hydrangea blossoming

hydrangea blossoming
Hydrangea on the Edge of Blooming
Showing posts with label farmer's market. Show all posts
Showing posts with label farmer's market. Show all posts

Saturday, August 14, 2010

90 CD's Later

So, on Thursday, I addressed this daunting pile of CD's and decided to deal only with the first 150 of them.  As it turned out, selecting 125 to go away into a new life, leaving 25 to, more or less, stay with me (e.g., six Alasdair Fraser CD's will probably get turned over to a granddaughter who's a fan) was pretty easy.  Most of those 125 I distinctly remembered, if only in terms of the circumstances under which I had bought them, but I could also sense pretty quickly whether I was likely to play them again or wish that I had access to them.  Thus, into a bag they went for the Saturday Farmer's Market, with a little looseness in the sense of what constitutes a farmer.

I checked with a daughter who knows more about retail and resale than I do and she advised that one can easily buy used CD's for $2, so if anyone actually wanted one of mine, they would probably easily pay $1.  And there was the pricing decision.  It seemed surely all profit since whatever I had paid for these CD's in the past, I had certainly gotten that much entertainment from them.

Then, I decided to have a second line of goods: flower seeds.  I had been collecting seeds over the past few weeks from columbine and lupine.  Now, I bought 100 little plastic closable bags (2x2 inches each) and put 1/2 teaspoon of seeds in each of 30 bags (about 20 columbine and 10 lupine) and decided to sell them for a quarter, although the amount of time it took to gather and shell the lupine seed meant that if I sold them all, I'd have been working for about fifty cents an hour.  On the other hand, 1/2 t. of columbine seeds amounts to hundreds of seeds, but only a couple dozen of lupine.

And this morning, I took myself to the ever-more-sparsely populated parking lot at the Community Center.  Today, there was one seller of plants, a jeweller, a graphic artist, two or three flea market-type dealers, a lemonade-and-cookie stand, a purveyor of fancy water bottles, a large table of nature photographs/cards, and three farmers with berries and vegetables of various kinds and colors, including blackberries for $2.00 (small basket).  And me with my CD's. 

The customers were pretty steady from nine until about 11 or 11:30.  Then they thinned out, and by 12:30, the customers and the sellers were all gone. 

But, the day gave me all I had wanted.  First, I got to swell the number of sellers at the Market, if only by one.  Second, I got over NINETY CD's and 15 seed packages moved happily into someone else's life (and all those dollars moved into mine) .  Third, I got to talk with a number of visitors to and residents of (friends and new acquaintances)  Point Roberts.  And I used some of my ill gotten gains to buy a nice bowl of coleus plants.  Altogether, a very nice morning in Point Roberts!

Thursday, August 12, 2010

One Hundred Things

I was reading around somewhere on the Net the other day about a lady who had come to a crisis in her life.  You know that this was a U.S. lady because the crisis was all about having too many things.  Whatever occasioned it, she ended up deciding to re-rig her life so that it contained only 100 objects.  And now, of course, she's writing a book about it.  And when the book is published, she will have 101 things and will have to throw something out to make room for the book.

It's hard to imagine what there is for her to write about other than the fact of it.  You live with whatever you've got to live with.  On the other hand, my first response to her noting that she had retained three pairs of shoes was, "Would that be three things or six things?"  I mean, there are a lot of definitional problems that would have to be addressed and, although it would be interesting to solve that problem, I doubt whether it would be interesting to read about it.  Thus, is silverware one thing?  Or an infinite number of things, depending on the size of your silverware set?  If you are going for simplicity, surely one of each (knife, fork, spoon) should be adequate, and maybe getting a spork would cut it down to just two pieces accounting for silverware, one item.

Or maybe not.  One hundred things is doubtless possible for a life, although it would be a life in which you didn't do anything very complex: no fancy quilting, woodworking, cooking or baking, I'd guess.  I probably have a hundred things just in two or three kitchen drawers and I use them all the time.

But there are a lot of things we have, I have, that I don't use all the time and that are very numerous indeed.  Because we are moving out of our other house up in British Columbia, the disposing of stuff is much on my mind.  Lots of it is already gone.  But this past weekend, I was addressing the problem of CD's.  Somehow, between us, Ed and I, we have amassed, over the years that CD's have been with us, maybe 500 hundred of them.  We definitely are not listening to all that music.  In fact, we probably listen to fewer than a dozen of them in any given month, and fewer than thirty of them are residing in our computers for IPod  listening.

So, I decided to try the 100 item limit on CD's.  And I am going through them carefully.  Each one goes either into the pile of go or the pile of keep.  And at the end of the sort, if there are more than a hundred in the pile of keep, there will be another sorting of that pile until it is down to one hundred.  And a double disk CD counts for two items.

And then I'm going to take all those excess but excellent CD's to the Saturday Farmer's Market this weekend to see if someone else would like to take them on, or at least some of them on, for a tiny fraction of their original price.  And then I'll know what it's like to live with only 100 CD's.  And after that, maybe it would be worth trying to get down to three pairs of shoes?  Well, maybe not something that hard for a second act.  But I promise I won't turn it into a book.

Do me a favor; take these CD's off my hands.  Saturday.  9 a.m.  Community Center.  A price that is a mere token.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Saturday Market, Act III

This past Saturday, the big B.C. day weekend, featured a market even thinner than the previous week.  I fret about this because it seems such a good idea, but it will clearly take some time for it to really work and I fear people will lose their interest.  Like so many good ideas that fail to come to fruition, it will wither and end with a whimper.  The thing is, there aren't, at the moment, enough farmers here to stock an every other Saturday market.  Although, giving credit, the two tables with edible stuff were well-stocked.  

And having arts and craft people and flea market folks add to the mix is great, but it may not be possible for the crafters to be putting together that much supply without a six month notice.  (I speak here with some experience with the quilting group and the Christmas Craft fair.)  Maybe the library ought to bring out a table with its excess books for sale (or just wheel some of the carts out?) to add to the mix?  How about selling/trading used CD's?
 
In any case, it would be better if the Saturday market didn't look like it ought to be (unsuccessfully) filling up the entire Community Center parking lot.  The first one had the Fire Department doing some kind of bicycle safety program and that took up a bunch of space and added a bunch of people to the environs.  Alas, the second two have not had anything to go with them other than the fact that the library is open on Saturday, which is a good combo feature, but not enough.


Unfortunately, the dog show is the day after the next Saturday market, although it's possible that the dog show needed to have access to the community center hallway (they used it last year when it was a little shower-y) and that might not work so well on the day that library is open.  Oh, it's frustrating!  At the first market, Ed sold his postcard/photos, but he felt he had to have something different to go back.  I've been thinking about how we could fill up a table with something!  I've been gathering seeds from spent flowers all week, so maybe little plastic bags with plantable seeds?  I've got about a cup of tiny columbine seeds, and that would go a long way, but it is just columbine seeds (although I also have lupine seeds).  Spend the day before the market gathering blackberries and then offer them to somebody else since I have more than enough of them?  But doesn't everybody have more than enough of them?

Marco, who was shepherding the initial steps of the market, ran into a deer this past week while riding his bicycle and with broken bones is probably not at the top of his game right now.  So, clap for Tinker Bell, is about all I have to offer.  Plus these pictures of the most recent market.