I hate when my ham(fest) gets wet...

So today was the Carroll County CARAFEST hamfest - and when you have webpage that uses the blink tag, you know it's going to be a good hamfest.

I still have a fair amount of inventory, even though I sold a bunch at the last 'fest and haven't bought a whole lot new. I wasn't expecting to sell a whole lot, and I didn't. It didn't have as much to do with my inventory than weather conditions, though.

I'm horrible about checking weather reports. So at 5:30 this AM, I'm driving the Ranger up 795, windows open, eating a Dunkin' Donuts cinnamon roll, bumping Atmosphere on the stereo, when I spot a few drops of rain on my windshield. Well, I figured, it's just a few drops. Maybe it will pass. Maybe it will rain itself out. Maybe it's raining over Owing Mills but not Westminster.

Unfortunately, it dripped all day. It didn't pour until I was homeward bound, but it drizzled on and off the whole time I was there. Not enough to want to go inside (plus, I found a windbreaker stowed in the extended cab of my truck) but enough that I had to keep my merchandise covered under mover's blankets most of the time. This hurt my sales - many of my customers spot stuff and come over, so having to lift up the blankets cut out sales to the lazy. I ended up grossing $247 - not awful, but I know I would have done better with a little sunshine.

The only thing I bought was a 4x backback cd burner - it uses parallel port to hook up, so it can come in handy for old machines (like old laptops) that don't have cd-rom drives and don't support USB. Well, OK, I did also buy a sandwich - this was one of the few hamfests that actually had, well, ham, of the pit variety, along with beef and turkey. I convinced them to make me a turkey and beef combo, and it was quite tasty.

bsom and the two students who went with us, on the other hand, bought a ton of stuff, including a giant speaker, a bench power supply, an oscilloscope, a bag of wrenches, a subwoofer, boxes of random resistors, capacitors, chips, and other small components, a box of old books, and a box of meters I couldn't identify, at least one of which had "SCRAP" scratched into it. It was free to tailgate, and bsom dragged a spare table for me to use, so he just parked in the tailgate area and piled his stuff in the back of his car. There was so much crap in the back of his Vibe that people thought he was selling stuff and started rooting around in the back, to the point where I had to close the trunk door.

The next 2 months or so are pretty dry for hamfests, and then there are three in a row, so I'll have some time to accumulate inventory and hopefully the weather will do better then and madanthony can make some more money. My HOA is sponsoring a yard sale next month, so hopefully I can move some crap then too - ski boots, anyone ?

And now, pics!

I'm looking for a capacitor about thiiiis big

buy my stuff, please...