barter barter barter

OK, so I am the bartering Queen.  Have been since Kindergarten when I would trade Gracie my graham cracker for her milk.  Worked great.

Today a friend of mine shows up at the door with 10 boxes of cereal for the kids.  The boxes were a little smashed on the side, cereal was fine.  Don't know where they came from, don't care.  I traded him two pails of tomatoes for them.  He then proceeds to pull out a cooler full of little frozen soups.  He works part time for a summer camp and at the end of the camp weeks, they toss out all the soups for the week.  He takes them home and I wind up with a bunch of them.  I have been eating them all summer and I have not died yet.

Earlier this summer I helped a friend remove drywall from a basement that had flooded. I got paid some cash plus I got to take home all the two by fours we yanked out and some awesome wooden coatracks for the girls room. I am deathly afraid of power tools, so last week I gave 3 jars of tomato jam to a friend who has a drillgun thingy. He hung the coatracks and a mirror in a matter of about 5 minutes.





Last week I found a nice piece of tan carpeting in the trash on my way home from taking Tim to work.  My sister is law spied it on the porch.  Karen reminded me earlier that day that tan carpeting was about the dumbest idea for my house, so I happily traded it for two cans of Coors beer.

This goes on all the time here.  I just got done hanging up a nice pair of snowpants that showed up at the door in Loretta's size and I am still sorting through the things that the other Mom's gave me right before school started.  I am pulling out dresses with the tags still on them.



Who's the dumby?  Not me that's for sure.

OK here is my take on the whole thing.

I heard this in church once and it's one of the only things that really stuck with me in church.  I was balancing my checkbook inside the hymnal one day when the preacher says "you have to have your hand open to receive".

Sounded pretty common sense to me.

I looked up.

"You have to be giving to receive things".

"If your hand is opened up from giving, then it will be opened up to receive".

This is sort of a rule I live by.

I didn't even finish balancing my checkbook that day. 

Talk later,

Annie