I'm still here .... kinda

My place has gotten increasingly messy and my computer has been moved to the dining table. Cooking has become one dish meals due to everything being reduced to bare minimum and playing the game of trying to fit everything we have into the cartons everything came in. The tricky part is that we have since gotten married and hence scored lots of wedding and engagement presents.

The solution: Offload older junk so we can fit newer junk into cartons yaaay!!

The plan: have a garage sale and make money to offset moving cost $980 plus coming up with bond $1120 etc etc.

Saturday morning dawned early. We had been forewarned by D who works with me that garage sale people can be persistent and arrive as early as 6 am!!! Richard errected a sign that said "Triple prices before 9 am" We stay up late as we can trying to get things ready in boxes to lay out the next morning. I have a fitful nights sleep as I did not want to be awoken with a start from people banging at the door.

We got up at quarter to 7 despite going to bed at 2:30 am the night before. We had been to a nice dinner party organised by B and did not get home until midnight.Anyway, Michael who is Debs husband came to give us a hand. We took down the sign so we could start laying things out and not 5 minutes past 7 cars started arriving and people literally started pushing past boxes to rummage through our things!! I was really shocked and asked them to please leave and return at 9 am. It fell on deaf ears and people started offering money for this and that. I was really unruffled but accepted their offers so they would leave. Yet more and more kept coming and I was really upset as I could not set things out the way I wanted, people were asking for this and that and it got really stressful. It was a totally harrowing exprience. I had never met the kiasu Australian before today. Kiasu is a Singlish (Singaporean English) term, defined at www.singlishdictionary.com: as kiasu /kiah-soo, ÈkiAsU/ n. & a. [Hk. kia fear + su loss; Mand. 怕输 pàshū] Also kia su. A n. One who is afraid to lose out to someone else, often to the point of selfishness; an over-cautious person. B a. Afraid of losing out to someone else, and therefore often behaving selfishly and disregarding others.

Singaporeans often laugh at this sort of behaviour and it is generally frowned upon, yet comes up quite often in social circumstances eg. arriving early to a buffet to beat the crowds and get the freshest foods etc. It is often a big part of their local satires. But I digress... I was extremely shocked as I had not seen much of this behaviour here in Australia yet here it was rearing its ugly head in my garage. I commented to a lady who asked if three were anymore books that they were gone because some inconsiderate people had arrived before time and took them. There was nervous shuffling from the group further towards the front who had arrived earlier. I felt bad but I could not hide my frustration at that point. Which part of 9 am in the newspaper did they not understand??

There was a lull from 10:30 am to 12 and that was the best part of the day as Deb and Michael (who bought some of our stuff) just came and hung out. We brought out the futon sofas to sun (as well as to see if we could get a reasonable offer for them) and we lay on them out on the front lawn. We had chips and juice and lazed about. We finished up at 3 pm and started deciding which of the remainder to toss and which decent items to give to charity. We ended up about $280 richer. Which wasn't a lot but it would help towards the cost of moving. Also it cut down the things we felt were too good to throw out find new homes. As D's daughter E plugged for her mum. " Come to our garage sale!!! Make our sh*t your sh*t!!" or Michaels milder version," Garage sale... where our crap becomes yours"

P/S For those who think wikipedia has not provided enough info about singlish, more can be found at http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/singlish.htm