The backyard wheat saga draws to it’s inevitable close.

The answer to “oh my god, why doesn’t everyone do this?” is making itself pretty clear right about now. Planting wheat? Easy. Watching wheat grow? Easy. Harvesting wheat by hand? Okaaay and more finicky than expected. Having to winnow and thresh an entire bushel of wheat. Ugh. Hand grinding flour? Probably blister inducing, we’ll see.

It’s fine and yes, I’ll still do it next year. I’ll bitch about it next year too, I bet.

In non-wheat news my oldest has picked where she’s most likely going to live, and it’s reassuring as it’s the downstairs apartment of my aunt and uncle… where, fun fact, we lived when she was 2-4 years old. We wonder if her cat will remember living there! She’s trying to pick if she’ll take her old bedroom back or the one we were in.

I’m reassured because we know it’s safe and as it has a private entrance behind a gate, the risk of forgetting to lock the door (like I had done so many times in my first apartment) are much lower stakes. That is the scenario my brain has decided to fixate on, by the way- so like, big relief.

She has forbidden me from asking my aunt and uncle to spy on her. A fair ask but I promise I wasn’t planning on it. To furnish it we’ve slowly been compiling things for her- dishes, silverware, decor, etc. and now we need to add more substantial furniture pieces to the list. If only we knew someone who went to estate sales most weekends…

She also had prom, where she looked lovely as can be in a black, bias cut satin gown and silver accessories. Very low stakes this modern era prom- most of the kids go in friend groups not couples. There are few corsages anymore- it wasn’t much more than any other dance, but I’m glad she went and got to check that box off for her high school experiences.

And (hard turn) she had walking pneumonia that took us a good month and a half, 3 doctor visits, and a full Sunday in the hospital to diagnose and finally treat correctly. Oh and a CAT scan and a few rounds of chest xrays too. Did you know there is a blood test for pneumonia antibodies these days? I did not either. Why that took the last doctor visit to get done I don’t know but hey, that finally confirmed what I’d been advocating for the whole time- that she’s been sick too long for this to just be a simple bug hanging on. How she got sick, then better, then sick again and that one was sticking around and she’s coughing to the point it’s difficult to breath at times. That it looked like walking pneumonia to me and she and I were both prone to that so I was asking directly for that to be considered and checked for on each visit.

On the last doctor visit where it was FINALLY properly diagnosed I got told I should have brought her in sooner and I just about snapped that I DID and she was, in fact, the same damn doctor who dismissively sent us away two weeks ago! READ THE CHART, YO. Moving forward I know to insist on the pneumonia antibody blood test, so I GUESS some good came out of it.

I don’t love that, the having to advocate for yourself over and over again to the medical machine. The oldest and I at least had many conversations about how and why to do that. And I got to watch her sleep in a hospital bed with pneumonia on a Sunday afternoon and see my life’s circular nature for what it is. The memories from her 2 week stay in a children’s hospital when she was a little kid are still fresh and ready to be called up in an instant, whether I like it or not. It was very “flashes of the past” at every blink there for a while.

She’s fine now.

All is well.

It is spring though- and the backyard is flourishing.

It’s pretty glorious, honestly. The tomatoes are in, and the snapdragons were self seeded, and my cactus bloomed for the first time. It’s all very exciting.

And we’re not the only gardeners back there, these days. I have always told the youngest that “digging in the mud is important”- and so there she was one afternoon, making mud and digging away in it when she asked if she could make her own garden. I said sure.

She ran right off to get a shovel. Here I thought she meant like a 4’x4′ square, but nope. 15’x10′ of scraggly yard we’d been kind of ignoring got claimed as her own.

She called dibs on this whole section all the way back to the fence. And grubbed the grass out with some help, but not as much as you’d expect. She’s on a mission, this one, this is no passing fancy.

And here’s what it looks like now. Impressive, really. And she has an insane ability to make damn near any seed grow. I’m not even kidding- I make her plant my seeds these days. So of course that meant she got almost 100% germination on the cosmos and flax she sowed and that I got like 10% on the ones I put in.

She was born to garden.

And our middle daughter is doing awesome too. She is, amazingly, 15 now- so our hunt for available driver’s ed classes and a vehicle are well under way! My husband does most of the driving training- it makes me physically ill to do it by bringing out all sorts of anxiety. But the calendar and increasingly independent children wait for no one, and so we’re about to do it all over again!

Let’s see, in other news reselling is still going well but I’m taking my foot off the gas. Even work we enjoy is still work, and so I’m pulling back the efforts on that front right now.

Little overview here: reselling is divided into 5 parts.

Sourcing- buying stuff

Researching- in books, online, google image searches. etc. Both “what is it” and “how much to sell it for” fall in this category. Most things I get require both kinds of research.

Listing- taking pictures, measurements, creating the eBay listing with correct categories, etc.

Product Storage- managing where the listed inventory goes so I don’t have to look at piles of stuff everywhere and can also find it once it sells.

and Selling- sending and accepting offers, pulling inventory, packing it and taking it to the mail center for drop off.

There is also other stuff in there too- managing listings by lowering pricing, refreshing listing details and keywords, etc. Also giving feedback to buyers, setting up marketing campaigns on sales, and answering buyer questions. As well as researching which estate sales to go to- I don’t just go to an address and hope for the best, I look through the pictures of upcoming sales and make a shortlist of where to go. Research is my favorite part. Sourcing is lower down than you’d think. It’s fun, but it isn’t the most fun and is the thing I burn out on fastest really, aside from taking pictures.

I am a burned out little nub over here currently. I’m doing very little sourcing. I’m packing and shipping every 3 days instead of each day (my handling time is 3 days and I stay within that window). And I haven’t done any new listings in at least 2 weeks now. This will result in a drop in sales as the eBay algorithm rewards sellers who list new material and are active daily and puts those sellers items higher in the search results- but it isn’t impossible to get it back once I’m back to full capacity, so I can accept it for now. I’m still making sales, just fewer these days. Mental health comes first, after all- and if I need a break, well then I need a break, that’s all there is to it.

I do still find it fascinating and super cool though- so that’s good. I take the breaks I need early so I don’t develop a hatred for the whole thing and just throw up my hands at it one day.

All that being said and still- here are some cool recent art sales I want to share!

I bought this very 1970s looking cartoon like print of cats for $10 at an estate sale, cleaned the glass and put it up on an auction the same day (starting price was $79.99) and it sold for $209.48 a week later. Proving taste is subjective and you have to be able to look past your own biases and still recognize potential. Also, cat things always sell well and she’s quite a collectible Austin artist so it had both of those going for it.

I get damn near everything cat related as cat people have money to throw around. I do not pick up anything with angels anymore as angel people are the cheapest people on the damn planet.

Exhibit B on the “cat stuff sells” front. I paid $20 for this oil painting in a beat up frame at an estate sale, paid $10 for it to be matted to an existing frame I already had, and sold it in 1 week. I accepted an offer for $175 on this one.

Weirdly the flame icon and exact key-worded title like that gets a much higher sell through rate than ones without that format. I took a super low ball offer of $250 on this one- and it’s annoying because I can’t see addresses or buyer info until after the sale is complete and this one got shipped to a 7 million dollar house for a nightclub in Miami (they used the business account, so I was able to see the nightclub’s name). I’m sure they really needed to lowball to be able to afford it- maybe the indoor pool needs new tile- we can’t know each other’s struggles, I guess?

I usually don’t entertain offers of less than 50% of my asking price, but this was a quick sale on a kind of obscure artist and my profit was $150 after costs and fees- it’s fine.

This one I woke my husband up by saying: “Terrible news! The Tarkay sold last night.” His reply was “Damn.” We probably should have kept this one, he still talks about it. It was a great profit as I bought it for only $18 but agh… we’ll dry our eyes with the $430 in profit I guess. It’s so hard because you can’t keep everything you like… but I’ll tell you we sure want to sometimes.

And this one wasn’t art, but it was close to the quickest sale I’ve ever had, and that it was on a vintage tablecloth is just crazy to me:

Someone must have had a saved search on this, I think. I priced way higher than the last few sold comps I found while researching, too. Something just told me this would go for good money. I paid up for it at $20, which I normally wouldn’t do, but I was in a weird mood because that was the day I dropped Mac off with her new owners- I went right from there to this sale (as I was in San Antonio on a Saturday morning I figured why not) but my heart just wasn’t in it and this tablecloth was the only thing I bought. That it sold by the next morning was a nice feeling.

You know what’s also a nice feeling? Pulling a huge work event off for the first time, and doing it to rave reviews. My work has this kind of food trailer thing we use for product demonstrations and to serve food out of at events. This was the first time I was in charge of it and I INSISTED on doing pork carnitas tacos- historically they’ve always done BBQ or hamburgers and hotdogs. When I tell you we got rave reviews… we got RAVE reviews. Was one of the biggest events the company has done too!

I’m really, really proud of that one. My husband smoked the pork butts, I shredded it and marinated it into carnitas. Pickled the onions. Made the sauces. Sliced up a ton of cabbage. Made the beans. bought all the tortillas and cilantro and onions. I was told my planning and execution was perfect. A+ on a first time in the saddle, heck yeah.

All over the map here but here is another thing to share- this lovliness:

I cannot convey how great this 100% cotton summer weight comforter is. Soft, has loft without being thick or heavy. Breathable. And it washes and dries like a dream. I love our down comforter and duvet for fall and winter coziness, but this thing has kept me from overheating since the first day we got it. 10 of 10, would comforter again.

Here is the link on Amazon: HERE

It is cat approved, too, despite how suspicious he looks in that picture.

And finally- I’m just going to leave this here: