and then there was one
monday, may 28, 2001
i found one of the baby birds dead in the nest this morning. i just noticed it seeming too still, you know - usually the two baby birds are very breathing and shaky and stuff. so then came the ordeal of removing it - i can't tell you how tough that was. i had put in a second nest a week ago underneath the old one b/c i was worried the old one was breaking, so i ended up picking the live chicklet up with a spoon and scooping him/her into the new nest below, and then breaking the old nest w/dead bird off entirely and removing the whole thing. ugh. so sad. it took the parents forEVER to take to the new nest, i was sooooo worried - mom called a pet store and they said removing the old nest was bad but as long as the parents started to feed the remaining chick, all should be well and after half an hr or so, i saw them feeding it. also they said it is very normal that only one baby bird makes it to adulthood, so it probably wasn't something wrong we did. sigh.
yesterday me, mom, my aunt and her daughter (well, she's like 30, but still) rented a table at the local flea market and got all grandma's old trinkets and weird holiday souvenirs and whatnot on a table. i'm pleased to say it was a complete success - we made something like $50/person, which is not bad considering most things were sold a dollar at a time.
the coolest sale was actually made by me - for some reason my aunt and mom had put grandma's old magazines in a box for sale. we're talking old gossip magazines, here, at least 3-5 years old. she used to have a running subscription on them. anyhow. so, a guy showed up and asked how much i wanted for them - i was stumped, said ten cents/magazine, he said ok and sat down to pick through them.. ten minutes later he goes "could you count these and see how many i've got so far?" and dumped this enormous stack on the table...
he bought 118 old gossip magazines. 118. hello? counting them i couldn't help but ask what he was going to do with them all. "oh," he said, "give them to friends and my parents. they like that sort of thing." heh. i mean, i like old magazines too, but 118 of them? wow. oh well. i gots me some money!
it was really hard to see the things we were selling, though. i wasn't here last year when my family sold and cleaned out grandma's house, so i never got an opportunity to pick out little things to keep for memory's sake. sure, mom saved some great things for me, but it's so hard to explain that i really wanted to keep her old cheese-slicer as well, and her old, chipped green drinking glasses as well because i remembered them from all the afternoon snacks of growing up, or her frying pan, it's impossible to make pancakes that taste like grandma's did and i swear it must be because i don't have that pan. silly stuff.
i got a chance to snatch some things, though, like crazy 70's cheap jewellry (huge, dangly necklace things) and an old gossip magazine from 1966 with a great black and white photo of ingrid bergman on the cover. still. it was pretty weird having somebody walk off with her old earrings for a buck.
a lot of stuff was left over though, about 4-5 large boxes worth of knick-knacks, and it just didn't feel right to throw it all away so i stuffed it into our storage space and plan to be at the fleamarket two more times this summer. it was fun, and hey, made some money. and i get to keep her odd little trinkets for a bit longer. you know?
