Saturday's Yardsale Results / Sunday Trip to National Zoo Washington DC

I rented a space at the weekly fairgrounds yardsale/flea market on Saturday ($10 space rental and the space you get is huge. However, I only bring as much stuff that I can cram into my mini-van. Some people have big sized vans and pull a trailer etc, and have helpers etc. I'm just little ole me and my junk. I ended up selling $144 worth of stuff (so I took home $134 after the rental fee). I tried running around and shopping at some other sales, but its a little hard to do and still watch your table.

I ended up buying a $2 Spongebob DVD for Jacob. At another table I saw a seller selling DVDs for $1 each, so I bought $5 worth of some of the ones that I thought would I could resell quickly (Bourne Ultimatum, Minority Report, etc) and sold them for $2 each at my own table.

It's pretty amazing how picky or tight some people are with their money. I had VHS tapes priced at .50 each, which I think is a good deal. There was this young man in his 20's who spent a good few minutes reading the description of the tape and then instead of just giving me two quarters for it asks "Do you know if this has been watched a million times or not?" I felt like saying "geez, its only .50 for crying out loud". I told him I didn't know and he didn't buy it. I should have taken the tape out of the case and flipped the actual tape thing open and yanked out 6' of the tape and say "Hmmm...looks pretty good to me". Just to see the look on the guy's face would have been priceless.

Then had another customer leave her empty disposible coffee cup on my shelving unit. Granted, there are no trash cans available, but put the damn thing in your car, it can't be parked very far away. This is a small flea market, I would guess maybe 40 or so sellers at most on any given Saturday. So you don't have to walk very far to park. If I had seen that person leave the cup, I would have said something but try to make it sound helpful, not bitchy.... "Oh Miss, you forgot your coffee cup". I did see a woman with a coffee cup in her hand, so I know it was a woman who left it, but of course I couldn't remember what she looked like.

The above pic was taken after I had already sold a few things...it really doesn't look like I brought much to sell, but believe me, my car was packed.

And at the end, this is all I had to pack up. I am going to go thru what didn't sell and donate the some of the still good and useable items to Smile. Blurriness in the pic is due to a dirty cellphone camera lens.



=========
On Sunday I suggested to DH that we drive to DC and go to the National Zoo. I haven't been there since the early 90's. DH and Jacob have been there a few times within the last several years. Jacob went there two years in a row for a field trip (preschool and kindergarten class) and DH was a chaperone both times.

It's free admission to the National Zoo, but you have to pay to park if you drive there. We took the Metro (subway) instead since riding on the subway is an adventure all in itself for Jacob. The nearest Metro station is about 50 miles away from us and parking there is free on the weekends. Roundtrip for the 3 of us on the Metro cost less than $15. It probably would have been about that much to park, and we wouldn't have had the *adventure* of riding the Metro. And with the Zoo, you can bring backpacks in, so I loaded up a backpack with a few sodas and some pretzels. I brought some of the Diet Pepsi Max sodas that appear in the food picture from last week - I think they were about .20 each since I had coupons that were tripled.

So we actually didn't buy anything at the Zoo, plus, it was so crowded that even if we wanted to buy something at one of the food stands, the lines were ridiculously long. And Jacob has no interest in any of the overpriced souvenirs they sell at the gift stores. It's not like he wants a stuffed panda bear. Now if the souvenir stores sold a National Zoo Paradise City Playstation 3 game, well that may be a different story.

I do think some of the Metro stations are cool looking - went on the longest (and steepest) escalator ride of my life.







The National Zoo is one of the a few in the country that have pandas. They had just put out food for them. One is eating an apple and the other is having fun licking a crate. They must have spread some good stuff on that crate, is all I can say. The pandas do have a big outdoor enclosure thing - I think they just feed them while inside so people can have a closer view.







I took this picture of the tiger enclosure. The zookeeper had just thrown out some chunks of meat so the tigers were active. When I get home I see what looks like a person sitting in the enclosure. Or maybe I captured the Virgin Mary cradling a baby Jesus? It does look like something. I can't figure it out, but it has to be some weird sun reflection on a rock or something. Maybe just a ghost.

The pics aren't that great because I only had my cellphone with me. I couldn't find my regular digital camera - the one with the taped up battery compartment. I let Jacob take pictures with it and that's the camera I usually still use but as we were leaving the house, I couldn't find it. Of course when we got back home, I found it within two minutes.