Getting other stuff done

March 3, 2010
Peoria, AZ

This week has turned out to be about "other stuff" - can't spend all my time painting!

Monday was the day scheduled for Geri's next follow-up MRI to verify that last year's kidney procedure "took". We were up early and over to Boswell Hospital's Imaging Center right on schedule. By 10:00, she was done and getting the Cracker Barrel breakfast "she deserved". A few errands later and most of the day was shot.

Tuesday turned out to be a computer project day, not that it started out that way. I've been gearing up for another batch of eBay selling for a while. OK, "gearing up" in this case means that I've been making a messy pile of stuff on the bed in the spare room, much to Geri's dismay. On Monday, our friend and neighbor, Mary Ann, forwarded me an email from eBay outlining their "one day sale" on listing fees for Tuesday. Being a cheap bugger and not liking fees in the first place (even though my rational side knows that without fees there would be no eBay on which to sell stuff), I knew I had to get off my duff on this. I organized everything in this batch and took the necessary photos and weights, then sat down to create the listings.

I knew that I didn't have eBay's "Turbo Lister" software loaded on my current laptop, so I fired up the older one that I now use for navigation and monitoring in the coach, where it had to be since I'd sold stuff last year. Uhhh, so where is it? Not here. Oh, I must have used the tower/desktop PC for that. Uh-oh, not there either. Hmmm, when the motherboard failed on the tower PC last year, I had to do a clean install and all the eBay stuff is gone.

Turbo Lister is a locally-installed package that lets you create all your eBay listings offline and upload them in a batch. While this is convenient for managing the auction durations, the real value is that you can create a template with all the routine shipping options, return policy wording, and item description boilerplate text, which makes creating listings much faster. Except, that is, if you have to set it all up from scratch. In any event, I got it all done and managed to upload about 30 listings before going to bed, saving myself a whole $8 in listing fees in the process. Woo-Hoo!

Today was another "early day". Geri had made appointments for us at the doctor's office. We have a new doctor, since our old one (literally - he graduated from medical school before I was born) finally retired. We'll both need prescription refills before we leave for the summer and "new guy" can't write prescriptions without seeing us in person, so it was unavoidable. At least she was able to get us early appointments (8:30 and 8:45 - how they can only allocate 15 minutes is beyond me) and we were on our way by 9:45. Geri had made appointments for the pups to go for grooming at 11:00, so we had plenty of time. I took the opportunity of the dogs being gone to spray a weed treatment, which was a bit overdue. All the rain we've had here (year-to-date 2010 is more than all of 2009) has yielded a bumper crop of weeds.