Dreamland

Yard Sale Electronics, and a Big Bird

I stop at a yard sale with my son. The woman having the sale is Betty, one of my customers. (I work part time as a handyman.)

There are huge piles of junk on her lawn. So much stuff that you literally have to crawl over it to get across the yard. Nick picks some speakers and broken electronics components from one of the piles, says he wants to get them for his projects.

We bring the stuff over to pay for it. Betty asks me if I can take a look at an electrical outlet she is having problems with. "If you fix it, you can have all the electronics junk you want for free," she says. Nick likes this idea.

We walk into the house to look at the outlet. "There's more old electronics stuff in the garage, if you want to look at it. It's through that door," she says to my son.

"You'd better not take too much of it, your room is full of junk already," I warn him.

I take the cover off the outlet and quickly diagnose the problem. It's just a bad ground wire. It only takes me a few minutes to fix it.

"Come on Nick, let's go!" I call out to my son.

"Come out here dad, I need your help!" he says.

In the garage, I see my son chasing a big black and white bird. It look like one of those Arctic birds, I think it's a puffin. "How did that bird get in here?" I ask.

"I don't know, I'm just trying to get him out!" he replies.

The bird finally flies out the door. Betty walks into the garage. "Where's my bird?" she asks.

"We chased it away, we thought it was a wild." I say.

"He was my pet!" she says, obviously upset.