As I have mentioned before, yard sales are my downfall when it comes to reducing my belongings. I love a bargain and when I see a nice piece of clothing and it fits me and it only costs a dollar, I have a terrible time resisting. Yesterday my friend Jane (see March 13) had a yard sale and I stopped by because it was nearby, and I wanted to support my friend.

I ended up buying myself a brown cardigan (which I really don’t need) and a blouse and a pair of cute shoes for our son Theo. But they were so cheap, and Jane’s a friend, so it was hard not to. (I will now have to purge something else from my closet to balance things out again, but I didn’t manage that this weekend). Since she still had a lot of stuff left, she held another sale today. I wanted to stop by to see if there was anything good I’d missed yesterday (I think I really might have a problem), but I didn’t manage to get there until she was starting to pack up and box things to give away. But today, I had a plan. I had asked my husband David to go through his clothes to find things he didn’t need, and he pulled out a couple of pairs of beige pants. I had been meaning to take them to Goodwill, but instead I took them to Jane’s house. I wanted to contribute them to her post-sale donation to Goodwill. When I got there, though, she told me that her neighbor from Guatemala regularly boxes up clothes and sends them to friends in her country to help poor people there, and so instead of giving the yard sale leftovers to Goodwill, she was giving them to her to send to Guatemala. So with Jane’s ok, I added the men’s pants to donation, feeling good that they would be useful to someone who really needed them. Before I left, though, I found a cute blue t-shirt for a dollar. Of course, I bought that too. And then got the heck out of there before something else caught my eye.