2003-07-07
You fail to learn the secret!
Ah, the 4th of July. What a long, sweaty, mosquito-ridden weekend it's been. But it was still a great weekend, and now I'm back at work.
Friday was the first day of our yard sale. It was approximately 137 degrees outside. We arrived at Niki's parents' house at 5:30 in the morning and set up all of our tables full of junk. Our ad in the paper said the sale would start at the ungodly hour of 7:00, but we had people there at 6:30. To POKE AROUND IN OUR OLD JUNK. Okay, that's cool.
At least three different "customers" asked us if we had any guns or knives. Ha? As Stephanie put it, "We have old prom dresses and New Kids on the Block tapes. Do we look like we have any guns?" One man asked us if we had a canoe or a go-kart.
Anyway, we made a bunch of money/dollas/bones/cabbage ($900 among all of us; $309 for Seth and me); at least, it was a bunch of money for selling stuff that we would have thrown/given away. Everything that was left will be picked up by the ARC today. Seth's and my share is going into our armoire fund. Yay! Om-wah! To replace the old rickety, side-to-side swaying TV stand-thing we have.
Another result of the yard sale is that we all now have mosquito bites in places no mosquito should ever know about. Yikes. And we drenched ourselves in OFF! and Skin-So-Soft and Bounce fabric softener sheets (Niki's mom's suggestion), but nothing worked. Those mosquitoes meant business, and they were immune to all our defenses.
The weekend also included the watching of fireworks and a trip to the Dance Beat Arcade, near Niki and Stephanie's apartment, just to see what the hell it was. We had thought that "Dance Beat Arcade" was kind of a goofy-assed name, but it made more sense when we saw that it housed nothing but Dance Dance Revolution games. I had heard of these, but I had never before seen the spectacle that is two pasty-faced teenagers hopping all over a giant videogame platform to techno music. We even saw one boy performing some sort of warm-up stretches (!) to play the video game.
Also, we kind of thought these games might have been stolen, as all of them were in Japanese. The only English that ever appeared on the screen said things like "This game may only be sold and played in Japan." Oh, there was a little bit more English on one of the simulated boxing games--after Seth, "lost," a big sumo wrestler man shouted, "You fail to learn the secret!" Some of the songs were in English (the Mickey Mouse club song), but they were clearly sung by Japanese women. All in all, a very educational experience for us.