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| message board June 2005
Life - as craptacular as it looks. Posted at 12:53 AM
I thought that this column was interesting, particularly considering I've been saying the same thing for months.
Posted at 2:07 AM
Am I missing something? Is there some reason that I have to keep existing here in misery? Why can't I just die now? Posted at 2:01 AM
How is it that with over fifty years of recorded television programming and almost 100 years of recorded film that every time I turn on the television I have to struggle to watch not only an episode or movie that I've never seen before but I actually have to struggle not to watch the same things that I watched even just a day or a week earlier? How many fucking times can some things be repeated, and why with so much that exists in the old vaults are we stuck watching the same small selection of things? Maybe my depression is making this seem worse than it is, but I honestly didn't ever feel like TV was this lim ited when I was a kid, and there were only about half a dozen channels to choose from back then. Sheesh. Posted at 1:24 AM
The sadness, lethargy, pointlessness, and emptiness are all there, along with the persistent tiredness and slight headache. Ain't depression grand.
Crud. The Wicked Witch had it right in the end - "What a world; what a world; what a world." It's the same any way you look at it. Crud. Posted at 10:45 PM
Depression sucks just about most of all when you can't even escape it by going to sleep. I hate these times when my depression combines with insomnia. It's obviously a preview of hell. Posted at 6:02 AM
This is sick and just plain wrong, but I just can't help find it wonderfully amusing. ROFLMAO.
Sperm: It's not just for breakfast anymore. Posted at 12:34 AM
Tonight's gaming session was great, just about winding up our exploration and combat in the old tower of the Black Wizard, now in the possession of a powerful Ogre Mage. The Ogre Mage could have kicked our asses if we'd have tried to kill him and his Ogre minions, but we were able to defeat a guardian of the tower for him, something he had been unable to do (as had many others whom he had sent before us with the same task), and because of our success we got the Ogre Mage to set down to negotiations with us, allowing us to barter for future trade and to also get valuable information from him. Key among such information was learning that a tribe of Goblins we're pursuing is much, much more organize and numerous than we'd expected - much more numerous and organized. So now we realize that we, as a group of five adventurers, can't handle a tribe of 700+ Goblins on our own, even as much as Mark's dwarf desperately is spoiling for a fight. We've gained a whole lot of information that answers a bunch of questions we've had, but it makes the threats to our small town even more desperate and difficult than we had ever imagined. Now we're left with figuring out how best to face the threat from the Goblins along with the threat we know also exists from the Orc clan that is even closer to our town than these Goblins. Steve has certainly created a world full of turmoil for us to deal with. We also realized tonight that our group of players has shrunk and isn't likely to see certain people coming back to join us. Steve of course runs the game as the Dungeon Master, describing the setting and laying out the storyline and role-playing the monsters and people we encounter, and he is quite reliable and sure to be there every week (which is good, because without him we can't game at all). Mark has been around for just about every session in both the old game (when we started this in 1997) and in the new game (that's been playing for a couple of months). He's sure to be around regularly as well. Kristie, however has been a no-show since I've come back into the group, and her appearances were spotty before that. Furthermore she basically will only meet on Mondays or Wednesdays, and our current Tuesday night sessions don't work for her. I, of course, am enjoying myself immensely and will be a constant player, even though I missed the first few weeks when Steve started things again recently. Steffen, who joined in only when Steve restarted things recently, has been very reliable, and a great player, and I feel we can depend upon him to be a regular player as well. O.J., however, who also joined in at the restart of the campaign, has not showed up for weeks, and since he works weekday evenings, it seems completely unlikely that he will ever rejoin the group at all (I've been using O.J.'s character in the group until such time as Steve can reincorporate my own character back into the group logically (which may happen fairly soon since they're heading back to town, and that opens many possibilities). Lastly, Robbie was showing up semi-regularly, even if he was late all of the time, but he hasn't shown up either of the past two weeks since we've met at Mark's house, even though Mark and Steffen have talked to him and he has assured them that he will be there - we don't believe it at this point and we have little doubt that Robbie won't be showing up any more. We aren't upset about that, honestly; he can join us or not as he pleases, and that's fine, but we're just not expecting him to be there any more. So that really just leaves three of us as players with Steve as the DM. That makes for a small group, to some extent, but at least we know we'll all be there every time, each week. So now we're a core group, and while I'm having great fun and enjoying this for myself, I also feel like I'm making a positive impact on the group not just with my good role-playing skills but merely with the fact that I'm committed to showing up and playing. I'm fully planning on staying involved as long as every body else can be kept playing. As long as this core group of us still holds together then we might just avoid the conflicting schedules and spotty attendance of the various players that led to this campaign group disintegrating in 1998. We can only hope.
Not long after I first moved here to take care of my grandmother we were shopping at Meijer and I pulled her into an aisle to suggest that we could buy a nice address book to pull together all of her loose addresses and phone numbers. I had noticed her "collection" - or more specifically I'd been forced to sort through her scraps and stacks in their various hiding places - to try to find phone numbers for calling to make appointments for my grandma. Her filing system, if I can even euphemistically use that term, was an assortment of numbers scribbled in the fronts and backs of the half dozen phone books she had from various years along with little scarps of paper with scribbled addresses stuffed in here and there and the torn corners of envelopes where she'd saved the return address. This was her main stash, but there were other hideaways in various places in her desk, her dresser, her closet, her purse, and other places. On top of this randomness she had a variety of phone numbers and a variety of addresses for any given person, even on the same page of paper, and it was almost impossible to know what was recent and useable. I talked her into buying an address book at Meijer that day, although it was a long and difficult argument to get her to agree. In the end, even though I tried desperately to get her to only agree if she was interested in trying for her own benefit, I'm sure that she actually only agreed to buy it to satisfy me. When my grandma went away for a visit to my sister in Maryland a couple of months later I took the address book, which she hadn't touched, and sorted all of the addresses I could find, determining what was accurate and tossing the rest, and putting everything into the new address book neatly, and then trashing all of the confusing mass of scraps and scribbles. I even got rid of all of the old phone books. When my grandma got back she was initially freaked out, sure that she wouldn't be able to get by without all of her cluttered menagerie. It didn't take long for her to come to love that new little address book, though. The new address book was easy for her to find, all of the addresses were accurate, and everything was alphabetized and written neatly (which is a big thing since my grandma quite often finds herself completely unable to read her own handwriting). She started singing the praises of the address book to everyone, and she never gave a further thought to her old collections of stuff. At least not until I worked with her to go through her desk and sort through things. The desk could barely be opened without an explosion of papers erupting, and as I should have known, a lot of the mess was addresses on scraps and slips of papers, hole envelopes saved for an address, old address books, and more. I set all of those aside into one collected bag, waiting for a day when I had time to sort through those with my grandma and put more addresses into the new address book. That was last summer. During the winter my grandma took it upon herself to pull out that bag of addresses and take various scraps and stuff them into the new address book. It took a while before I noticed this, and then I asked why she was making this barely usable mess (you could barely open the address book without little slips of paper falling all over the place). She told me that she didn't want to spoil the address book with all of my neat writing. I guess you can't really teach an old dog new tricks. Anyhow, I've wanted to clean up the growing mess (which my grandma has continued to add to), but school work and other projects have always come first. Today I jumped headfirst into the ugliness and tackled first the scrap-stuffed address book and then the remainder of the huge bag-o-stuff and the variety of addresses, phone numbers, and names (married names, maiden names, children's names, dead husbands' names, etc.). Figuring out what names and addresses were accurate was a challenge, figuring out who was dead from the names (which was a lot) was a greater challenge, but keeping calm when I'd find the same address for the same person saved on one and a half dozen scraps of paper, many times collected in the new address book where that name and address had been written for the last year - that just about freaked me out. But it's done, and that's one project that I'm glad is over. Granted, I won't be able to stop my grandma from continuing to scribble names and addresses on top scraps of paper and keep stuffing them into the address book, but now I can check the address book every week or two and keep on top of any address collecting before it gets to be a project that would take a whole day to complete. If only this sort of situation weren't true for all of my grandma's files. No such luck. There's still a long way to go to make any sense of the bags, boxes, and stacks of papers that are collected in closets, drawers, and shelves throughout her house. I'm making progress - big progress actually, and progress that my grandma loves (and so does my mom, who realizes that I'm saving her the trouble of sorting through all of it one day) - but there's still so, so much to be done. Posted at 10:31 PM
When the U.S. was fighting the Vietnam War, our government made regular claims that: we were liberating the Vietnamese people and keeping them safe from the communists who wanted to kill or enslave them; that we were working to make Vietnam a stable democratic nation; that we would stay until the South Vietnamese could stand on their own and defend themselves; and that the opposition (in the form of the Viet Cong insurgents and the North Vietnamese communists) were viscous and evil, willing to kill civilians, men, women, children, and even themselves - anything to achieve their goals of communist domination of all of Asia. None of that was true, of course, as we now clearly know. The Vietnamese people were fighting for their independence after millennia of having been dominated by one colonial power or another, and the independence movement ended up being based upon communism (partly because communism was seen throughout the world at the time as intellectually interesting and full of potential, but also, and more importantly, because the U.S. had rejected independence leader Ho Chi Minh on both of the occasions when he had asked for support for creating a democratic independence movement). The communists had no intention of killing their countrymen, but they were willing to die if that was what it would take to gain independence for their people and their descendants. Furthermore, the South Vietnamese government was weak and corrupt, completely dependent upon U.S. economic and military support for its very survival, and hardly democratic in that it was nothing more than a series of totalitarian regimes that crumbled one after the other with the only continuity being the general control of all military operations by the U.S. The U.S. did such a great job of propping up South Vietnam and making it strong that it collapsed and was conquered by North Vietnam in less than a year after U.S. troops pulled out. The North Vietnamese made it clear from the start that all they wanted was an independent united Vietnam, free of any control from western powers. They weren't evil or crazy or hateful, they just wanted their independence. You'd think the U.S. would have respected that. You'd think the U.S. would have figured this out just by looking at the history of Vietnam and it's 1400 years of constant insurrection against occupying powers. But the U.S. is dumb that way. And of course using U.S. and dumb in the same sentence now-a-days immediately conjures the image of George W. Bush, and why not? The comparison to U.S. stupidity in conducting war in a foreign country and completely misrepresenting all of reality with propaganda is so much of a parallel to what was done in Vietnam that it's unbelievable. I'm talking about Iraq, of course, and of Fuehrer Bush is doing his utmost to live up to the stupidity and the lies that made the Vietnam War the utter failure that it was from the first day it was begun. Bush has once again claimed that we are in Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a lie that has never held true (but heck, those WMDs never showed up and more Iraqis have died during this occupation than under Saddam, so the first two reasons for going can't be used any more). He has claimed that the insurgents (whom he calls "terrorists" because that has the negative connotation he wants) - he claims that they want to kill everyone, that they enjoy killing men, women, and children and even themselves. He has claimed that by fighting these people in Iraq we're keeping them from attacking here in the U.S. And he has claimed that U.S. troops will leave when the Iraqis can stand on their own against the opposition, and they will be a wonderfully democratic nation just like America. Isn't that swell? Well if propaganda is swell, then sure. Really, however, the truth is that the insurgents (call them "terrorists if you must") have made clear that they want the U.S. and other western powers out of the Middle East and minding their own business. They don't want our culture trying to overwhelm their culture and they don't want our strongarm tactics of pressuring them to do what we tell them. They want the western powers out of Iraq, out of Lebanon, out of Israel, and out of every other place in the Middle East. They basically want their lands to be free to have their own culture without occupying forces from western powers and without cultural dominance by western cultural norms. Honestly, they have pretty fair demands in that sense, because really we have no right to be there treating them as if we're the only people who know how to live (and you either live our way or die). The comparisons to Vietnam are too clear. We are basically threatening the independence and freedom of culture of Middle Eastern nations and they want us out. They want us out so bad that they'll fight with their every last dying breath to get it. Considering the American patriots did the same thing against the British, you'd think the U.S. would get this. But most people don't get it. And while the insurgents are fighting a deadly war, they are fighting for their own lands, and they are fighting the U.S. as a foreign occupying force. Simple enough. Also like in Vietnam, the assumption that the Iraqi government will magically be a democracy just like in the U.S. is a farce, a lie. The Iraqi government faces severe problems in a power struggle between various religious factions. Even once they get past that (if they can) they will have to gain control of all of the areas controlled by various warlords and insurgent groups - a task that even the full strength of the U.S. military hasn't been able to accomplish, let alone the paltry Iraqi army. Let's face it - Fuehrer Bush is lying his ass off, trying to make the U.S. war against Iraq seem like some great humanitarian effort that we're doing out of the generosity of our hearts. Face up to the bullshit, though, and see that Bush is just trying to make everything seem perfect and easily won. Even his fellow Republican John McCain has made clear that that's just stupid and unrealistic. Bush needs to be impeached for how he's lied to Congress and the American people, and we need to get the hell out of Iraq. It took the U.S. years to figure out that they were fighting a losing war in every aspect in Vietnam, and they left without having accomplished anything. Iraq is shaping up to be pretty much the same, and I don't see any possible way to achieve any of the things that Bush says we will do in Iraq (not soon and not ever). "Those who fail to recognize the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it." No truer words have ever been spoken. (Here are the articles cited above):
(and this one):
Posted at 12:47 AM
Ahhh, those wacky Republicans. Why don't they just hold a constitutional convention and cut to the chase, rewriting the American government to be the fascist elitist police state that they want. Then they could just have all of the Democrats killed for expedience. That's obviously what they're working toward.
Posted at 10:31 PM
I always enjoy Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times, but the title of this one alone makes it worth reprinting. It's a bizarre, interesting story in itself that he is writing about, a scandal called Coingate that is both stupid and devious at the same time, just what we have come to expect from Republicans. I swear, if I didn't have to be here to take care of my grandma I would have gotten myself as far away from this fucked up state as possible a long time ago.
Posted at 3:17 AM
Ooof! Watch where you're going. Posted at 1:02 AM
Having only gotten to sleep some time after 4 AM, I was happily sleeping in a bit today. My grandma was going out with friends to a luncheon (a birthday celebration for one of her friends), and that meant that she was being taken by those friends and I wouldn't need to be up and about to drive her around. I didn't even have to drive her to the YMCA since she was skipping her exercise to go to this affair. So I had no plans to wake up and get moving until I woke up naturally, fully rested. But the best laid plans invariably fail to follow through, and my grandma buzzed my intercom shortly after 10:30 and asked me to come downstairs to help her find her glasses. This has happened before, but rarely. My grandma needs to wear her glasses constantly to see, and she's very good (or at least habitual) about either wearing her glasses or putting them down by the sink in her bathroom. She is better about this than almost anything, and even with her forgetfulness, her inability to concentrate, and her general tendencies to disorganization, she very rarely sets her glasses in an unusual place. Of course the glasses are only a small part of the problem. The bigger part of the problem is that my grandmother gets herself very worked up by things like this. She gets flustered, frustrated, and she mentally beats herself up about it, and this sort of thing is very difficult for me to stop. Worse still, this sort of anxiety wears her out very fast, and she ends up exhausted and often still frustrated with herself, even after the situation has been resolved. So I knew that the best thing would be to downplay losing her glasses, find them quickly, and get her mind onto other things. Unfortunately I was still tired, bleary-eyed, and not at my best. On top of that, one of her friends (who lives in the neighborhood) had shown up 45 minutes early, further upsetting my grandma because she wasn't nearly ready and because she was even more upset about her glasses being missing. I wasn't too thrilled about her showing up so early either considering I had no idea she was there until I got downstairs with my eyes half shut, my hair tousled in a dozen directions, and my loose bed shorts and loose t-shirt not being particularly presentable attire. Still, the task at hand was to find my grandma's glasses, and I focused upon that. Unfortunately 45 minutes of searching all over the house multiple times over revealed nothing. I was to the point of looking in drawers and under furniture and in cupboards, and I was honestly at a loss. Eventually my grandma's other friend, her ride, had arrived, and they had to go. She went off frustrated but carefully led by her friends, and I went back to my futile search. Only a couple minutes after she had left she came back inside and went straight to her room, saying she thought she might know where she'd put her glasses. She was right, too, and she found them in her robe pocket. So off she went, much happier (although still frustrated with herself for not finding them earlier), and I breathed my own collective sigh of relief and frustration. I was far too wide awake by this point to have any pretence of going back to sleep, so I made my way back upstairs and got myself going for the day. Later in the day, in the late afternoon, after my grandma had been back for some time, she misplaced the newspaper that had come a few hours earlier. I searched the house for that as well, failing to find any trace of it, and I have no clue where she could have (or would have) put the newspaper that I couldn't find it. She's misplaced the newspaper before, about a month or so ago, and I eventually found it about nine days later, but only after having endured nine days of lamentation about how my grandma couldn't believe how she could misplace the newspaper and how stupid she was as a result of that, all of which I would dismiss and downplay in an effort to get her mind off of such things. For a woman who can forget the most obvious and important things she is unbelievably focused upon anything she has done that she sees as wrong. Taking care of my grandma can certainly be a handful. She's incredibly self-sufficient for her age, but it's days like today that keep me phenomenally busy trying to take care of her.
We met at Mark's house in Toledo tonight for the gaming session. Steve and I actually met up at Panda Chinese as we were grabbing dinner on our way, and by the time we got to Mark's, Steffen was there (and of course Mark was already there). Robbie never showed up, which may be a sign that he won't come to the games unless we play at the SAGES, like we have the previous few weeks. But with poor air conditioning and uncomfortable chairs, the SAGES offices were far less comfortable than Mark's basement. Things at Mark's weren't perfect. His kids (ages about 8 months, 2 years, 3 years, 12 years, and 16 years old) were an occasional distraction as were his dogs (three young Boxers) and even his wife, but still the more comfortable, relaxed atmosphere was a good change from the distractions posed at the SAGES. We spent nearly the whole first hour just eating, chatting, and figuring out how we wanted to settle in, but once we got going we made some good progress. Steve and I discussed the progress of the characters in the game at great length after the game, after Steffen had left and Mark had gone to work (he has a third shift patrol as a Toledo Police officer). Steve feels that the pace is perfect while I argue that things could certainly be going a little more rapidly. Some of the fault for the slower pace, in my mind, is due to the way Steve runs the game and tries to make everything very detailed and deliberate, but the rest of us are to blame, too, because I think a lot of the time we're much too overly-cautious. It's common for people playing Dungeons and Dragons to be overprotective of the characters , particularly when playing low-level characters who don't have a lot of powerful armor or weapons. One attack from even just a black bear or a human soldier can kill you instantly because your character can't withstand the damage, and bigger, uglier opponents like a Minotaur or an Ogre are even more dangerous. So it makes sense to be cautious, really, but still I think we take it to an extreme a lot of times. After all, it's just a game and we can make new characters if these die. That would be sort of a pain in the ass, but really, if these are supposed to be heroic adventurers, it seems uncharacteristically un-heroic to cautiously creep up to every door, listen for sounds of trouble, check carefully for traps, check if the door is locked, check this, check that, and after ten or fifteen minutes of observation finally open the door. And then do the same thing again with the very next door. It's just a bit too much. But I'm having fun. In spite of the way I make it sound, we are making progress and doing things - killing monsters, finding treasure, trying to figure out the mysteries of the wizard's tower we're currently inside and trying to figure out the bigger mysteries and intrigues in which we're embroiled in the world. It is fun, and I'm getting a lot out of it. It's been a long night, though, and I'm tired. Sleep sounds good, really, and I have no intention of waiting for it any longer.
I started the day out alright, but I've gotten quite depressed very quickly. It's sucked for most of the day (since maybe about 10 AM), and I've cut out one thing after another that I had planned to do today. I did get a few small things accomplished early on, but I ended up giving over the day to playing Rise of Nations to try to relax (and distract) my mind. It's worked to some degree since I'm not quite as depressed as I was before, but I'm still down, and that's still sucking. At least it's not as bad as it was. Posted at 1:42 AM
Yes, Virginia, there is a Sanity Clause. Posted at 10:50 PM
The right-wing religious zealots who think they can "cure" people from being gay make me sick. They are evil, sadistic bastards that should be imprisoned in complete isolation where their hatred and insanity can poison only themselves until they die. This article/interview (which I've included below) reveals exactly the sort of inhumanity I'm talking about. It's this sort of sick human beings who are torturing not only adults but kids - mostly kids, in fact. And the fear and suffering if those kids is abominable, as can be glimpsed in the blog entries of this poor, sweet boy from Tennessee. It just breaks my heart.
And consider this excerpt from the most recent blog entry of a 16-year old boy suffering in one of these programs.
Posted at 11:38 PM
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman consistently impresses me with his simple straightforwardness and thoughtful observations. Today's look at the losses experienced by the middle class is yet another column that displays his keen insight.
Posted at 3:28 AM
Ooohh! Look! Shiny stuff! Posted at 11:04 PM
If you need empty boxes - for anything - come to me. My grandma has enough of them in the basement to supply everyone who roams the internet. Posted at 2:28 AM
I went back to Toledo tonight to once again be part of Steve's Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I've been exc itred about this all week, and although I've been otherwise busy with the garage sale, I've been looking forward to this a lot. In fact a good part of yesterday as well as the earlier part of today were spent changing my game character from the old system to the new system (when we last had played this fantasy role-playing campaign in 1998, Steve was using a gaming system he had made himself called GarQuest. With the game now being run in Dungeons & Dragons version 3, a lot of changes/transitions are required in how the characters are constructed). Tomorrow is Steve's birthday, so I bought him a small cake, and I bought some fudge brownies for the rest of the guys, and we joked around and gamed for a good five hours. We even killed "the Guardian", the nasty high-level minotaur-like monster that was our current opponent to find and defeat. It was all a great time and very much the sort of fun interaction I've always loved about role-play gaming. Unfortunately the SAGES offices were hotter than hell, having been left closed up with no A/C before we got there, and even by the time we left the old, weak A/C they had was of little effect. It looks like we'll be gaming at Mark's house next week instead, solving that issue. It'll also be more comfortable all around, and we won't have to worry about getting in (none of the SAGES were initially there to let us into the building today, so Steve and I ended up standing around on the sidewalk until Mark and Stephen showed up, and then they stood around with us for a while, too. Obviously we got in, but that shit's frustrating). Anyhow, I have some more work to do to have my character completely set up neatly on the character sheets the way I'd like, but I'll have that stuff ready well before we meet again next Tuesday. I can hardly wait, honestly, and this sort of excitement is something I haven't felt in a very long time.
Say it isn't so, Steve. Apple today announced that they will switch to Intel processors in all of their computers starting next year and they will have all machines on Intel chips by 2007. They'll be having all software (in-house and third party) recompiled to work on Intel, and that means that eventually (maybe three to five years from now) the non-recompiled programs almost certainly won't run any on the newer Intel-based machines any more. I have mixed feelings about Apple bedding down with Intel, but I'm really burned by the fact that if my last laptop hadn't unexpected died on me, I had been planning to get a new Powerbook in 2007. At that point my Powerbook would have been about six years old, and I had figured that it would be outmoded to some degree by then. I was right because Apple's change to Intel chips will cause big changes in a short time. Instead of getting a new laptop then, however, I have a new laptop now, and in less than two years it will already be in some ways obsolete. That sucks. I love this new Powerbook, and it has been very wonderful for its new features and faster processor, but it hasn't given me enough difference from the performance of the old Powerbook that I see a huge benefit from having had to switch when I did. Now I feel even more like I've been screwed royally once again by fate. It never fails. Here's the details as posted by Apple:
Posted at 1:42 AM
Garage Sale: Day 3 At least it's finally over ... for now. Having talked to some of the neighbors who also had sales this weekend, I think I'll do one more sale the first week of August (and they'll hold garage sales as well). After today I wonder if it's worth it, particularly the whole Sunday sale day deal. I was up at 5 AM again and setting stuff up at 7 AM again, yet by 10:30 I'd had only one customer, and he didn't show up until after 9, the official start time. The number of people to stop by didn't get better, really. I had maybe two dozen people stop all day, and only a few of them bought a single day. If it hadn't been for these two cute kids (maybe about eight years old each) that drove up on their bikes, the day would have been a bust. Their fathers had given them $15 each and told them to go out and spend it. They found me and my neighbor and bought all sorts of stuff, nothing I would have expected them to want (small rugs, a suitcase, a blanket, tackle boxes (that made some sense), some large sheets of spongy foam, some water bottles ... lots of stuff), and they had a huge pile of stuff. They grabbed what they could and drove their bikes back home and then came back for the rest of the pile, then they shopped some more, collecting a few more items, and then one of the boys left with a handful of stuff. He came back after a bit of a delay and his father was following behind soon after in his car so that the boys could load up their booty. The father didn't smile at me but he didn't scowl either, so I have no take on what he thought of all of this. All I do know is that those two little boys made my day. They were so energetic and so excited about each thing they bought that it was fun to watch. They managed to take a lot of stuff, too, at least in terms of bulk, and even though they got a lot of items I'd marked down to move quickly, they still spent most of their money and between the two of them spent more that everyone else who'd bought stuff from me during the whole rest of the day. In the final assessment, I made $73.85 today, a pretty piss poor amount compared to all of the other sale days. But I can't complain. I got rid of a whole lot of stuff this weekend and made just shy of $600 for the weekend. Added to the total from the last sale that puts me at $935 for both sale after expenses. And there is, of course, still one more sale to go at the end of the summer. Plus I'll be selling some stuff on eBay once I have the time to focus on that. So I've made a good start. I'm tired, but I'm content. Tomorrow I'll be taking a bunch of stuff to the recycling center, donating the clothes that were left over from the sale, and running a bunch of errands for my grandmother and myself. I'll be pretty rushed and busy, but it looks to be far less hectic than the last four days. And heck, I won't have to get up at 5 AM ... or ever 7 or 8 AM. Hee hee - a full night of sleep. How cool is that? Very. Posted at 11:19 PM
Garage Sale #2: Day 2 Strange Days - or at least strange day. Today was odd. I was up at the crack of dawn, cleaned up, and then moving sale items into place at 7 AM. I had everything in place by 9 AM, the official start time, which was odd since I've never had everything out on time before, but also strange because the early-comers, who swarmed me yesterday and also two weeks ago at the beginning of the last garage sale, weren't there. Well, yes, I had two people show up before 9 AM, but only within the last half-hour before that. Anyhow, it was an odd beginning, and the oddities continued. As the day progressed I kept wondering what was going on. We'd been swarmed with people yesterday, and we had a lot of people at the last garage sale, which was on a Saturday, but today (a Saturday) there was barely a trickle of people at any point. I sold all sorts of stuff, and I made almost exactly what I made yesterday (which was good for a garage sale on any day, but less than I had been expecting/hoping to draw in), so it was a successful day for the most part. In the big picture, I'm seriously whittling down the pile of stuff to sell, and that's one of the main goals of slaving away at this (that and making lots of money to pay down my credit card debt, of course, but that's almost a given, really). Anyhow, tomorrow is the last day for this sale. I've talked with the various neighbors who participated again today, and I think at least two or three of them will join me in one more sale at the beginning of August when we can catch the 'back-to-school' crowd. Hopefully I'll sell all sorts of stuff tomorrow, but barring some shockingly unexpected series of events that leads to someone buying out everything I have to sell, I'm sure I'll still have plenty of stuff left to sell. And with two more months to poke around the house, I will surely find more to add to the sale items in an effort to minim ize the clutter and pay down my debts. Here's to hoping for good things. Posted at 9:01 PM
Garage Sale #2: Day 1 Today's sale started at Noon ... or at least it was scheduled to start at Noon, but people obviously can't read, so I was facing all sorts of early-comers in amazing numbers before I could even get out a portion of my stuff to be sold. It was frustrating, and the early birds slowed down my ability to set things up. It was not only frustrating but hot. The Noonday sun burnt me up and gave me a dose of mild sunburn, so that added to the fun. However, putting all problems aside, the day went well. It didn't rain, which was possible (and it certainly looked like it would indeed rain most of the early hours of the sale), and a lot of people came to shop. In the mere five hours of the sale (plus an hour or so from the early-comers) I made $268 and sold a whole bunch of stuff. Mind you, there's still all sorts of stuff left, but I've still got tomorrow and Sunday to find new owners for those things. Hopefully I'll find a lot of new owners. We can only hope. Posted at 10:11 PM
I repeat, Ugh! I've been working all day at gathering stuff from all over the house that can (and should) go into the garage sale (which starts tomorrow and runs through Sunday). I've had to poke around all over the place, find out what my grandma wants to keep or not (or what I want to keep or not), clean the things up (since most things are invariably covered with the dust layers of ages of disuse), and then figure out what the hell to charge for the things and put price stickers on them. And I got to do it all day long (except when I was trimming and mowing the lawn and supervising the guy that was fixing the gutter he had previously installed wrong). Do I know how to have a fun day or what? Yes, the correct answer is 'What.' I wonder if the next three days of garage saling will be as much fun as this. Ugh. I don't know if I could take that. Posted at 10:46 PM
Ugh! I've been tired all day. Yesterday was great (or at least it ended great), and it helped to lift my spirits a good bit, but getting to bed after 3 AM and being awoken by the phone at 7:30 AM (by one of the people I've contracted to work on the house) didn't give me much sleep time. I tried to get back to sleep after the phone call, but that didn't work very well, and shortly after 9 AM I just gave up and got myself together to drive my grandma to the YMCA for her aquarobics class. I did some small things during the day, hoping to have more energy at some point as the day progressed, but the energy never materialized. Hopefully with a full night's sleep tonight I'll be more energetic tomorrow because I have a lot of stuff to get ready to add to the garage sale (the second one of the summer that I'll be holding this Friday through Sunday). Tomorrow's the last day I have left to get things together, and I have a lot that I hope to pull out, clean up, price, and have ready to move out. It should make for a busy day (particularly since I want to trim and mow the lawn tomorrow as well). Fortunately I think a full night's sleep will come easily tonight. Posted at 11:58 PM
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June 30, 2005
