When I wrote about our last garage sale here in Townsville I mentioned Community Garage Sales (also known as street garage sales).

In Calgary there used to be one weekend a year when the whole community would hold their garage sales. It worked really well as everyone knew that on this particular weekend you could head over to that suburb and find a lot of garage sales running.

The community garage sale has a lot of benefits over a regular garage sale:

• Increased traffic to your garage sale
• Cut down on advertising costs (share the cost with the community or street)
• Get to know your neighbours
• More fun than a standard garage sale

I’ve often thought that if we were to run another garage sale it would be nice if it were done as part of a community or street garage sale. Continue Reading →

This is sort of funny…

I was just outside checking our car and the sheeting under the house when someone walked by and asked if I was wanting a Cyclone (the winds today have been up around 90 km/hour, and there has been a lot of rain). I said I definatly do not want a cyclone coming through Townsville, to which I was called a pansy!

Honestly, if not wanting a cyclone to come through Townsville means I am a pansy, then call me a pansy all you want. I certainly don’t want a cyclone coming through anywhere around here.

The last time a cyclone came close to here was in March 2006 when our house was in the middle of being lifted. Cyclone Larry devastated the  city of Innisfail, about 150km North of Townsville. Tamara and I drove through there on our drive from Townsville to Cairns a few months ago and they have still not recovered from Cyclone Larry.

I asked the people if they had ever been through a cyclone before, to which they answered “no”. Well, it figures I guess, only someone who has never been through a cyclone could possibly consider it anything other than terrifying and destructive…

Technorati Tags: townsville, cyclone, cyclone larry, innisfail, pansy

For those of you who don’t know, I am a Canadian who has living in Australia for nearly 10-years. My wife is and Australian, as are my two kids who were born in the Townsville Hospital.

Today I sat for my Australian Citizenship Test. Before I did the test I read through a free booklet that the Australian government provides, “Becoming an Australian Citizen“. I also did a few sample Australian Citizenship Tests and was quizzed by Tamara on the booklet.

Well, I passed my Australian Citizenship Test with 100%! I’m pretty excited as I have never been a person who enjoys test…

I wrote a bit about actually sitting the test on my personal blog, as well as some links to some sample tests on that site. Here are links to those articles:

• Sample Australian Citizenship Tests
• I Passed my Australian Citizenship Test

Now I’ll be able to send in my application for Australian Citizenship and go from there to eventually a citizenship cerimony.

We ran a garage sale here in Townsville a few weeks ago and the response that we had to it wasn’t as good as what we were hoping for. It was better than our first garage sale at our previous help, but still not very good.

Tamara’s parent’s had run quite a few garage sales down in Adelaide, and the garage sales went really well in Adelaide. I remember running some garage sales in Calgary during their community garage sale weekends, and the garage sales in Calgary did fantastic, although us kids normally ended up buying more stuff at other garage sales than we sold at ours.

One note to look out for though is watch out for rip off artists trying to find bargains at your garage sale!

While I was upstairs at one point a guy came around the garage sale and had a look at a security system from our previous house. I know that the security system was complete, and working well, as I removed it myself from our other house, and we were using it up until when we moved out. The conman said that it was missing parts (a circuit board) and got the security system for half the price (remember, I was upstairs).

I honestly can’t understand what goes through someone mind to convince themselves that to save some money it’s okay to lie through their teeth! The guy probably does it every weekend, and then resells what he buys. I hope he doesn’t come around to any future garage sales that we run in Townsville.

We will probably be running another garage sale this year in Townsville, but we are also looking at using ebay.com.au for some of our smaller items to see how we go on there.

Special thanks goes out to Tamara’s parent’s for all their help on this garage sale.

Technorati Tags: townsville garage sale, ebay australia