Category Archives: Random

Sell and Wait and Sell

It seems, the last couple nights, as if I’m always closing but not actually getting close.

Last night I had bites on a couple pens I’ve been trying to sell and I stayed up late answering questions. In one case, the deal is done pending payment, and I’ve even managed to upsell a couple things (pending payment).

With the other, things seemed to finish quickly after I lowered the price slightly, but once we got to the payment part, communications ceased and payment has not been made. (Note: nothing ships until I’ve been payed.)

Now I’m probably going to have to stay up late and see if I have more questions to answer or a box to pack.

If I don’t hear soon, I’ll have to declare it’s still available and see what happens. Oddly, I know at least one person who will not be happy if the pen becomes available because they are interested in it and have been hoping it sells to someone else.

Not Many Excuses to Go

A number of factors have combined to keep me locked up in the apartment: heat, humidity, and an age related general lack of interest in going outside unless I have a particularly good reason to do so.

The latter has caused me to cancel planned outings even during nice weather. The typical process involves a couple days of making plans and more plans but  then the day of the plan arrives and my brain starts rationalizing staying in by second guessing the necessity of following the plan. My brain is suddenly concerned about spending and spent energy and all the bad and annoying things that can happen during the outing.

If it is hot and humid, or there’s a strong chance of rain, the process happens much faster.

In the end, I usually end up staying home.

This makes life kind of relaxing as well a whole lot cheaper. I just doesn’t give me much to write about.

 

Revisionist Curses

Progress is slow.

Thus far I’ve kept up my daily goal of typing my old manuscript for at least one hour every day. However, after an hour, I often find I’ve only added a page or two to the typescript. The problem is that not only do I have to translate my handwriting, I’m also revising on the fly.

In a couple cases I’ve revised a section only to find a second, better version of it already in the manuscript. This happens because as the original brain dump happens I just let words flow and that means I’ll write something and then write it again. Usually when I do the initial read through I find such sections and cross out the bad ones or cut and paste the better ones.

However, today I hit two sections that I’d apparently skipped over during the initial read through. After uttering some bad words and generic curses, I had to un-revise and then re-revise the sections and although I’m reasonably pleased with them, I still have a lot of things to type.

I’ve thought about hiring someone to transcribe everything for me, the trouble is that after a few hours with my handwriting they’d be cursing me as they slowly drifted into madness.

I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Short Cut With a Hair Cut

The woman who cut my hair today laughed at my hair before she cut it. I deserved it, though. Sort of.

As I’ve written before, one of the odd revolutions over the past several years in Japan has been a change toward 10 minute, 10 dollar hair cuts. I’ve had them, as an afterthought, in train stations, and once when I was bored.

However, because I have a regular place I go, I often get the same barbers. However, I usually don’t get them consecutively.l

Today, though, I got the barber I’d got the last time I got haircut two months ago. She ran her fingers through my hair and laughed at how long it was. (Note: it wasn’t that long in a Beatles mop-top sense, but it was the longest she’d seen.)

I gave her some basic instructions and, after she finished laughing, she went to work. (Note Deux: I’m not joking, because I’m a regular, she knew my hair enough to laugh at it.) Because I’d timed it well, though, I got more than ten minutes.

In the end, it was slightly longer than I wanted but it looks pretty good. Next time I hope she won’t have a chance to laugh.

 

 

Once More, the Breach

Today, I worked on a manuscript I’ve been avoiding for a while. I like to put a manuscript aside for a while before I attempt to edit it, but even for me the time I’ve waited on this one has been ridiculous.  I’ve been avoiding it for two reasons: 1) The subject matter borders on personal and I want to handle it correctly; and 2) I’m lazy.

Actually, the personal stuff isn’t that bad because it’s been morphed and modified enough that the parts based on actual events are now fiction. It’s the lazy part that’s the problem.

Because I hand wrote the original (it is literally a manuscript) I now have hundreds of pages to type into the computer and that means I have to translate my own handwriting. As I’ve written before, this is a horrifying thing.

However, as I did the transcribing today, I found myself getting back into the spirit of the book. I remembered what my goal was and I had ideas for organizing the mess.

I also had to do some research on Scotland to remind me what in the story was true and what I was making up. At one point, I was confusing myself.

One of my summer goals is to spend at least one hour a day transcribing the manuscript so that I can eventually print it and do a proper edit.

I suspect the boost I got from today’s restart will keep my energy and focus on the manuscript for a while. But eventually my own handwriting will annoy me and I’ll put it away for a while longer.

New Place New Rules

I posted the sale pens and sold three of them fairly quickly. Since then things have been silent at the usual place.

Posting the pens violates all kinds of collector/hoarder sensibilities. I can think of dozens of excuses why I shouldn’t post just yet. Two of my oldest pens sold first and think, symbolically, that’s a useful thing. Normally, like George Carlin, I prefer to leave symbols to the symbol-minded, but this time, because the pens are two of my most sentimental, it’s only right they are the first to go.

To break the silence, I’ve looked into other places to post the pens but those places have different rules. You can sell things but not very often. You can only post fountain pen related items. You can’t be a commercial venture. You can’t be icky. (Well, something like that.)

Because I’ve got a couple non-fountain pens in the sale and because I also have a lot of ink to move, I wrote the manager of a fountain pen related Facebook group to ask a few questions. I’m waiting for a response (mostly about ink which is kind of/sort of a commercial venture) but even if I haven’t heard back I’ll post the pens on a Facebook group tomorrow and hope for the best. (I will also offer to send a link about the ink.)

Luckily I have lots of time next week to pack and ship. Hopefully I’ll have more stuff to ship. If I manage to follow the rules, I should be okay. Probably.

 

Of Phones and Inventory

I spent part of the day either on the phone or waiting for a phone call.

The rest of the day I spent cleaning and counting. (And denying. More on that in a minute.)

The phone calls were a back and forth with our cellular service provider.  What I was asking them to do turned out to involve lots of research and work on their part and I had to spend a lot of time on hold or hanging out at my desk waiting for them to call back. Luckily, our provider has excellent customer service and although they couldn’t do exactly what I was asking them to do, they told me how to do it. (And I will tomorrow.)

After that, I made one final pass through the pen hoard to decide what needs to go. That led to lots of second guessing and third guessing. That led to lots of pictures, some extra cleaning, and some extra research. It also led to me tracking down missing parts. (It also led to me including three more pens in the sale.)

That led to me deciding on prices which led to more research and a lot of doubt (so that I can avoid registering disappointment) and denial (so that I can avoid actually attempting to sell anything).

I’ll post the for sale list soon. There’s just one more thing I need to do.

Glorious Justified I Told You So

Because I have a lot of stuff I want to do but nothing I need to do I’ve been watching old episodes of American Pickers. This is a dangerous show. If you are a hoarder don’t watch it. If you love a hoarder, don’t let them watch it.

I remember seeing the show the last time I was back in the USA but only recently decided to look it up. When I saw it the first time, I didn’t realize how dangerous it was. The basic premise of the show (two guys digging through hoards for rusty, dirty hidden treasure) proves to hoarders that, yes, no really, that thing will be worth something some day.

Granted, the two pickers will walk into a farm containing 14 trailers full of stuff and emerge with only a few things, but the sale of those few things is enough to justify, to the hoarders at least, that their hoarding was. It also provides enough cash for them to acquire new pieces for the hoard.

I thought it might help inspire me to sell stuff (and it has) but it also puts that little seed in the back of the head that maybe that leg-shaped lamp is worth owning. That’ll be worth something some day.

Registering Up the Cash and Disappointment

As I sort through the pens and knives I want to get rid of, my head continues to dwell on a lesson I learned, for better and for worse,  back in Hayden, Colorado in the early 80s.

For reasons I don’t remember, there was some sort of sale going on in front of the old Quonset hut gymnasium at Hayden High School. It may have involved raising money for a band trip to California and I may have had some things for sale but that’s been long cast down the memory hole. (I have a vague sense that we were raising spending money but all I remember is that a sale of some sort was happening.)

What I do remember is that one key person associated with band had decided to sell a vintage cash register. It was pristine and in working condition and was quickly snatched up for a few hundred dollars by the curator of the local museum who had driven buy, seen the cash register, and then had done a high speed turn whilst pulling out her wallet. (Something like that.)

The key person associated with the band acted fairly smug with a few hundred dollars in his pocket until another band associated person arrived with a similar cash register. That was was not in working condition but they’d bothered to have a professional look at it and the professionals appraisal was well over a thousand dollars. (This was 1981ish when $1,000 was worth over $2,725 in today’s dollars.)

This caused great depression amongst both of the cash register people. The first was upset because he’d sold something valuable for a lot less than it was worth and the latter were upset because the former had guaranteed that their expensive item would never sell.

All this has me questioning what to charge for the items I want to sell. Which, of course, makes me overthink selling them. Cash may be king, but my brain thinks that a little more cash is even kinglier and that not selling things is quite safe and kingly indeed.

Something like that.

Cleaning and Not Processing

I’m gearing up for a large sale, but first there is a lot of cleaning, picture taking, and second guessing to do.

I’m going to use the early part of the summer to purge a bunch of stuff and that starts with pens that no longer set my soul on fire. I cleaned two of them today and took several pictures of them but didn’t process the pictures so that I could use them. Also, the water wasted during the cleaning probably adds up to more than the pens are worth.

These pens join a large bundle of pens that have to go once I get past the “But, oh so PRETTY” phase.

This phase, I suspect, is what turns collectors into hoarders. Your brain tells you that this shiny object must go. You not only haven’t used it in months, you haven’t missed it. Sometimes you even forget you owned it. However, once it’s in your hands your only reactions are “Shiny!” and “It is precious…” as if Smeagol had spent the entirety of The Lord of the Rings trilogy collecting all the rings of power and only wanted the One Ring back in order to complete his collection. (It completes us, it does. Yessss, it doessss. We loves our sets completes, yes we doessss. Dirty Hobbitsess, breaking up our collection.)

Something like that.

(Meaningless Side Note: My ending for the Lord of the Rings would have involved Sauron recovering the One Ring and then Gollum killing him to get it back, thus making the entire trilogy a meaningless waste of time. Yeah, that’s the mood I’m in right now.)

The next phase is the fear phase where you imagine that nobody will want to buy them. Of course, that may be a secret hope that no one wants them and I get to keep them.

I have a few ideas for overcoming this in mind, but I’ll probably second guess those ideas.