Perhaps you can help me.

I'm spending all of my free time going to my storage locker, opening boxes, looking through them and deciding if what is contained in each of them is mostly items that should be sold in my upcoming garage sale to benefit our Relay For Life event or will I mostly use it in our new house or is it something I'm storing because it means too much to me to get rid of. (In other words, will I open that same box in a couple more years and wonder why in the world I still have that ridiculous thing and sell it in that Relay garage sale!) Then the ones that are headed to the sale get loaded into my car, brought back to the house and unpacked in my garage and set about on the tables. I'm not marking anything. I'm just setting it all out. And then rearranging everything. Over and over and over again.

2006 Relay Garage Sale

Why am I not marking anything? Because as it is, this sale is taking me hours to prepare for. DAYS even. And I've had enough of these sales over the years to know that in order to get rid of everything the way I want to, so that I don't have to haul things out of here on Saturday after the sale, prices have to be set low. So low in fact that by the time you spend all of those extra hours marking everything, when you stop to tally it all up, all of those hours you spent preparing, you realize that you made about a nickel an hour toward the Relay. And then you get a little bit depressed.

So this year I decided to try something a little bit different for this sale. I decided to run it more like our hot dog stands of the past. I'm going to ask for donations on the majority of the items. I'm going to hang up photos of the friends and family that I have lost to cancer around the garage. I'm going to put up statistical data about cancer and information about what the American Cancer Society is doing with the funds that Relay is making. I'm going to do a little information spreading while I sell my goods and I'm going to ask that people donate generously for the items that they are taking away. And Survivor Keith will be there, too. And my mom will be there in her Relay shirt and I will be there in mine.

It may make less money than ever, but it's worth a shot I think. Because I really want to get rid of everything and not have to haul anything away come Saturday morning. And I don't want to spend any more time getting ready for this sale than I have to. Frankly? I'm getting a little tired of my garage.

So for the next week until next Thursday, I'm going to be working on a list of who has been inspiring me to keep going along this fund raising path. You can help me with that if you'd like to. In the comments you can tell me who it is that you know who has been diagnosed or that you have lost since last May 11, the date of my last garage sale. And next week? I'll have the whole list printed out for my sale. Let's knock my shoppers over and help them dig a little deeper in their pockets, shall we?

If you could include a photo, that would be even better. Pass the word along to your friends. Overwhelm me with your names and photos. Please. It would rock if we could put together a slide show. Someone could take and run with this in flickr for me... maybe HalfBrainBoy could handle this part of it. I'll have to get him out here... hah.

Okay. Enough.