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IT’S TIME AGAIN FOR PERPETUAL
GARAGE SALES
By Chuck Wells
Ok, so the weather is nice now
for a couple of days before winter and you want to have a garage
sale to see if someone will pay money for your junk.
I’m sure the first thing you
think about before having a garage sale is whether or not your
home insurance policy will protect you if someone is injured on
your property as they come to buy your junk.
What if some old lady trips
over the leg of your folding table holding the dirty, grease
stained clothes your kids used to wear and breaks her hip? You
know she will call some lawyer advertising during the day as she
watches her soaps and you will be sued for not providing for the
safety of your customers. Will your house insurance company
protect you? It depends.
If you have a garage sale a
couple times a year, your house insurance should pay for an
attorney to represent you and pay up to your policy limits for a
settlement. If you have one of those perpetual garage sales (I
drive by one on Route 31 in Macedon every day), the insurance
company will consider it a business and will not protect you.
Keep in mind that any business
you run out of your home should be insured. It makes no
difference how much money you make at it or even if you lose
money doing it. Don’t take a chance of losing everything you
own.
HOW DID WE EVER LIVE THIS LONG?
I read a funny e-mail the other
day about how few things those of us in our 50’s had when we
were kids and how amazing it is that we survived.
We slept in cribs with the
wrong space between the slots and painted with lead-based paint
and survived.
We didn’t have child-proof
caps, doors, or cabinets
We didn’t wear helmets when
riding bikes.
We didn’t have seatbelts or
airbags. Our big, heavy cars which got good gas mileage because
they didn’t have pollution controls protected us pretty well.
We drank from water hoses on a
hot day and still survived.
We ate real butter, real milk
(not 2%), soda with loads of sugar, bread full of carbs, cakes,
cookies, and big candy bars (not these little bite-size nuggets
they sell now) but were not obese because we were outside
playing.
We only watched television at
night with our parents and only those programs they wanted to
watch. We did not have parental controls on the tv. We had our
parents.
Our mothers were at home when
we got out of school and knew where we were and with whom we
were playing.
We didn’t have computers. We
actually talked with people.
We addressed adults as Mr. or
Mrs.
We fell out of trees and
crashed into things. We never even thought of suing someone else
for our own stupidity.
We didn’t worry about being
kidnapped; everyone had too many kids already and didn’t want
any more.
If we didn’t like things at
home, our fathers would tell us to pack and leave. The police
and social workers would tell us to go home and stop whining so
they could work on more important things.
Parents could hit their kids
when they got out of line and not be arrested.
We would try out for the
baseball team and some of us were actually cut! This is how we
learned to deal with disappointments.
Tests in school were not
curved. If you failed, too bad. Try harder the next time.
There were no child safety
seats and we made it.
We had B-B guns and still
survived with our eyes intact. If you shot at something you
weren’t supposed to, the neighbor came over and told your father
and it didn’t happen again.
Teachers would threaten
students with telling their parents about their bad behavior and
it worked as parents backed up the teachers.
Kids never even imagined
bringing a gun to school. Smoking in the bathroom was a big
violation.
Doing drugs was only done by
losers.
It can’t imagine how we ever
survived this long the way things were but somehow we made it.
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