Long before I knew I would be getting married in December, I knew for a fact that I would never have an outdoor wedding. I would not be able to handle the stress of planning 2 locations for the ceremony and making paranoid visits to weather.com for the prior 3 weeks. I'm also a person that when I develop a certain expectation (such as getting married outside) I would not be able to roll with the punches if it rained. In fact, I just might start punching people.
Why didn't I remember this key aspect of my personality before I started planning my yard sale? Hours and hours of rooting and tagging and pricing and ad-placing - and what do I get? Torrential downpour, one tentatively dry hour, and 7 lousy guests during an 8-hour day.
My damn yard sale got rained out. And I want to punch someone.
The good news? At least I've earned a little more money than I spent advertising for the dumb thing. The bad news? I've made an equivalent of $2.50 an hour. That right there is enough to piss anyone off.
It was maddening, sitting there on our apartment stoop in an uncomfortable black folding chair as the deluge inundated my pitiful plastic-covered pile of a yard sale. At one point while the rain was pounding down so loud on the plastic sheet I couldn't hear my radio, I looked up at the sky and said, "How about hail? Or fireballs? Maybe a plague of locusts?" And for a few seconds, it rained even harder. Figures.
Thank God my mother brought me a Chipotle burrito and kept me company for a couple hours. That kept me sane.
Cars would slow down to squint through their rain-streaked windows, and then almost inevitably speed up again. WHY? WHY GIVE ME FALSE HOPE? It would've been better if they had just kept on going.
And, fittingly enough, Dave helped me pack everything up half an hour early as it continued to steadily rain. So I sat on the couch for an hour and pouted - yes, full-blown pouting - and looked at the unchanged size of the pile eating up the other half of my living room.
Now I had originally planned to write something optimistic out of the situation, about how much I love storms, and this was the longest I've ever sat outside during one, and I've never stood in one place long enough to watch rain water run down the trunk of a tree. That was the original plan.
To hell with that. A storm rained out my yard sale and I am now going to go outside and punch that tree.
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