You know, it’s annoying

But in order to sell anything on eBay these days, I have to have it already packed up and ready to ship.  This is delaying me a lot, because I don’t like packaging items until I know they’re sold.  That way, if I buy something that turns out to be a complete dud that won’t sell via eBay (which has happened, believe me) I can just take and donate it to a thrift shop—no muss, no fuss, no spills.  But now eBay has gotten all cozy with the Post Awful and UPS, and they encourage you strongly to tell how much the finished package weighs before ever you list your item.  (They don’t insist on it—yet—but I foresee that day ain’t far off.)

So I’ve been packing up items, trying to get them to a state that I can list some and get them OUT of the house and reduce, in small part, the overwhelming clutter.  Yesterday I managed to sell an Epson inkjet printer and a booklet on Melanesian Pidgin English printed by the Navy in 1944, and failed to get a bid on a set of three Kodak Brownie Cameras.  I’m not surprised I didn’t get a bid on the Brownies, because I paid far too much for ’em and they’re far too common to sell well.  Even with my 1337 research and writing skills, I can’t make them sound good enough to draw bids.

I have packed up a set of Anchor Hocking pressed glass nappys in the Royal Ruby color that I think I’ll try re-offering.  They didn’t go last summer, but they ought to, the glass is such a gorgeous red.  After that, I need to dig up a box big enough to contain all the disassembled components of a Model 9 Mixmaster (I kinda hate to let it go; it’s in better shape than my Model 7 except for the big mixing bowl, which is always the first thing to go).

{Aaaaaarrrgh . . . just took an hour out to replace a broken window in the living room, and cracked a corner on the new pane of glass as I was setting the points!!  Now I gotta go buy a new piece of glass and another box of points at Home Despot, or maybe stop at Lowe’s on the way from the Empire to the Infernal Revenue tomorrow . . . .}

Linda left for Maryland and home today; we dropped her off at Bergstrom about eleven for a one o’clock flight on Southwest, at her request.  I think she had a good time going about with us, and M was definitely sorry to see her go.  While she was here L took her to the Bullock Texas History Museum and the newly-reopened Texas Memorial Museum, which were pretty sure-fire.  Linda’s an inveterate museum-goer wherever she travels.  She didn’t get the chance to see everything she would have liked at the Bullock, but the Memorial Museum worked out better because it was (1) smaller and (2) less full of schoolkids’ tour groups.  M greatly enjoyed the wildilfe dioramas, but freaked out mildly when we got to the top floor and found a display with a three-foot rat snake prowling around a dead branch.  I explained two or three times that the snake had to stay on his side of the glass and couldn’t come out which helped some, but she stil recoiled when the snake began waving eight inches or so of its body off the end of a branch at us.

While she was here, Linda tried her hand at shelling pecans and found that she didn’t have the skill for cracking the little thick-shelled San Sabas without smashing the meats to uselessness in the process.  Apparently her opinion of our ability to get them out in usable pieces went up after that.  L gave her some of the Mahans, which take almost no talent to do and work up very quickly.  We’ve promised to pack her a box of the leftovers from the 2001 crop still sitting in the freezer and ship them up.  She still has some from what we sent before, but they are nice for festive treats and presents, so I’m sure she’ll get them used somehow.

You know, it’s time to go see whether that potato I stuck in the nuker to bake is finished.  Lunch was both small and a while back.