World's Largest Garage Sale

The World's Largest Garage Sale
No seriously.  I think it's in Guiness Book and everything.
Now, truth be told this isn't just a garage sale.  There are vendors, food sales, and church efforts in addition to true garage sales.  The only thing missing are the carnival rides!

We took some time away from home today to go help out Todd's parents at their yard sale, enabling them to help out at their church, too.  We went up on Thursday night, because apparently you shouldn't even expect to drive on the streets and get anywhere on Friday or the weekend.  However, there was a driving rain on Thursday night and into Friday morning, so I had no trouble getting out and back for an appointment on Friday.

Oh, the other purpose for our participation was to sell Whoopie Pies.  I used a recipe from allrecipes.com and they turned out pretty well, but I usually use devil's food cake so I was not as happy with them.  Now as it turns out many people did not know what a whoopie pie was, so, for those of you reading who are not from New England, be enlightened!  They are chocolate sandwich cakes with frosting-like filling.  I never had one myself until I went to college outside of Boston, and they were a major factor in my freshman 15!  We sold by donation only and made about $17 the first day.  Having run out of Whoopie Pie, I picked up ingredients for my famous finally-got-the-recipe-right chocolate chip cookies, which I will happily share here because I got it off the back of Blue Bonnet Margarine so it isn't really a secret.
3/4 c. Margarine, melted then cooled.  This is important!
1 1/2 c. brown sugar
1 egg
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
2 1/2 cups flour.
1 c. chocolate chips

Now, if you melted and cooled the margarine (cooled as in forgot what I was doing and left it on the counter for half an hour), you should get dough that acts like play dough.  I use parchment paper for easy cleanup, and voila!  Bake at 350 for 9 minutes, if you didn't eat all the dough.

These we sold at the garage sale on Saturday.  Who can resist these salespersons:
Especially with a bait-and-switch line like "Would you like some cookies?  They're free...but you can make a donation."

These little shysters made $35 on chocolate chip cookies.

Our contribution to the sale, other than cuteness, was some collector's Hotwheels cars.  We also brought the painted windows you can see behind the kids.  I painted these, which were taken out of the house we owned when we remodeled it.  I sold two!  This was very exciting since I had sold several in the past but I have not been able to move any lately.
Got a few left if anyone's interested!

Our daughters got up at 6:30am to wait on tables at the church breakfast and lunch.  Although they seemed quite exhausted by the end, but it was good for them and they got some tips, too.  In the afternoon we closed up the garage sale at the in-laws and went for a look around ourselves.
We didn't get very far.  I just found the whole thing overstimulating.  Too crowded, and we didn't have stroller for the princess, so having her bouncing along next to us in that press was just a little too nerve-wracking.  Plus, we are still pretty exhausted from stress, transition, and working  hard  to put our lives back together this week.  So, one long walk around the block was enough for us.  We followed that up with some offensively expensive fried dough, a bloomin' onion and let's not forget, fried Reese's peanut butter cup.  The GF kids had sno-cones.  The sno-cone place had a myriad of flavors, so I got a sasparilla.  Mostly because DD12 was using "Sasparilla!" as an interjection this summer, and I want a person to know what they are saying.  (For the record, she found it quite disgusting.  I ate it, but it didn't enjoy it either.)

And a little bit of joy to share:  Our camera is found!  The few pics I have posted in the last two weeks were taken with my video camera, which doesn't take super pics and annoys me by resizing after I push the button.  I have been managing ok, but it has no flash.  I got no pics of my parents' 40th anniversary party! Worse, I didn't like thinking that the pictures of my kids on the chip in the camera were floating around lost, either.  We eventually decided that we'd lost it at the conference we went to two weeks ago, but in my state of permanent distraction I never did anything about it.  When I finally emailed the pastor there, he said nothing had been found after the conference.  But yesterday, he emailed and said that he did indeed find my camera!  Hooray!  I was a little worried that it had gotten toasted in the crash and we didn't know it because we weren't looking for it to be there.  So, hooray.  He's going to mail it to me.  Then, dear friends, you will have illuminating pics of the contruction on our Botany light hut, which I promised you lo these many weeks ago.