Emma’s Fantabulous Blog

Also best moving iguana icon ever.

Watching this makes me giggle endlessly.

Our yard sale this weekend was a total success!

These are the awesome signs that I painted & Devon hung up around our neighborhood to draw people in. We also posted free ads at Craigslist.org and our local newspaper, The Seattle Times/NW Source. Notice that the signs say: 8am – 4pm? Yeah. The first person arrived at 7.10am way before the signs even went up. We had a good day. It was really long and exhausting, but we got rid of a TON of stuff, we made a TON of money and we met some more of our neighbors. We also met a bunch of wack jobs.

The highlights (and low lights):

• We had a broken Razr cell phone (they usually cost about $100). The keypad doesn’t work, so we were going to sell it for $0.25 as a kid’s toy or whatever. However, before we got a chance to mark it, some douche bag pocketed it and took off. We know it was one of 2 guys. In a way, I’m glad they decided to steal that, because it isn’t worth anything, but it pisses me off that they only took it because they thought that it would be worth a lot of money. In the end I take a large amount of satisfaction in knowing that they will spend a couple of frustrating hours trying to figure out why they can’t get the phone to work.
• The 20 odd groups of people who showed up before our listed starting time. (mostly collectors and resellers of books & costume jewelry.)
• The guy in his 60’s who bought my sexy Medusa Halloween costume. hehe. (You can see the costume here.)
• We had about 30 DVDs for sale. Out of the first 5 to get snagged up, 3 of them were soft-core vampire-y type movies and they were purchased a middle aged woman who was there with her young kids. Titles included: Female Vampire and Scarlet Diva. (Don’t look at me! Selling such risque material at our yard sale is totally blamed on Devon.)
• About 5 groups of people wanted to buy our massive styrofoam columns! We sold them around noon for $5, but really we would have just been happy for someone to take them for free! (you can also see part of the column archway in the “medusa picture” here.)
• Fifi hung out with us for a while on one of the chairs that we were trying to sell… Reactions from prospective buyers ranged from a high pitched squeal of “EWWWW!!!” to a woman who was an animal rescuer who completely and totally fell in love with the Fif-ster and ended up carrying Fifi around on her shoulders for about a half hour.
• The multiple almost-collisions that happened in front of our house as cars slammed on the breaks as they drove past our house and saw that we were having a yard sale.
• Devon was selling his massive collection of music CDs at 5 for $1. His collection consisted of a bunch of techo/electronica/angry-German-industrial. A woman, possibly in her 60s, ended up buying about $9 worth of his music. Devon wasn’t sure how to feel about that.. Either he listens to old people music, or the woman had super cool taste in music. I think that it was a little bit of column A & a little bit of column B.
• It was really interesting to see what people spent their money on. We had a bunch of really great deals on some really quality items, but a bunch of that stuff ended up unsold at the end of the day. However almost all of the ugly cheap stuff ended up being purchased. Like freebie mesh bags, freebie metal tins and other really hideous stuff that I wanted to trash originally, but figured I’d put out in our yard sale to make it look like we had more stuff to sell.
• The lady who pulled up and asked if she could donate stuff to our yard sale. I was kinda confused, so I said sure. She ended up needing Devon’s help to unload a truckload (seriously, she was in a truck) of old, dirty, damaged garden hoses. As soon as I saw them, I though “crap! Are those all going to fit in my trash can at the end of today?”. Then, to top it off, she ended up buying some computer stuff from Devon and tried to hit him up for a major discount because she “donated” to our yardsale… ::rolls eyes::. Yeah, no. But thanks for playing. Oh and btw, no one bought any of her nasty hoses.

I’m sure there are some other amusing stories that I’m forgetting. It was a very busy day. But it was great. Our guest room was originally filled with stuff to sell, and at the end of the day all that we were left with was 2 boxes of stuff to donate to Goodwill (tax deductions!!!), 2 boxes of books to donate to our local library (tax deductions!!!) and 1-2 boxes of stuff to ebay/post on Craigslist (more monies!!!). Oh! and a large stack of green bills.
In the end we did really well. Lemur is very excited about our proceeds.

Some people seem to take their estate sales very seriously. too seriously infact. WAYYY too seriously.

While browsing my local Craigslist garage sale section, I came across this posting. The unedited repost below the cut, and warning: the repost contains the original poster’s “potty mouth”. Tisk, tisk……

Freaks.

(more…)

One of the flock

Originally uploaded by fuzuoko

It’s time for a yard sale at our house! This Saturday, August 25th. 8am-4pm. No crazy early people, please.

We’ll be selling lots of cool stuff like:
* Tons of Books! Hardcover & Paperback, New Titles & Vintage, all sorts of genres (sci-fi, art, travel, classics, horror, cookbooks adventure…)
* Clothing for men and women, women’s shoes, accessories, bags, etc…
* Toys and Games
* Home Decor
* Snowboard & Boots
* 2 Men’s Leather Motorcycle Riding Jackets
* Electronics & Computer Stuff: Scanner, Monitors, Wireless Routers & LOTS MORE!!!
* Handmade Greeting Cards
* 4 Fish Tanks
* Tons of other rad stuff that range from swords to a massive styrofoam column archway!

Feel free to stop on by and say hiya! For my actual street address e-mail me at *myfirstname*at emmasart dot com.

D & I watched The Simpsons Movie on Monday. It had its moments, but the movie wasn’t mind blowing by any means.

Personally, I think The Simpsons (tv show) has been going down hill in recent years. With earlier episodes, I’ll laugh for 30 minutes straight, beginning to end. With the newer episodes, I giggle 2-3 times during the show and the rest of the time I’m mildly bored.

With The Simpsons Movie, I felt like I was watching a newish tv episode that happened to be an hour and a half long. The movie did have funny moments, but nothing super memorable… (Although I did adore the part where the angry bald eagle comes in to try to help tear off Homer’s shirt.)

All in all, I think it was a good way to spend 90 minutes, but I’ll probably forget the general plot in a month or two.

parveen’s henna hands

Originally uploaded by darcitananda

I really enjoyed my Belly Dancing class at North Seattle Community College, and I’ve decided to take a new course. A How-To-Henna Workshop. It’s 1 4-hour-long class on Saturday October 20th for $50. Anybody wanna come with?

I figure I could drag Devon along with me, but he’d probably look a little goofy with flowery swirl designs dyed on his hands and feet for a month or two. hehe. He’d lose soo many “dude” points.

Seriously though… If you were my henna buddy, you’d come out of the class with a wearable piece of original “Emma” art.

Ok. I’ve been home for almost a week and I just now got around to posting my pictures… I know i’m a lazy butt. Click on the thumbnails to view the entire album.

(Me & mah ladies hanging out at the Corrib. Woohoo for townie bars in West Roxbury.)

(My cousin Vinnie & his new bride Erin.)

This is a pic that was snapped by Devon while I was out of town. Apparently Fifi has a very definite preference in her fiction literature. Silly iguana. She’s so adorable when she messes up my alphabetized bookcases.

This past Saturday, my friend Erick and I were wandering around downtown Boston, bored and wondering what to do. We headed over to Central Sq. to check out if there was any good music going on. We ended up at T.T. The Bear’s Place where a rockabilly show was starting.

Interesting thing about the Boston music scene. You always see people that you know, or at least I do. Erick saw one of his friends who played in a band that Erick’s old band used to play with, and we saw a girl that we used to hang out with at Copley Sq Park when we were into punk rock (and who also dated my high school boyfriend John, before i did), back in high school. It was pretty crazy to see people that I know randomly, when i haven’t lived in Boston for over 4 years.

Anyways, on to the actual show. We caught the tail end of Johnny Carlevale & His Band of All-Stars. They were the band that drew us in off the street. Pretty good. Next was The Bourbonaires. I think they were my favorite band of the night. They had a great front man who was a great performer and singing himself raw. Then The Raging Teens came on. I really enjoyed them. The guy playing stand up bass was awesome. And finally The Racketeers played. They were pretty enjoyable as well.

Entry into the venue was $10. Not bad for 4 bands on a Saturday night. Drinks are reasonably priced. The rockabilly girls were dressed to the nines which is always fun to look at; their rolled hair decorated with flowers and their retro outfits. Downsides: No air conditioning. Only 1 stall in the ladies’ room, however that can lend itself to some interesting conversations while waiting in line. A 2 man bar fight broke out, which was kind of impressive since the music was so loud, I couldn’t hear anything that people were saying. No matter. It was broken up efficiently by the jacked bouncers. But really at a rock show, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a fight.

But yeah. I had a great time! I love stopping by Central Square and checking out a random show whenever I’m in town.

This picture kind of sums up my experiences with raccoons at the Wildlife Center:

Waste a day or two of your life at the website where D found this picture: ICanHasCheezburger.com. It’s full of pictures of goofy looking animals with similarly goofy captions.