imple Vegetarian | Local Shopping Challenge, Day 2: A treasure map

For the second one day of my dollar-and-underneath neighborhood purchasing assignment, I scored a freebie that comes however as soon as a yr: this system for our Highland Park's annual town-huge outside sale, a good way to take area this weekend. This annual occasion is backed with the aid of a neighborhood real property workplace, which signs and symptoms humans up for the sale and, the week earlier than, locations out a list of all the addresses where residents could be taking thing. On the alternative net web page is a map of the city, for people who want assist finding the addresses. It's a very useful tool for purchasing the most out of backyard sale weekend; as opposed to absolutely roaming the streets randomly seeking out income, you may plot out a course that allows you to take you via the maximum sale-heavy regions. This, consistent with Livingston's First Law of Yard Sales, will maximize your probabilities of finding the notable matters.

As I cited in my put up about ultimate year's sale, I want to pass-reference the listing and the map with the aid of filling in all the websites of profits with x's on the map, coded through shade to indicate whether or not or now not they may be Saturday pleasant, Sunday handiest, or each days. This one year, but, as I made my manner back and forth from listing to map with my colored pens, it happened to me that there must be an much less complicated manner to do that through just inputting the addresses into Google maps and having it mark all the places. And wonderful enough, I discovered an academic on how to do just that during this About.Com web website. I observed the internet site on-line stored putting for me because of a few sort of wonky script at the net page, so if you have trouble with it too, here is a short precis of what to do:

1. Sign in to Google maps and enter your home address.
2. Click on the marker and select, "Save to map." Then tell it to create a new map and give it a simple title like "Yard sale map."
3. Then start entering the addresses of known sales and selecting "save to map" for each one. You can change the marker from a basic teardrop to some other shape and color if you like. I selected pushpins, color coded according to my usual scheme: green for Saturday, red for Sunday, or blue for both days.

It took a bit of time to enter all the sale addresses, but it was still a lot simpler than doing it by hand. (There's also an app called Yard Sale Treasure Map that's supposed to make finding and adding sales even easier, but I couldn't get it to work on my Mac.) In case any local readers were thinking of going to these sales, you can view a copy of my yard sale map here.

This may well be the most useful freebie I pick up in this whole week-long challenge: a genuine treasure map. OK, the treasures (mostly) won't be free for the taking, and we may have to search a whole bunch of sales to find them, but at least we don't have to sail all the way across the ocean to get to them and then dig them up by hand. (Too bad the sales aren't next weekend; then they'd overlap with Talk Like a Pirate Day, and my treasure map would be even more appropriate. And we could refer to it as Yarrrrrrd Sale Weekend.)