up space in the storage unit. We also decided when we do move again & if we were to buy a house we wanted a new set, so they went to the garage sale. We arrived & started setting up at 9am & they were going to open the doors to the public at 10am & it was supposed to end at 1pm. Our washer & dryer sold to another Coast Guard family that are moving out of housing, before the doors even opened. Almost everything else we had, including a desktop computer with printer & webcam, was sold by 11am. We ended up leaving with a few pieces of clothing, about 5 books, a couple flower vases, & some plastic cups & went straight to good will to donate our small amount of unsold items. All in all, we cleared out a good amount of room in the shed & made almost $1,000. With a new baby on the way & all the stuff we have to buy for her & her bedroom, we were very pleased with the extra income. Now, I get to move & rearrange our storage spaces for the 4th time since moving in. I am also very proud of myself for not buying anything from any of the other tables while we were there AND there were SEVERAL tables of very cute baby girl clothes.
After the garage sale was over & we were driving to the bank, we noticed that ALL of the fishing boats were leaving the harbors & headed north. Herring season was about to start & game & fish put the commercial fishermen on a standby. This meant that all the fishing vessels were heading to "the spot" to sit and wait & as soon as game & fish says "go", they drop their nets. We decided to drive north towards the boats to see if we could watch, however, they were too far out from the island. A lot of people were pulled over on the side of the road trying to watch, but unless you had binoculars, there wasn't much to see. They ended up opening herring season around 2:30pm for about an hour & a half. We brought the binos with us so we could see all the boats & all the spotters flying around in the air above. There was a ton of boats out on the water & we were so disappointed that it wasn't happening closer to land. Kolt is going to go out on the boat tomorrow to do some fishing & he will probably head up to the herring area to get a closer look if they open it again.
Our baby shower/ BBQ, that the neighbors are throwing for us, has been set for June 2nd & the invitations are absolutely adorable. They match the bedding we are going to get for Brinleigh's room.
