Busy at home

I've been making progress on a lot of projects:  putting a new hanger on the back of a smaller mirror, braiding a rug, mending, knitting an oversized hat, yard work, organizing a closet; one thing after another.

I finally got an antique carpet runner that we were given months ago installed onto the stairs.  I didn't realize that it was going to noticeably brighten the space; the previous big-box-store landlord-special runner--which I left on the stairs as an underlayer--is very dark and it soaked up light instead of reflecting and diffusing it around the stairwell. 

I made progress on another project, ironically, by abandoning it:  making a lampshade for a small lamp.  It was complete except for figuring out how to make it sit securely on the lamp. 

Instead, I pulled out a cracked old lampshade that I had been balancing on an Ikea lamp, and tried it on this one.  The lampshade attached well, but it looked not so good, and was much too opaque.

There's little risk in maybe ruining something that is nearly ruined already.  I decided to poke a lot of holes in the lampshade with a sewing needle-after taking it off the lamp, of course.  Within one minute, that task was subcontracted to an enthusiastic tiny human, who did an excellent job.  Little pinpoints of light come through, and they are brighter or dimmer depending where you are in the room.

Later at a yard sale, I found an outdoorsy watercolor print that echoes the colors in our living room, and also the colors of the lamp and lampshade--and even of the frame of the mirror I fixed--and that exemplifies some of our family atmosphere.

I picked up a free pine bookcase headboard for a twin bed, which turned out to be the perfect size to become a header for two plywood shelf units, which were originally the "doors" of a closeable toy shelf that our church retired a few years ago.  The rest of the shelf is on the other side of our living room now.  The headboard is not as deep as the shelves, so there's a space behind it, and also it covers up the tops of the shelves by several inches, but it also lends them a lot more style than they had before, and it functions as a sort of mantel.   Although few mantels have a painted orange crate and a well-dressed half-mannequin preemptively parked on them.  

Outdoors, a child helped me install some garden edging that a departing neighbor didn't want to move to their new house.  Previously there was no delineation between yard and garden in that part of the yard.  It makes a lot more difference than I expected it would, and there's enough left over to replace some badly-deteriorated edging in another part of the yard.

Local writer James Lileks last week bid his beloved home Jasperwood goodbye.  It's homely-ness is something that I am now pondering, as a Christian and a renter and the mother of a large family.  I've seen Mr. Lileks in person at the State Fair a few times, and we've driven through that very expensive Minneapolis neighborhood once or twice.  

The lipstick almost outweighs the pig

A sort-of-nearby house is for sale again, after being sold earlier this year for more than $150k less than the current listing price.  Photos show exterior improvements still very much in progress.

It's been quite a while since I looked at local real estate listings.  Neighborhood houses continue to sell quickly for ridiculous prices.

By ridiculous, I mean 100% higher than ten years ago.  Which makes the property taxes more than 100% higher, thanks to recent school-funding proposals that easily passed.  

At the same time, the public school ratings range from poor to barely-middling.  The student populations are majority-nonwhite now.

About half of the incoming house-debtors immediately set up leftist yard signs in their yards.  

Yesterday I was in St. Paul.  I only saw one family's children outdoors on a drive of a couple miles through residential neighborhoods, but there were dozens of ICE OUT signs.

I recently calculated the cost per square foot of a city building project.  It was more than the cost for the Federal Reserve renovation that Trump roundly and soundly criticized.  

I just now threw together a very optimistic estimate of the building's cost per visit:  building cost divided by number of building users over the lifespan of the building.  It came out to $11 per visit.  The real number will be higher.

Off day; small fake fireplace

I took a day off between two big projects and messed around with making a little hearth under my sewing machine table.  It's the same table I put an oak chair back into two years ago, to connect and stabilize the legs.

The leather chair seat that I mentioned in that post, by the way, has gone from dull green suede to an impressive polished brown, to dull green rougher suede, under heavy wear from children.

Anyway, I had recently moved a large wooden tray from the top of my dresser onto the oak part, and had put a few awkwardly-shaped things in it, including a half-log that separates to reveal a hidden drawer.

I also recently picked up a small box of veneer bricks from a neighbor's spring clean-out; just the bricks' faces.  I knew that I wanted to use them somewhere soon, and that they wouldn't cover a large area.

In the midst of puttering around the house, I was thinking about making a fake fireplace, along the lines of a scrap wood fireplace in the Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found book I reviewed in 2018.

I realized that I had the brick floor, and the log, and the place for it....

The bricks were just enough to line the wooden tray, after breaking a few to fit, with just one tiny piece left over.  Some of them were fake-singed, and I put those toward the front.

For a back, I immediately thought of a long metal sign I had picked up from another neighbor's curbside.  It has a warm, dark copper color.  I bent it into a U shape with the help of an old atlas, by putting one end into the atlas, standing on them, and pulling up on the other end; probably the first time I've ever used a book as a bending brake for metal.  It gave me good, straight, rounded bends.

Putting everything together under the table, the sign-back was too tall to fit under the sewing machine compartment, so I rotated the sign forward 90 degrees and made it into a hood instead--which makes more sense, anyway.

I found a few warm-colored firelike objects to go around the log, including some copper and a glass candle holder--which I lined with an upside-down picture of autumn leaves--and a curly piece of birch bark.

There is even a modest amount of warm air coming out of it when the furnace is on, because it's right in front of a vent.

Not out of the weeds yet, and still pouring

Although there has been much grace from God, including the glorious orange and golden sunset we had this evening.  There were also rainbows...in February.

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Another household improvement from last year that I'm appreciating now is a clean laundry sorting area I established in our basement laundry dungeon.  Formerly I did a week's laundry, stored it upstairs, and then sorted and put it all away at once--sometimes ten loads' worth, and caffeine definitely helped.  

I realized with my children getting older and my time less constrained by littles that they could fetch their own laundry and put it away.  I had just gotten a start on the new system when a neighbor Providentially set a shelf out by the curb, the kind with four big square cubbyholes.  That holds clean, sorted laundry for four children now, and on top are improvised containers for the other family members I do laundry for.

On the floor in front of the shelf I put a wire closet organizer shelf, six or eight inches high, from another neighbor's curb, for baskets or bags of laundry waited to be sorted--or taken upstairs, in the case of towels and such.  

I only just realized or remembered the other day that with all this within reach of the dryer, I could just sort laundry straight out of the dryer. 

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Eldest Child led a final effort to use up the remaining apples from the fall.  They were beginning to taste more like pears than apples, and still had to be checked over every week or so to remove the rotting ones.  They lasted a lot longer than I expected.  Very few perfect apples this time.

Even worse, but less worse that it could have been

We discovered that an ambulance ride costs more than rent now.  In Millennial terms, around 400 Starbucks coffees and 150 avocado toasts.  I need to start making friends with drug dealers.

By the gymnastic grace of God, there was same-day treatment and no permanent damage.

ICE has been in our area, but I haven't seen any personally--that I know of.

One thing in my home that I've been appreciating lately is a tall narrow garden trellis that we picked up for free from a neighbor who was moving.  Similar to these curved ones, but with four top spikes that each end in a small ball.

It fits very well in an awkward gap next to an awkward corner in the bathroom, we can hang towels off the spikes, and the trellis keeps them away from the wall.

The Goodwill doesn't really take garden furniture, so it is often given away.  I switched to a metal flower pot stand for my nightstand, and set a wrought-iron-style napkin weight? for picnics? upside-down in it to keep small items from falling through so easily, while still allowing most of the dust through.  I don't put water glasses there because the mattress is frequently used as a trampoline; small house, long winters.

I managed to paint a large picture frame and an office stand that we had picked up at other times, using old toothbrushes as brushes.  Uneven paint coverage, but I think that could be an advantage when trying to simulate marble.  A clear varnish of similar reflectance to polished stone would make it more convincing.

Still pouring...

...and too utterly ridiculously to write about yet.

However, we still had a good Christmas.  I was crafting little presents up until almost the last minute.

The washer got fixed enough to be functional.  At one point I had a whole system set up with two sturdy plastic bins and a bucket.  The second bin is for having a place to move wet laundry to while getting water out of the first bin and out of the laundry itself.  The bucket is for bailing out the bins.  

It worked okay as a temporary solution, but for a longer term I'd want sturdier laundry tubs.  I don't need a binful of laundry graywater flowing across the floor.  We do have a legless utility sink we trashpicked once; it would need to have the drain hole plugged securely against the suction of the laundry plunger (Rapid Washer).  Currently it is a holding pen for dirty laundry.

I set up a drying rack in the bathtub, to let things drip-dry enough so they could go into the dryer.

We even went to the laundromat once.  Almost deserted, probably because of the threat of a visit from ICE, which was good, because there were hardly any chairs--to keep homeless people from camping there.  A sign on the wall said No Sleeping.

Storms it is

The snow somehow held off until we had finally gotten the yard stuff taken care of.  Since then there has been a whole series of domestic disruptions.  I've only just now gotten the house more or less in order, aside from the washer being broken.  

I happened to have picked up a short RV water hose from someone's curbside a few weeks ago, and so I  experimented with siphoning water out of the washer.  It sort of works if I get all the air out of the hose and bring the lower end down to a basin on the floor; it needs the difference in height to create enough suction for that size of hose, and it only worked for the top half of the water.  

After that, I experimented with using a short hose from the dehumidifier as a flexible water container:  lower entirely into the water, and then lift by both ends.  This worked, but the amount of water it can carry is very small.

I did wash a load of laundry in the bathtub using my antique Rapid Washer-style metal laundry plunger, and experimented with setting wire shelving over the laundry room sink as a place for draining water out of the laundry.  However, really, a stronger force than gravity is needed.

Future loads are waiting until the landlord deals with the washer in one way or another, or until I finish recovering from this cold.

I am appreciative now of two projects I did a while back, which was to take some free-from-a-neighbor bathroom tiles, and two wooden panels from a deconstructed TV armoire, and make two tiled panels:  one for the kitchen behind the wastebasket, and one for the bathroom between the toilet and the side wall; both protecting the walls against family members with bad aim.  Both panels are just leaning against the wall, not attached.  One I finished with grout in the tile joints, and the other with white caulk and a band of paint along the top edge.  Both are much easier to scrub clean than the wall paint, and being speckled white instead of weary beige, they help to brighten the rooms.

The painted wooden frame in the living room now has large red Christmas bells hanging from it.

The apples are for the most part keeping far better than I expected, given their condition when we picked them.  I haven't done much more than sort through them every week or so to pick out the ones that are going bad, and cook up the ones that are partly salvageable.

I realized a year or two ago that the purpose of food is not to be eaten, but to be available to be eaten.

Awash in apples

Through our local social network, this fall we picked up four buckets of black walnuts at one place, and considerably more than that of apples at another.

Last year, we brought home enough apples to last into spring, aside from the ones we cooked or preserved in various ways.

This year was also a good year for apples, although not quite of the quality of last year's bumper crop.

We were out picking after dark with headlamps, and I was surprised to see how many moths were going after the bruised apples on the ground.

I found a new recipe, not with apples but for apples, from an old community-fundraiser cookbook.  It is a topping for an apple cake, and it looked so weird that I figured it had to be good.  We are using it for a dip for apple slices, although it is rather drippy.  As the original recipe says, "Texture may be funny and brown flecks may appear":

Topping for Apple Cake/Dip for Apples

1 Cup sugar

1/2 Cup sour cream

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Combine ingredients in saucepan, and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it boils.   

The brown flecks are from the sugar beginning to caramelize, which doesn't take long, and the result tastes like caramel and almost like marshmallow.  I found that leaving it in the pan after cooking resulted in more of the sugar caramelizing, and tending to crystallize on the sides and bottom of the pan, along with making the overall color more brown.

George Floyd Square

I passed through George Floyd Square earlier this summer, serendipitously.  I didn't realize before that there isn't just the one Black power fist at the intersection, but also one in each of the neighboring intersections, which define the "Square".

It still looks a lot like the photo here.  You can drive through the Square, but the north-south traffic is squeezed over to accommodate the memorial.

The city wants the memorial out of the street.  The activists want to close off the street to traffic and build a memorial plaza.  Business owners have unsuccessfully sued the city for not providing law enforcement, and now are going to mediation.

When I was there, in the evening, there were only a few people around, and the mood was subdued, aside from someone yelling about a block away.

"The People's Way" former gas station across the street is--I think--where the city had their surveillance camera feed that the 911 dispatcher was watching in real time.

The general trend of the big cities going cashless has pushed many of the homeless out into the suburbs.  I saw a uniformed security guard at one of the mid-range grocery stores, and there were loiterers around the HarMar Mall last year and keycodes for the restrooms.

Walz off

I am not a fan of Tim Walz.   I went back and read from this blog's archives of the end of May 2020 into the following June...

...when he let the Twin Cities rioting get so bad that multi-county curfews had to be imposed...

...on and past my baby's due date.

My baby was smart and waited until well into June to be born; thankfully with no need for emergency transportation.

Many places that we had been to as a family over the years were looted and burned.  Several of those places were totally destroyed.  $500 million dollars damage in the Twin Cities.

I've also seen the ways Walz has been devastating Minnesota since then, which accelerated once the Democrats took control of the Legislature for the "trifecta".  

And it's not just Minnesota; Minnesota is now a destination state for abortions and gender transitions. 

Walz and Harris are centering their campaign around "joy".  Walz has a very convincing jolly warrior act, partly because he's had a lot of training.  He is probably not an organically-grown candidate at all; I think he may have an interesting history with the teachers' union.  He certainly favors them now, despite increasingly dismal education outcomes, which are both bad and barely above the national average.

A few years ago, Walz said something about how if Minnesotans don't like living with immigrants, they should leave.  I have not yet unearthed the exact quote.

Anyway, when I see Harris-Walz, I don't see joy.  I see fire, destruction, and death. 

Preliminary results

I came across a little tiny online mention of a connection between Vitamin A deficiency and bleeding, and I realized that there was a possible recent correlation in my own life, memorable because of jury duty.

Here's the abstract of a medical paper on using Vitamin A to treat menorrhagia, from 1977:  "menorrhagia was alleviated in more than 92% of patients".

Sources of Vitamin A include carrots, eggs, and butter.

Locally

Charges have been dropped against State Police Officer Ryan Londregan, who fatally shot black man Ricky Cobb II, as Cobb was driving away from an arrest while Londregan and another officer were leaning into the car.

I happened to be going into the Government Center for jury duty on a day that Londregan had a hearing, and I saw some of his supporters setting up in the atrium, but I didn't realize what they were there for until later.  There were also counter-protesters angrily shouting slogans like "No justice, no peace!" for a while.  

The atrium you can see in the picture in the article extends up the entire height of the building between the two towers of offices and courtrooms, and the protesting was very audible even on the top floor, which is where the jury office is now.  It used to be in the basement under the street that the building straddles.

I was surprised that protesting was being allowed inside the building.  There is a large paved space outdoors on the north side.

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Closer to home, it is yard sale/estate sale/spring clean-up season, with two especially interesting finds.  The first is a pair of pliers used by cobblers, which incorporates a small, square hammer head, so leather can be pulled taut and nailed at the same time.  One of the handles is bent, so I'm going to have to figure out how to straighten it.  The other item looks a lot like a golf club, but it has a ridged horizontal metal blade, and is apparently an old-fashioned weed-whacker.  It has been very handy, as we have been getting a lot of rain and the weeds have been growing at high speed.

Addendum to The Fall of Minneapolis

Earlier post here.  [Edit:  I have added to it a bit.]

Derek Chauvin's wife Kellie entered (and won) the Mrs. Minnesota America pageant in 2018 with the encouragement of her friend and earlier Mrs. Minnesota Andrea Bennett Xiong, whose husband was Tou Ger Xiong, Twin Cities Hmong celebrity.

It has been reported that Tou Ger Xiong was kidnapped, stabbed a dozen times, and thrown down a hill in Columbia; multiple Minnesota Congresspersons have issued statements.

It's very odd that this came only a few weeks after Derek Chauvin was stabbed in prison.

The Fall of Minneapolis

An alt-news documentary on George Floyd's death and its aftermath is out now:  The Fall of Minneapolis.  It blows the mainstream narrative right out of the water.

Many of the places in it are recognizable.  Fortunately--or Providentially--we moved out of the Third Precinct before 2020 hit.  The government center where Chauvin's trial was, was where I had had jury duty years earlier.  I've been to the bookstore where Keith Ellison found the Antifa handbook.

The documentary is missing some important context:  most importantly, a disclosure that the producer and host, Liz Collin, is married to Bob Kroll, who was head of the Minneapolis police union in 2020.  The protest led by John Thompson that is shown was outside their house.  [Edit:  Thompson's son Derek crashed into and killed a carload of Somali young women earlier this year.]

The portrayal of the police is very positive, but you can see that there is long-standing antagonism between the police and multiple segments of the city's population.

Also there is no city surveillance video from across the street, which was visible in real time to the 911 dispatcher; the camera was at the gas station I guess.  That business with Floyd being kneeled on for 7 minutes 46 seconds, then 8 minutes 46 seconds, and then 9 minutes 29 seconds, was caused by the City of Minneapolis sitting on that video good and hard until Chauvin's trial the following year, and it has never been released to the public.

Later on, after that gas station was closed down, a kidnapped guy was held there for a night or two, in between being driven around to ATMs to withdraw cash.  I'm not sure how to correlate that against the protest/occupation activity in that area.  There's a Minneapolis teacher who has been very dedicated to being right there and being seen and heard.  [Edit:  Marcia Howard]

Darnella Frazier, the black teenager standing on the sidewalk taking the video of Floyd, received a special Pulitzer prize for it.  Later on, her uncle got killed in someone else's police chase while sitting in his car.  As far as I know, that was an accident.

George Floyd's girlfriend worked at the school Daunte Wright attended, and she was back in the media after he was accidentally shot and killed by police.

George Floyd's family, including his mother Larcenia and brother Philonise, received a $27 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis, but for some reason Floyd's roommates were saying months later that his family never came over to get his Bible or other belongings.  [Edit:  I believe Floyd's aunt lives or lived in the Twin Cities metro area.] 

Chauvin's mother Carolyn Pawlenty is a cousin-in-law of former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.  Chauvin's now ex-wife Kelly was a Mrs. Minnesota beauty pageant winner.  [Edit:  a little more about that here, including death of Tou Ger Xiong] Chauvin and Floyd used to work security at the same club, which burned down in the riots.

John Thompson's son was recently in big trouble for fleeing police at high speeds in a rented car and T-boning a car full of Somali young women, killing them all.

Liz Collin was interviewed by Candace Owen after being fired from the local CBS station, I think that was later in 2020.

Umbrella Man, who kicked off the window-smashing at the Autozone (more-or-less kitty-corner from the 3rd Precinct police station) was at one point identified as a white supremacist who had previously been in a group harassing a Muslim convert in nearby tourist destination Stillwater, but I haven't heard that he was ever arrested.

Donald Williams, visible among the bystanders on the sidewalk with the boxing club hoodie, was caught on video hitting a police car with a shopping cart, I think it was, during the rioting at the St. Paul Midway Target store.  He's been in legal trouble a couple of times since then:  alleged domestic violence against his girlfriend near the Minnesota State Fair, and recently a disturbance at a suburban school when they wouldn't let him come inside to pick up his kid.

A timely table

I have been thinking for a long time about replacing our kitchen table with a larger, less decrepit, and more washable one, and I had gotten so far as to reject the idea of building a table, and to save up funds for a new used table, and even to write a time to go shopping for it on the calendar.

Then we all got sick, and there were a lot of church activities and things going on, and around the time we were mostly recovered, my husband called and said his boss had a table he was giving away.

He gave me the measurements over the phone, and it was just the size I was looking for.

After various exertions, he got it home and we got it into the house.  The chairs came with it, but they are definitely oversize for the room and I am mostly using our old chairs with it.  

The table itself is just about as big as will fit there.  When fully opened, the fridge door comes within an inch of the table. I am not above taking my drawknife and shaving some wood off the table legs and the bench I made before, to gain an inch or two. The fridge could be moved back a couple of inches also.  Happily, none of those things are necessary.

Theoretically, we can all squeeze in around it, if enough of the smaller children sit on the bench--which hasn't happened yet.  

Another thing I did recently was to unravel a finger-crocheted chenille scarf that I had been given some years back, and re-crochet it into a little mat for a chair seat.  The colors go well with our living room, and it is good to have the scarf being used more.

I have been somewhat surprised to notice that I have not been doing much crafting at all during this sabbatical.  Just more music, more puzzles, and more reading.  I did get a bunch of mending done as I've been watching movies with the elder children.

At one of the church activities, I was talking with an older couple from another church, and it turns out that they were homeschoolers back in the Eighties, before homeschooling was explicitly allowed by law in Minnesota.  They said they had to keep a low profile, and that friends of theirs were investigated by the state.  Later on, one of the larger homeschool co-ops started up, and they were involved in that.  

Finally fall...

 ...after almost five months of August:  May was August, June was August, July was August, August was August, most of September was August, and even some of October has been August.

We didn't have the air conditioning on at all this year, so fall weather is a reprieve and a chance to really get moving on projects again.

In particular, dealing with all the things that have piled up all over the house.

I don't even have a craft project going on at the moment, except that I delegated one experiment to some bored children by having them draw on fabric with scraps of soap.  I will iron the fabric, wash it, and see if any grease stains from the soap survive the washing.  I'm looking for a way to give plain fabric a subtle pattern.

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Myquillyn Smith, "The Nester", is putting up transcripts with her podcasts now; an example.

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Locally, I'm watching the school board election and the referendums for funding that they have on the ballot.  The school board candidates are unimpressive.  The information from the school board on the referendums managed to outdo our last school district, by putting a lie on the first page instead of the second:  "This publication is not circulated on behalf of any candidate or ballot question."  That was at the bottom of the page, but it says "IT'S TIME TO RENEW" at the top, in much larger letters, and then they go on to do everything but fill in the "YES" ovals in the sample ballot questions.

They're trying to push through a big increase in their operating levy and have it increase with inflation.  Also, they're trying to trying to renew the technology levy, which is actually larger than the current operating levy.

A school district in one of the Twin Cities inner-ring suburbs recently called off in-person school for a day for the upper grades with only two hours notice, after some sort of threat.  I expect there will be much more of that in the future.

Homeschool moms' group, Twin Cities

I've been in a Discovery Bible Study group for the past couple of years with some wonderful women, and now it is time for me to start a new one!

My homeschooling journey has been long, but lonely--even now I can count the number of local homeschooling mothers I've met on one hand--so I am making an effort to seek out and find other homeschool moms, as well as teenage girls who want to be homeschool moms, to help foster connections and community.

No previous Bible knowledge is required, and non-Christian women and young women are welcome.

The meetings will be from 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm on the first and third Wednesdays of the month, beginning with October 18, and running through April 18, 2024, so it is not a long-term commitment.

Location:  Community of Nations Church, 2025 Skillman Ave. W, Roseville, MN  55113; room TBD, I will put signs at the entrances.

Heritage

Child is home from the hospital, much improved.

Inheritance these days is mostly nonlinear/nonlineage.  I made it to an estate sale over the weekend.  Husband reported that their sign said they would be charging half-price in the afternoon.  I got there just as they were changing their sign to "Everything free".  Clearly the old person's children didn't want to deal with it any more than they had to.  Most of what was left at that point was furniture, not of interest to me at this stage, but I found a couple of bags of useful items, a desk lamp that a child needed, and a large wooden drying rack.  

I also found a vintage wooden sewing machine case at a yard sale; no machine, just the case.  I bought it for the hinges that the machine slides onto, to replace one for my great-grandmother's machine that was lost sometime after the last move.

The hinges turned out to not be the right depth for the sewing machine cabinet, but the case was a close enough fit for the sewing machine, and now it will be a lot easier to store it somewhere besides on the library desk.  I think I can make the hinges work for the cabinet later on by putting in a new piece of oak where they meet.

What we stock up for...

...is the next round of unpleasant unplanned major expenses and impediments.  Which has now begun.

The child in the hospital is doing much better, although still not out of the woods.  I don't know when he will be able to come home.  People from church brought us a lot of food, and are willing to bring more as soon as we need it, and on top of that some of them are real prayer warriors.

It has been also been good to have the new musical instruments around the house, to pick up and blow some air through now and then.  My littlest children very quickly learned how to get the trumpet to toot.  I looked up the manufacturer online, and the trumpet could be a century old.  Transitioning to an open-hole flute has been much easier than I thought it would be.

I had decided a while back to get going with the hand weights and some simple exercises again, despite being somewhat wiped out from anemia.  That has been helpful with the added workload of a sick child.

Branching out

I set up the big willow basket, found an old smoker lid to turn upside down for a planter inside it, and then I set up a stack of hardwood pieces from old armchair innards as a base for the smoker lid.  I ended up filling it with water toys, and not dirt, though.  

We had a yard sale, and did poorly money-wise, besides my mother-in-law buying two willow wreaths that I had made, and one child running a lemonade stand that did well.  Child charges 25 cents per cup, but many people pay with paper money and say to keep the change.  With the yard sale, the problem was mostly that we didn't have a lot of stuff to draw people in.

We went to a number of yard sales ourselves, and found some useful items.  Children bought fishing equipment and a large vintage crank-driven ice-cream maker.  I bought an oak table, boxes of nails, and some tools.  At free piles we found some fabrics, greeting cards, and books.