Yard Sale

This week has been very busy. On Monday night for our family night we placed signs all over town announcing the community yard sale that Mama organized. We put the signs on boxes and then put rocks in the boxes to make sure they didn’t blow away. One nice thing about Arizona is that there is always a plentiful supply of rocks just about everywhere.

Speaking of rocks. . . we’ve found that they multiply like rabbits in our back yard. I have spent about 7 hours roto-tilling three measly strips in the back yard. (Mama wants to plant corn and sunflowers.) I’ve discovered that we have more rocks than sandy dirt. The tiller I borrowed went crazy on Tuesday night. All the vibration caused by the rocks unloosened the screw which holds the choke butterfly valve in place. The screw became lodged in the carburetor in such a way that the engine began to accelerate uncontrollably. After I shut down the engine it took me a few minutes to figure out what happened. Fortunately, nothing was permanently damaged and I was able to get the tiller back together with just a bit of effort.

On Wednesday Mama and I taught the youth in our congregation how to do the Virgina Reel, a type of folk dance. We had about 65 youth present that night. It was a lot of fun. Underfoot loved to ‘dance’ in his own way. At one point, he picked up the microphone. It happened to be quiet right at that moment. With a big grin he said, “Chick-en”, which drew a huge laugh from everyone in the hall. It was a wonderfully funny moment.

Mama is now about 32 weeks pregnant, so she had to catch her breath after teaching the dance for a few minutes. She is a trooper when it comes to working. Sometimes I think she forgets that she is building body parts and must work at all times. That must be a maternal trait. Speaking of those maternalisms, Lucas has picked up one from his Mama. When asked if he is sick, Underfoot replies, “I fine”. . . that sounds like Mama. . .

Underfoot still seems to be at bit under the weather. We think he might have allergies because the mesquite trees are blossoming right now and sometimes during the day he is lethargic. At other times during the day he jumps and plays like normal.

On Thursday we had a horrible wind which ravished our tomato plants. On Friday we had a ward dinner party and eggstravaganza. The ‘eggstravaganza’ consisted of people making cars to carry eggs down a track and across a finish line. I got to be a line judge. It was interesting to see the various designs. It is kind of like a pine wood derby with eggs. The family that won the competition has done so for the last few years. The winning car had two electric fans on it.

Saturday morning was the community yard sale. We got up early, made a bunch of arrow signs, and ran around town to put them out. We discovered that some poor soul ran over one of our signs during the week. The person must have felt guilty because they managed to put the sign back together, albeit with road some added road-rash.

We were able to check out the sweet treasures that others were selling because we’d gotten up so early. I found two sets of armor (in honor of Sir Aaron), 3 Tonka trucks for the sand box, and a pedal powered go-cart for Underfoot. He can’t quite reach the pedals yet, but he’ll grow into it. We also got a few other treasures. We sold two items, make a total profit of $1.50. (We only had two items to sell.) We consider ourselves very blessed.