Still Here

Church, 2010

Yes, I've been away. Not away, away, just away from the computer and blogging. Spring brings a lot of work along with the better weather, and after a long harsh winter, it's good to be outside toiling about the yard and garden.
I also saw a down turn in my financial situation, so I've been doing a bunch of different things to earn extra cash, not the least of wish is taking on a part-time job mowing lawns. Or, more precisely, one huge ass lawn. I have mastered the fine art of using a zero-radius riding mower, or as I call it, zero tolerance since the slightest touch on the steering levels veer you wildly off course. But I'm not complaining, it's actually a pretty sweet gig and pays better than what you'd expect.
And, in preparations for my impending move in with MK this summer in our new house, I've been selling stuff I no longer want or need on ebay. I'd been toying with the idea of selling of my Buffy The Vampire Slayer collection of collectibles for quite sometime and finally took the plunge. Turns out the economy is not so bad when it comes to BtVS!
Also, I was part of a poetry reading/art exhibit last weekend and one of my prints sold, so that threw extra cash into the mix as well. Basically I'm saving up for a trip this summer to Texas to see Reichter graduate from his Air Force training, and MK and I want to stay a day or two extra to see the sites around San Antonio. It's not likely that we'll be back to TX anytime soon, so we want to make the most of it while we're there.
There in a nutshell is what I've been up to: Making money and working on prints. I like it best when those two things overlap :)

Ebay Madness

Spurred on by a yard sale purchase, for $.50, of a Minox C subcompact spy camera, circa 1950-60s, MK and I have started selling our shit on ebay. The whole snowball started when I found that spy camera. I mean, it was a 'real' spy camera, not one of those junky things one (me) could get with enough Bazooka Joe wrappers and a quarter for S&H. No, this is like James Bond real-deal stuff. I did a little cursory research and discovered that my modest purchase could haul in some serious cash, so we took some digital pics and posted that puppy. Now that it's all said and done (meaning: the auction is closed and the money is sent), we've become drunk on our own success and have started scouring our closets for more to post.
Now, let me just say that I've been down this road before - thinking that I too might have a haunted crutch used by a beatified soul as they hobbled from one hospital charity ward to another administering to the seething masses with boundless energy and empathy. So, I told MK, "We need good product, honestly described, accompanied with snappy copy/text."
And that's where we are right now, in the middle of a bunch of ebay auctions, most bid upon, a couple of bidding wars, and already scheming on what to put up for sale next. It's fun, but you can get so caught up in the whole giddiness of making money and getting rid of something that you don't want anyway, that it's easy to lose focus of: a) What you are selling - and b) whether it actually has value or if you're just addicted to obsessively tracking your auctions. It's a sickness, trust me, I tell you.
Not that online selling is anything new to me. I've been doing it for almost a decade, but ebay is just different. Tracking how many pages views you've had, whether a couple of bidders are driving up the price, how much time is left and whether a price is going to go through the roof...it's like gambling, only you're the 'house', sitting behind a one-way mirror observing it all and waiting...
I'm just going to post a few more things and then I have other things I have to get done and can't devote this kind of devotion to something that makes me feel obsessed and stressed, and kinda high.
Of course, I still have all of this Daguerreotypes, so we'll see what happens...