Fleamarket frenzy

Voluntarily waking up at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning? I must've been seriously out of my mind when agreeing to that! Up at five, setting up a fleamarket table about an hour later...

Yes, Satu and I went to sell some of our old stuff (clothes, books, cheap-o jewellery etc.) at a local fleamarket yesterday. Satu is about to move to a smaller apartment, so she wants to get rid of all the useless trinkets and I just want to clean up my closets. And make a few euros while at it.

In preparation for Sunday I had been working as a de facto laundromat for a week. First I had rummaged through all my closets and piled loads and loads of old clothes in the middle of the livingroom floor. It's nicer to sell clean clothes, I thought, and so on Tuesday my task was to wash all of them. I honestly think I washed about 16 loads of laundry that day. From 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. And it wasn't much before midnight when I went to get the last dry clothes from the drying room. I never thought laundry could make me so dull-brained. I had to pop by the TSFS board meeting in the evening and I felt really grumpy and agitated all the time. Umph.

If only the washing of the laundry was all that was needed. But no. I couldn't very well go and sell clothes that are all crumpled. So I took upon me the task of ironing the stuff. Ohmigod. I'm such a slow person when it comes to ironing that it took me several hours to get everything ironed. I stayed up a few nights (well past midnight) ironing away... In my defence it has to be said that I watched tv at the same time, so didn't really notice the time. All I noticed was my aching back... (It's really not that nice to notice, to be honest.)

So did it pay off, all that work? Sort of, but not really, if you think of how much clothes I sold, or didn't sell, to be more exact. Most of my clothes stayed with me (it seems that the only pieces of clothing the people wanted to buy yesterday were black slacks, good thing that I had several pairs to sell), but luckily I got rid of my old tv (way cheaper than what I actually wanted to sell it for) and an old, big & ugly lamp.

The fleamarket seemed also to be the right place to sell old vhs-tapes. I had several movies I wanted to sell (I want to replace them with the dvd-versions), but lately it has become quite obvious that old vhs-movies aren't that easy to sell anymore. This was proven to be a misconception among the fleamarket people. The only movie I had to take back home when we finished the day, was a movie called 28 Days. But I think that's just my destiny. When I bought the movie, I bought it only because it had Viggo Mortensen in it and now it became quite clear he wants to stay with me. :) Which won't prevent me from trying to sell him again next time. So sorry, dearie.

Yes, the next time. Although it was the first time of going to the fleamarket to sell something for the both of us, we already planned on going again this week. We'll try a different place and this time it'll be on Saturday. Last night I immediately had to rummage my closets again, this time a bit more carefully, because it's darned addictive, the whole process. I won't be doing as much laundry this time (thank any deity for that), because all of the clothes I didn't sell yesterday are still going to be fine. Instead I'm going to try to rummage through my old kiddie stuff (some of my toys and such) in Nousiainen, maybe there'd be something I could sell.

All of this for a few lousy euros? Well, yes. I managed to sell stuff for about 100 euros yesterday. It's a fortune to me at the moment, so I'm more than happy to go through a bit of trouble for it. Although I don't expect to do as well next time, since I no longer have a tv to sell. (Or perhaps dad would have some gadgets I could try to turn into money...)

Ok, I think I'll wrap up for now. I have an exam on Friday (wohoo, I haven't had one of those in a while) and this week I'm going to have to seriously study for it. Less work on the thesis, more studying of the basics of the political systems and international politics. Wahey. My week's going to be all NGO's and such. Wish me luck. :)