Posts by Jonah

The trick to E-Baying is to sell a bunch of stuff all at once. That way you won’t get discouraged when stuff doesn’t get a single bid, because you’ll be racking in so much money from officer club ashtrays.

The exception to this, of course, is selling identical items. If two people want the same thing, they’ll both drive up the price, whereas if there are two items, they can each get one for themselves cheap. As a guy at the fur auction said, “All’s you need for an auction is feller with money and another with guts.”

Michele’s been cleaning out the basement. A quarter of the basement is now lined with new shelves from Home Depot with a wide avenue between them. Until recently, it was tricky to walk in there at all. A lot of what was in there has ended up in the trash. A lot more has ended up in the downstairs hall. She threw out all the empty boxes I was collecting to ship the things she has me E-Bay. Then she told me to E-Bay three things.

One was a waterproof sock that you put over your leg cast and then pump it to make it watertight to you can swim in it. It didn’t work for her. It didn’t sell on the first try but then went for 99 cents on the second. Fortunately, I had a box the right size for it stuffed under my desk.

Have I mentioned that I compulsively save empty boxes? I have four on my desk at the moment, plus another one with an unknown number nested inside it, plus peanuts. I have a large box full of small boxes out in the outside storage room, but Berck has blocked it in, so I can’t very well get to it. I’m in charge of selling things on Amazon (which is even easier to use than E-Bay), and it’s very frustrating to be furiously searching for a box the size of one that your husband just threw out when you have to SOLD, SHIP NOW.

The two identical items Michele had me sell were two Iceman cold therapy units. They’re not cheap, so she was hopeful they’d bring in some cash. Only one of them had a power adapter, but I managed to find one that worked out of the power adapter drawer. I spread out a sheet, took pictures of both ensembles, and put one of them up to end on a Sunday night. The next Monday morning, it had sold for $29. I sent out an invoice, got paid, and shipped it out. Michele had been kind enough to save two boxes the right size for them. Got good feedback too!

Then I listed the second one. A week later it had sold for $73! Identical item. If I had sold it a week earlier, they probably would have both gone for $15. Or maybe $28.

Auctions are weird.

I have to say that E-Bay has made it a lot easier to ship things these days. Used to be you had to figure it all out for yourself and hope you weren’t losing money. Now you can just put it into the embedded shipping calculator. And when it’s time to ship, you just head over to PayPal, and it gives you a postage paid label to put tape on your package. Then you just drop it off at UPS or USPS.

I hope the last package gets there. I sent it to Canada, and the guy at the UPS store wasn’t sure how to handle the customs situation. We ended up taping a photocopied piece of paper on the side of the box listing the contents and value, which is all you should have to do.

Dad is in town. We went to a recording at New Life tonight.

Berck is in Vancouver. His sim partner failed his oral exam, but they’re letting him go through the simulators anyway and retake his oral exam afterward. Berck isn’t using his phone in Canada, as it would cost $.69 a minute, but he has Internet access. If you really wanted to call him, I can give you his hotel number.

It’s official: I still have a job. My salary will go to 75% of what it currently is, but I’ll get a 10% take of whatever Bremer Associates brings in. I currently get 4%. If we do as well as we did last year, I’ll make 5k more this year.

On Thursday Michele yelled up the stairs to me. We have an intercom system on the phones, but she can never remember how to use it. So she walks from one end of the downstairs to the other to yell up the stairs to me whenever she needs something. My desk is at the top of the stairs, and I can hear her fine from there.

“Joanna?”

“Yo.”

“Have you been having trouble with your applications this morning?”

“My applications?”

“I’ve been having horrible problems with Firefox and InfoSelect. Do you think it’s the wind?”

“Uh, why would the wind…nevermind.* Have you restarted your computer?”

“No, I probably should have done that first.”

“If you’re still having problems after you restart, I’ll be happy to try to fix them.”

I didn’t hear of any further problems after that until the next morning.

“Joanna?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m having horrible problems with Firefox.”

“Firefox just installed a new update, so you should be better soon.”

“Okay.”

I sat down at my computer for the first time. On Fridays I clean the house, so I hadn’t been doing my usual scouring of the Internet. Sure enough, the load times on major sites I visit every day were unreasonably sluggish. I checked my bandwidth, which was much slower than usual.

So I called Qwest. I hate talking to tech support people. He had me turn the modem off and back on again, which worked remarkable well, once I plugged the Ethernet cable back in after it had become unhooked from the modem to the router when he had me turn the modem around to find out what model it was. I really should replace that cable.

“What was wrong?” asked Michele.

“We had to turn the modem off and back on again.

“Everyone had to get out of the car and get back in?”

“Exactly.”

She was referring to this joke. There are three engineers in a car; an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a Microsoft engineer.

Suddenly the car just stops by the side of the road, and the three engineers look at each other wondering what could be wrong. The electrical engineer suggests stripping down the electronics of the car and trying to trace where a fault might have occurred. The chemical engineer, not knowing much about cars, suggests that maybe the fuel is becoming emulsified and getting blocked somewhere.

Then, the Microsoft engineer, not knowing much about anything, comes up with a suggestion “Why don’t close all the windows, get out, get back in, then open the windows again, and maybe it’ll work!?”

Here’s a conversation I had with Duncan recently:

“Joanna, Outlook isn’t working right.”

“Did you restart the computer?”

“Yes! Three times!”

I wasn’t sure I should be happy he’d restarted it before coming to me or to tell him the definition of insanity. Instead I just sighed and fiddled with stuff until it started working again.

Yes, I am the IT department.

*The house is in the middle of nowhere, and up until recently the only broadband we could get was either satellite or line of sight. Our line of sight antenna would jiggle whenever it was windy, making our Internet connection go in and out. In March the Chinook winds come. This whole last week the wind was blowing at about 40 miles per hour constantly.

But we’ve had DSL for 2 years now.

The two new cats showed up after being trapped by some of the volunteers and brought to the ranch. Michele kept them in the horse trailer, because cats often try to head home, no matter how far away they are, when they’ve been moved. She was out of town for a few days, so she told me to be sure to feed and water them. She put Sunflower Velcro in there too so an owl wouldn’t eat her.

Every morning I’d add some water to their bowls of frozen water and put some food in their other dish. I’d check on them at noon and then when I did the evening feeding. Velcro would be right at the crack of the door ready to see me. The other two cats were in the two furthest corners of the trailer as far as they could possibly be from one another. One of them was an orange and white cat that Michele called “The Flat Cat.” The other one was some sort of Siamese. They would stare at me, motionless in their respective curled up balls. I would make sure they were alive. The missing food and accumulated poop proved that they were, even though they never seemed to move otherwise. Satisfied, I’d scoop Velcro back into her prison/safe and wedge the door shut.

When Michele came back, she decided they could be released. The two new cats disappeared under the tack shed. We’d see glimpses of them from time to time and give each other reports on their sightings. They were obviously terrified of people. We weren’t sure they knew that the food was in the barn. Of course, Bear was in there too, and may not be keen on sharing. Soon we’d stopped spotting the flat cat, though not before Velcro started looking suspiciously pregnant.

Michele managed to catch the Siamese a couple of times and take it into the barn to show it where the food was. She left on another business trip, so I was in charge of feeding again. That Friday I opened the barn door to find Bear, Velcro, and the Siamese all inside. The Siamese was at the far side of the barn and had that deer-in-the-headlights look of whether she should flee or stay stock still. I spoke gently to her and turned my attention to filling the food dish on top of the rabbit hutch. Bear immediately came over and started eating. I leaned over to pet him, which he loves, enough to let me do it as much as I want while he eats. He even paused to rub his head into my hand before going back to munching as I baby talked to him. Velcro was trying to figure out how to get a mouthful without ticking off Bear.

I turned over to the Siamese as I stroked Bear’s black coat. “Would you like some loving too?”

“Mrorrr?”

“You can have some too. Doesn’t this look nice?” I gave Bear a satisfying caress.

“Roorrr?”

She took a tentative step toward me as I continued to stroke Bear. “You can come over here if you want.”

“Rerrr…”

I reached out my arm and met her halfway as she approached. I put out my hand and gently reached under her chin. She nearly went into a paroxysm of pleasure, as she tried to help me stroke her cheeks, talking loudly the whole time. I stayed at arm’s length, not wanting to freak her out.

On Monday the Siamese was again over by the tack shed. She looked like she might bolt as I approached, but I told her I bore dog food, and sprinkled some on the bench where she’d been sunning herself. She approached cautiously to eat and let me carefully touch her again.

On Tuesday I opened the barn door, and the Siamese came running up to me! I stroked her and put some food in the dish. Bear approached to eat his breakfast, but the Siamese slapped him in the face. He hissed and jumped backwards about a foot simultaneously, then stood there asking, “What just happened?” The Siamese turned her back on him and started chowing down.

On Wednesday Michele had returned. I asked if she noticed anything different about the Siamese. “Thinner?”

“Anything else?”

“Friendlier?”

The Siamese went to live with Lara this weekend, whose 22 year old cat just died.

But now she likes people.

Why you should never pull over until you’ve exited the highway