So this idea DOES need more explanation than the title? Okay, I will give it.

We have a yard, and it is in an excellent location for yard sales: visible from a semi-main road, semi-visible from a main road. We’ve had a couple of standard yard sales there. The more successful one, I spent hours and hours gathering/sorting/pricing things and laying them out attractively, and we spent most of the day sitting outside monitoring it and not getting the things done we’d usually get done, and we made $75. VERY DISCOURAGING. (The less successful one, it was drizzling and we made $7.)

So now what we do is once per summer we put stuff out on our lawn with a big “FREE” sign, and people come and take it away for us. Usually the first few cars of the morning take about half of it, and the rest of it gets picked at over the rest of the day. If we do it during peak yard sale season it goes particularly quickly, no doubt because people are taking the stuff to sell at their own yard sales.

This has ended up being a much more satisfying way to do things. It’s much, much easier: I don’t have to fret about the condition of things or whether something might be broken or missing a piece; I don’t have to put things out nicely; it doesn’t have to be monitored; I don’t have to decide how to price things; I don’t have to deal with people trying to bargain me down to 75c from a dollar; I don’t have to do math in my head; I don’t have to sit there feeling frantically self-conscious while other people poke critically through my stuff.

I like to peek out the window at people and make up little fantasies about what they’re taking and why. I pretend that the person taking the baby stuff is pregnant and has been lying awake nights wondering how she was going to afford the things she needs. I pretend that the person taking the kitchen canisters has been looking for those at antique stores for YEARS, to replace the ones from her childhood. It can be very gratifying to make this stuff up, and far better than imagining that other people are going to make MILLIONS by having a proper yard sale with it.

Our free yard sales have been much less impressive since we (1) had our porch made into a dining room and (2) started using Freecycle. The porch is where we used to dump all the stuff waiting for the day we did the yard sale, but we don’t want to put all that stuff on the dining room table instead. (For one thing, the dining room table is ALREADY covered in stuff.) And with Freecycle, we tend to get rid of stuff as we have it, as opposed to saving it. Still, with a big pre-mother-in-law-visit purge, we get out the old sheets and put out a nice spread.

It was because I was searching Temerity Jane’s blog for more information about her wig collection that I found this video. Here’s the post where she writes about it. Feel happy with Temerity Jane and me! [Note from the future: I don’t know what video used to be here, but it apparently didn’t transfer over when I moved the blog.]

I have been playing with Google Analytics, something I rarely do because I don’t understand ANYTHING on that site and never will. But totally by accident I found out how to do a map that shows how many visitors this blog got from each state in the last month. You know where I am WILDLY UNPOPULAR? Wyoming and North Dakota. So I thought I’d do something to even out the stats a little. Something that might appeal to people from Wyoming and North Dakota, because clearly I have been ALIENATING PEOPLE FROM WYOMING AND NORTH DAKOTA.

I’m going to start with Wyoming, because even taking into account that Wyoming has the fewest residents of any state, it is disproportionately unfond of me. For example, in the last month I have had 10 visits to my site from Wyoming. Nebraska, which has about 3 times the population of Wyoming, has visited 300 times—30 times as many visitors from a state with 3 times the population. Wyoming HATES me.

So! Yellowstone! That’s a great park, yeah? Really awesome! Tourists should totally go there, and then they should spend lots of money while in the state, and they should send me postcards because I would treasure them!

And can I get a shout-out for coal and whatever has to be done to get it out of the ground? Sounds like hard work!

Go, Casper Ghosts! Go, Wyoming Calvary! Go, Wyoming Cowboys and Wyoming Cowgirls!

Did you know Dick and Lynne Cheney are BOTH from Wyoming? It’s true! So is Buffalo Bill! So is Jackson Pollock, he of the splatter paintings! Also: William Henry Harrison! Not the 9th president of the United States, no. Apparently it is a common name.

And you know what the coolest shape is for a state to be? Largish and nearly rectangular! It is way easier to fill in those places on the map, you can’t deny THAT. Not like all those skimpy twisted little northeastern states!

You know what else is great? Being north of Colorado! Wooo!

Wyoming may not like me, but as I read their Wikipedia entry I am liking THEM more and more. Did you know they win first prize for “Feminism Before It Was Cool”? Yes! They were the first state to acknowledge the right of women to vote, and the first to have women on a jury, and the first to elect women to several different positions of political power I’ve forgotten in the time it took me to get back here from Wikipedia. This is why they are called The Equality State, and that’s something I never knew and/or never knew the reason behind and/or was too busy writing notes to my boyfriend to hear when it was told to me in class.

Also, did you know they have a State Dinosaur? It’s the triceratops. That is AWESOME.

Posts currently saved as drafts, because they seemed like less of a good idea after I wrote them but I didn’t quite want to delete them:

1. A post trying to kiss up to people from Wyoming, because I was playing with Google Analytics and found out I am super-unpopular there—even taking into account the low population.

2. A post in which the only part that is written is the title, which is “Free Yard Sale.” It was going to be about how every year we hold a free yard sale in our (wait for it) yard. But after I wrote the title, I felt like I’d already explained the whole concept.

3. A post I meant to finish LONG AGO, with a question from a reader about newborn sleep issues. That newborn is now…let’s see…two months old.

4. A rant post about things that bug me. All the things in the list are things I have already ranted about on other occasions.

5. A post about how using my Wii Fit is like going to confession (“It has been 3 days since my last workout”). I am not Catholic. What do I know about what going to confession is like?

6. A post about whether elementary-school-aged boys should be allowed to wear nail polish if they want to.

7. A post containing partially-written childbirth stories. They kept getting out-of-hand lengthy. Like, novellas.

8. A post about what an obedient person I am. Who cares?

9. A post containing links to postcards I was buying for Postcrossing after asking you guys for suggestions and getting some great ones. I don’t know why I never posted this. Looks like I forgot.

10. A post about Jimmy, only half-written before I ran out of steam with those adolescent-diary posts.

11. A rant about how I much I dislike it when people assume that a family with 5 children NEEDS a 7-bedroom house or tons of other stuff people didn’t expect to have a few generations ago when they had more children and fewer bathrooms. Never posted because I kind of like it when people say, “And you only have one bathroom??????” as long as they say it in the impressed way instead of in the “I’m calling Child Protective Services” way. And besides, now we have two bathrooms.

12. A rant about how on the children’s television show Arthur, Arthur is in third grade before he ever sees his parents bicker. Er?

13. A post about the time I went to my primary care provider to ask if I could be switched to a version of the birth control pill that would make me feel less crazy, and he said I should “do the adult thing” and get my tubes tied. I thought I’d probably already written about that enough times. And besides, then I went to my OB who said there DEFINITELY WAS a birth control pill that made many women feel less crazy, and he gave me a prescription for it, and then he had a highly gratifying conversation with his nurse in which the two of them rolled their eyes at how dumb my PCP was.

14. Yet another post in which I discuss my various methods for dealing with depression-like moods. Repetitive much?

15. A list of things that changed the way I felt about other things (example: Britney Spears’s behavior changed the way I felt about Kevin Federline).

16. A post about how Paul is not a “fixer” the way many men are, but I AM. That is, if you vent to me, I might forget that I’m not being asked to offer a solution. I didn’t post it because I actually would rather not draw your attention to that flaw.

There. That brings us back to fall of 2008.

This is hardly a fresh observation, but let me join the legions who have said it is WEIRD when you run into someone you went to high school with. And it gets weirder with every year.

Yesterday Paul and I were out on a date, and a woman came up to me and said we’d gone to school together, and I didn’t recognize her AT ALL which was as awk as I’d feared in my many times imagining such a scenario, but fortunately I ABSOLUTELY recognized her NAME and knew exactly who she was and THEN recognized her, and all my her-related memories clicked into place, and everything was fine although of course still awk because AWK SITUATION.

I’m in my mid-thirties, and so at this point my high school self is less than half my age. I looked up my old classmate in the yearbook when I got home, and both of us have really left our high school selves behind. Those senior pictures look like CHILDREN. Thin, smooth-faced children. With late-eighties/early-nineties hair (I have bagel bangs!).

This same week, another former classmate died. It reminds me of when I was in my early twenties and a friend of mine got pregnant, and it was the first time I’d realized that I was now the age when I could do that TOO. I know that seems like it should have been obvious, especially since by that age I’d already been married and divorced and also technically could have been getting pregnant for a good decade, but it was still like a light going on as to the ACTUAL FACT of it. I could have an ACTUAL BABY!!!! It was like that. But, um, with death.

Oh, I DO get SO TIRED of the old idea that men are doing a PERFECT JOB at chores, just IN THEIR OWN WAY, and that women are ONLY complaining because the men don’t do the chores IN THE SAME WAY the women would. Oh, yes. Clearly. If my complaint is that when Paul does dishes there is STILL FOOD ON THE DISHES, obviously my problem is that I’m a control-freak who insists he do the dishes My Way instead of his Perfectly Good Alternative Way.

Listen. I totally understand this control-freak argument if, say, a man likes to do the dishes with a sink full of wash water and a sink full of rinse water, and his wife is all over him wanting him to have a sink full of wash water and then a thin stream of running water in the other sink. OBVIOUSLY that is unreasonable: he has His Way and she has Her Way, and why would she be trying to force him to do it Her Way? Ridiculous! The dishes come out clean either way, so why would one adult be nagging another adult?

But why ON EARTH would anyone try to apply that to situations where it doesn’t even slightly apply? I complain that Paul goes to the store and comes home with pumpkin pie filling instead of pumpkin, and people say it’s wrong of me to demand he do things my way, or they say I should accept that he does things differently than I would. This is not a My Way vs. His Way issue EVEN A LITTLE TINY BIT. This is him making a mistake.

If Paul puts our child’s homework in the recycling bin, must I SAY NOTHING because he is doing things HIS WAY? No. He is doing things THE WRONG WAY. The argument people are looking for is the one where I complain because Paul puts the recycling in all willy-nilly instead of neatly stacked, or where I fuss because he likes to take the bin out on Tuesday night and I think he should take it out Wednesday morning.

In those cases, there’s His Way and My Way, and both ways result in Success: recycling is in the recycling bin and is brought to the curb on time. It BAFFLES me that people want to apply this to cases in which His Way results in the papers being strewn across the yard, or placed in the regular trash, or left on the floor in another room, or not brought out to the curb on time. I’m supposed to consider that “his way of doing things” and not say anything about it because it’s not fair to force him to do things “my way”? Ridiculous!

There are two completely different situations here, which some people try to relate. The first is a situation of His Way vs. My Way. That’s the one where we have all now been THOROUGHLY CHASTENED that we are never ever ever supposed to say ANYTHING to ANYONE about their inviolable right to do things exactly as they feel like doing them, no matter how stupid or inefficient, because after all it DOES result in the chore being done.

The second is a situation of Right Way vs. Wrong Way. I think grown adults should be able to do things (HOWEVER they choose to do them) in a way that results in the chore being DONE. And if they don’t manage to do so, I CERTAINLY DO speak up. I am in a partnership with an adult, and I expect the other partner to act that way. I am not in a 1950s sitcom where The Man bumbles around screwing things up and The Little Woman rolls her eyes and says, “Men! They’re just like CHILDREN!” before backing her car out through the garage door.

Today I am reasoning with myself about Paul.

When he puts away the muffins, and he chooses from the large pile of gallon-sized zip bags one of the ones I use for muffin mix (visibly coated with white powder) (also LABELED IN PERMANENT MARKER), so that all the muffins in the bag are finely dusted with baking soda and flour and spices unrelated to themselves, does this mean he is blind as well as stupid? No.

When he reorganizes the basement, and now the boxes of handmedowns are in “the order he grabbed them” rather than in order by size, and when in fact he has made TEETERING STACKS of boxes so that if I need the size 4-5 long-sleeved shirts for Edward I first need to lift off FIVE BINS, the top one of which is higher than my head, does this mean Paul is a bad husband and father? No.

When he tidies up by putting a whole bunch of papers into the recycling bin without bothering to glance at what those papers ARE, and when some of the papers are Rob’s homework and some are my Dunkin’ Donuts coupons, does this mean I should divorce him and file for full custody? No.

When he goes to the store and comes home with weird specialized versions of things we buy in their normal versions ALL THE TIME (golden flaxseed meal instead of regular, large elbow macaroni instead of regular, canned pumpkin pie filling instead of canned pumpkin), does this mean my life is nothing but one long torment? No.

When I come home from the store where I have been purchasing the grocery items they “didn’t have” (which are all right where they usually are), and he says, “Oh, I need Tabasco sauce,” does this mean the only solution is human sacrifice? No.

My mom and I were at the store and we saw a plaque in the clearance section, and neither of us could make heads or tails of it. It is unfortunate that neither of us has a camera-equipped cell phone, but I copied it down exactly, punctuation and capitalization and centering and all, and maybe one of you will have an insight that will make my headache go away. Here it is:

in a

friend

FRIEND

you find a

second left

I mean, what? What does that MEAN? It seems like we should have a “best answer” contest or something.

It has long been my feeling that even though I am willing to pay a “Target tax” ($1.99 for an item at Target instead of $1.87 for the same item at Walmart), that overall I save money by shopping at Target. This is for two reasons, no three reasons, no FOUR reasons:

1. Target has sales. Target’s everyday price might be higher than Walmart’s, but their sale price is lower.

2. Target has good clearances. Target’s everday price might be higher than Walmart’s, but their clearance prices are way, WAY lower.

3. Cheapness is partly reputation—not necessarily deserved reputation. The FEELING is that Walmart MUST be WAY cheaper because they have a carefully-constructed reputation for it and because they are SO unpleasant in so many ways, but an actual item-by-item examination reveals that some items are a little cheaper and some are a little more expensive and basically they’re not cheaper. This is something I’ve been meaning to do a post on (comparing the prices at Walmart and Target of all the things I buy), but the research involved makes me feel like dying.

4. Walmart is a bunch of cheaters. The price marked on the shelf is lower than Target’s, but the price that rings up at the register is not. Or, the item will be marked “20% more free!” but will ring up at a price about 20% higher than regular price. EVERY store (of COURSE including Target) makes errors at the register, but in general the errors even out: some are in the store’s favor, some are in the customer’s. Walmart’s don’t balance out, and this has been true at all three Walmarts I’ve lived near and shopped at regularly, in three different states.

ANYWAY. So it has been my opinion that Target costs me less money for the way I personally shop: that is, for the particular things/brands I buy, and for the things I buy on clearance, and for how unwilling I am to drag a cart full of children over to Customer Service to fix a bunch of 24-cent pricing errors.

But today I would like to add “The Example of the Luvs Diapers” as YET ANOTHER reason I think Target costs me less money and Walmart’s reputation for cheapness is not fully deserved. Normally I buy all diapers at Target, the store brand ones for daytime and Luvs brand for nighttime. Today my mom and I were running errands and we needed to go to Walmart for yarn, and we weren’t planning on going to Target, and I was nearly out of Luvs at home, so I thought I’d better get a box while I was there. I don’t like giving Walmart my money, but I felt a little guiltily pleased to be “forced into” paying $15.97 for a box of Luvs instead of Target’s $17.99.

Then I got home and OH WHAT HAVE WE HERE.

Target’s box is on the left. Walmart’s is on the right.

Allow a former math medalist to walk you through the math, or perhaps you can join me at the riveting conclusion in the next paragraph. Walmart charges $15.97 for 70 diapers, so to find the per-diaper price we divide $15.97 by 70, and the answer is 22.814 cents per diaper. Target charges $17.99 for 80 diapers, so to find the per-diaper price we divide $17.99 by 80, and the answer is 22.488 cents per diaper.

Per 100 diapers, Walmart charges $22.81 and Target charges $22.48. Target…charges…LESS. That’s a pretty small price difference, and in fact I consider that “the same price.” But the issue here is not that Walmart and Target have a similar price on Luvs; the issue here is that Walmart has their own package size, which is smaller than the standard but not enough smaller to be obviously smaller, and that they charge “less” for it. The impression shoppers receive—even MATH MEDALIST shoppers who notice prices—is that Walmart’s prices are lower. Which would be fine IF THEY WERE. But I’m adding a fifth reason to my list:

5. Walmart has their own sizes on certain things. This gives the impression that they charge less, when in fact they are charging more.

Do you know, I was two classes short of having a minor in economics but I still didn’t understand until THIS WEEK that one of the arguments against chain stores is that they send the community’s money elsewhere. I got that a few days ago in a flash of insight (or possibly from a commercial on the radio I didn’t know I was listening to) as I was driving along mulling. I am in my MID-THIRTIES.

I think part of the problem is that when there are so! many! emotional! arguments! against something, it distracts from the PRACTICAL stuff—and if I hear too much emotional stuff, I generally start assuming there ISN’T much of a practical angle. Like, I am actually NOT sympathetic when I hear that the chain stores are going to put “the mom-and-pop stores” out of business. I think “mom and pop” is an excessively provocative term, considering that chain and non-chain businesses alike are owned by all kinds of people, some nice and some not, some parents and some not, and their motivations tend to be the same: make money.

I DON’T feel like making voluntary donations to keep a smaller company artificially profitable when a larger company can do the same thing more efficiently. And in my experience, small-business customer service varies just as much as chain-business customer service: some are great, some are crap, and not much seems to have to do with whether they’re owned by “mom and pop” or by an international conglomerate. Sometimes you get a jerk, and sometimes you don’t; sometimes a company has good policies, and sometimes they don’t.

But finally I heard it in more economics-minor terms: that all the money the citizens spend at the chain is therefore going out of state. If it were spent at a small, local store, the money would presumably be spent by the local owners at other local establishments; then those other local owners would spend THAT money at other local establishments, and thus the money goes around and around, profiting the locals and also profiting the local government as they take their cut with each changing of hands. OH! I see!

It’s not so clear-cut even then, of course. For one thing, the branch of the chain is still located HERE, so they have to pay taxes here. I think. Don’t they? Or is there something about paying income taxes only where you’re incorporated or whatevs? Still, property taxes, surely. And of course they employ local people, which means the company takes some of their out-of-state money and spends it back HERE. But still, I GET IT: I am in my mid-thirties and I see why smaller local stores can be better for a community.

What I DON’T get yet is how “seeing why smaller local stores can be better for a community” makes any difference once the chains are already here and the local stores are already gone. At THAT point—and that’s the point most of us are at—it’s hard to know what use this knowledge is.

I AM willing to pay a small/reasonable “tax” to shop “a better way” (which is why I’m willing to consistently pay $1.99 at Target for something that is $1.87 at Walmart, or buy the $4.75 partially recycled paper instead of the $3.50 non-recycled), but I’m looking around and I don’t see many options for the “spend local” idea. Non-chain groceries? Only from the farmer’s market, and that’s only certain things and only a few months a year. Non-chain Tylenol? Nothing but a overpriced-beyond-small/reasonable convenience mart, and also of course most of the money still goes TO TYLENOL, which is NOT local. Books? YES! But…again, much of the money still goes to the out-of-state publishers/authors, and also, the difference between local and Amazon goes beyond what I am willing to pay in the “small contribution to the larger good” category. Gifts? YES! But that’s a small part of the budget, and also what about Etsy? I love Etsy. Most of Etsy isn’t local.

You can see how all this might make a Target girl feel…compromised.