Books I've read lately.

I've been remiss lately in fulfilling my compulsion to write something, anything, about what I read.  I've not even been updating the book on the sidebar.  So, I'll have to mend my ways.  So here's some thoughts on books I've read lately.

I read The Devlin Diaries by Christi Phillips.  It is essentially about two mysteries of sorts, which take place 340 years apart or so.  One is set in the reign of King Charles II, and the other in present day Cambridge.  Its a story of professors, historical research, a 17th century serial killer, the modern day death of a much disliked professor and so on.  I liked it. I thought it was very well written (though I did find an editing error - where her 17th century character replied to the modern day professor), and it was a good story.

I also read The Day I Died by Steve Sjoregren, which is a true story about the author's botched surgery and it's aftermath.  The author is a hard working pastor of a large church in Cincinnati, and seems to be a nice guy.  The operation was scheduled gall bladder surgery.  I know what a person with gall bladder problems goes though, I apparently had gall stones etc and I was sicker than I've ever been in my life.  Pain, vomiting, and more vomiting, even when there was nothing to vomit.  My body found something.  So as much as surgery is not a fun thing to do, I can see the necessity of it. 

So anyway, the surgeon made a mistake right off the bat, making an incision at a wrong angle and too deeply.  The incision ended up cutting through a bowel, and cutting an artery.  The author very nearly bled to death and was technically dead, was revived, and at some point later was technically dead and revived again.

Can someone be technically dead?

He spent a long time heavily medicated, in and out of consciousness, and saw things which he interprets religiously. 

Personally, I'm very glad I didnt read this book before I had gall bladder surgery.

So the first part of the book was interesting.  The last half turned into a motivational type book - how to be a better father, husband, friend, etc.  I really do not like motivational books.  Maybe I have no desire to be motivated.

Next I read Against All Odds by Tom Clancy.  It's about what you would expect - military special forces, people being killed on every page (usually their heads explode), world-wide conspiracies which range from Pakistan/Afghanistan to Mexico & a lot of stereotypes.  It was a fast, easy read, good story and I expect it will be a major motion picture some day.  It's very typical of the type of fiction Tom Clancy writes.

A Brief Thought on the Intelligence of Dogs

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have the intelligence of a dog, even though it would mean I'd be unable to get a long stick through a door. My problem solving abilities would be severely lacking, but on the other hand I'd attack whatever I perceived of as life's problems head on, with no thoughts of ramifications or consequences. If I couldn't figure out how to get the stick through the door I'd just drop it and go on to something else without any concerns.


I once read a science fiction novel which took place close to a million years in the future, and included a few paragraphs about a professor who had a dog, which, through a little genetic tweaking, gained the ability to speak in short sentences - maybe 3 words long. Through almost a millions years of dog evolution the intelligence level remained about the same as it always was, and the dog's major concern was how to get extra food.

Anyway. To me, dogs don't seem to worry about too much.

And that is my brief thought.

Waiting for Death

March 11th.

I have a first cousin who doesnt have much longer to live.  Most likely just a few days, if that.

Late summer or early fall he had an ear and sinus infection that he could not get rid of.  He finally ended up in a hospital over it, they got it under control and released him.  Not too long ago he was sick again, went to a doctor, who sent him to a hospital.  He had double pneumonia.  They were able to get that under control, but they took a chest xray as part of this diagnosis, and found a spot on one of his lungs.

It was very close to his heart, apparently, so close that the surgeon did not want to take a biopsy.  So they did the surgery, with the idea that they'd remove the tumor, or the whole lung if needed.  Turned out they didn't do either.  During the surgery they decided it was inoperable, and I guess untreatable. I was told the tumor was attached to his heart in some way, as well as his lung.

This all happened very rapidly, at least from my point of view, but of course lung cancer doesnt happen overnight.  He smoked, which is a risk, and he worked on strip mines, mining coal, another risk.

March 18th.

I started this post about a week ago, and my cousin died the next day.   I think his cancer was diagnosed less than a month before his death.  He was very sick, but also very aware.  He knew he had a very short time to live. 

He spent most of the last three weeks at his home.    He moved into a  hospice facility in Hazard, Kentucky literally a couple days before he died.  Once they found out it was terminal they managed his symptoms, but did nothing further to treat the disease.  He died late in the evening of March 12th.

I don't know what I'd do in that situation.  It seems he handled it about as well as anyone facing certain death can.  Well let me amend that a little.  We're all facing certain death, but most of us are not facing immanent death.  He was, and he knew it.   I don't know how I'd react.  How can anyone react.  If you are literally deathly ill, you aren't going to do a whole lot.  If I were able, I think I'd just sit out on the porch and feel the air and listen to the birds.

On television people with chronic or even terminal illnesses take yoga classes and play tennis, and seem to be healthier and more active than the rest of us.  Reality is a little different.

He had a lot of family and friends, and most, including me, attended the funeral. It was held in Hindman with bluegrass/gospel music and a sermon.  It was a very long procession to the cemetery.  He was buried in the family cemetery near his home, the graveside service coinciding with a very heavy downpour, soaking most people there.  He would have laughed, everybody knew it, and they all laughed about it.  He was buried next to his (and my) grandparents who raised him, and who he thought of as parents. 

A Change in our Business

Once or twice a year eBay implements "Seller Updates" & I've noticed over the years that these changes directly or indirectly cost us money.  Frequently we (and just about every other eBay seller in existence) slowly but surely - some not so slowly - raise prices to cover the increased cost.  We've generally gone with the flow, eBay makes these changes to encourage certain behaviors in the sellers, in the belief this will increase buyer's confidence, which will in return increase the number of buyers who shop on the site.  Some sellers react with anger (just read the boards), but I have a feeling most, like me, just make adjustments.  I'm pretty sure eBay is the still the largest site of it's kind by far, and that translates into traffic & dollars for people like me.

In this latest seller update eBay announced a change that we will finally not be able to meet.  It's not something that would drive us out of business, in fact I suspect in the long run it would only make a minimal difference, and as usual we could probably raise prices just a bit to compensate.  But it spurred us to thinking about things, and to make a change which we hope in the long run will translate into an expansion of sort.

eBay, of course, rates it's sellers, and if sellers meet certain criteria, they are awarded with "Top Rated Seller" (TRS) status.  TRS status comes with a tangible financial incentive in the form of a 20% discount on their Final Value Fees, the amount eBay charges a seller when they sell an item.   It can add up.  TRS status also brings an advantage in eBay's default Best Match search results, but that is somewhat intangible since there is no way to measure if that leads to any sales or not.  And last but not least a seller with TRS status gets a badge displayed on their listings & next to their listings in search results, which is supposed to give a buyer a bit more confidence.  Again, intangible.  But the 20% discount is not intangible, that is easly measured every month.

They've added a requirement to achieve TRS status - in June, to obtain TSR status, sellers will be required to have delivery confirmation (or some other kind of tracking information) on 90% of the items they ship domestically, in addition to all the other requirements they have to meet.   We can't meet that 90% requirement the way we currently do buisness.  We've had TRS status for years and unless we do something radical, we're going to lose it because of this.

We ship almost all items domestically for free.  Our more expensive items and/or items which are rigid - most of our antique photos, for example - are shipped as a package.  Typically the photos are shipped with delivery confirmation, the postcards not necessarily.  It's economics.

In order to ship everything with delivery confirmation we'd have to raise prices on our postcards or start charging for shipping (same difference) to cover the increased cost.  This would not be a cost we could absorb, and competition is such that I don't think we could raise the prices on our postcards high enough to cover the increased cost of shipping. 

No matter, we don't want to raise our prices & we'd like to maintain our TRS so we decided on a different approach, and it's risky, as far as I'm concerned.  It is not worth doing solely to maintain TRS status.

We've had an Etsy shop for years, but had not used it in awhile.  We've decided to start moving postcards some photos & other items over to Etsy, and concentrate our antique photos on eBay.  If we ever got to the point that we were routinely selling the same amount of photos as we are postcards, we could potentially more than double our income.  So that's what we're going to try to do.  In theory, this will also enable us to keep our TRS status, but it may not.  It's a slow process, it'll be a long time before all our postcards etc are moved to the Etsy shop.   It is not worth doing this just to maintain TRS status.  But over time, we'll have a lot more antique photos in our eBay store, and a ton of postcards and other items in our Etsy shop.  Over time this should result in a notable increase the amount of $$ we pull in, and secondarily, should retain our TRS status on eBay.  At least that is the goal.

It's a risk.  Postcards are a major part of our monthly sales, usually more than half, and if they don't sell on Etsy, we will lose money. I don't know if any any eBay customers will follow us to Etsy.  We could potentially lose a lot more money than we would by simply not having TRS status.  So it is a risk, but that's what makes life interesting, at least in the corner of the little room I'm sitting in. 

It's not like we're risking the house or anything like that.  It's only money, after all.

I put a link to our Etsy shop on the left column of this blog - click on it take a look if you want.  Check back often, we'll be adding stuff pretty much daily. Feel free to buy something, anything, I'm not particular. 

Our eBay Month - February 2012

Sometimes sales are just plodding along and you think it's going to be a struggle to even be an average month, then all of of sudden the flood gates open.  This is what happened the last few days of February.

When the dust settled, we had out sold January - which was a pretty good month.   Not by too much, but it counts.  And we blew away February of 2011; we had more than 25% higher sales than a year ago, which is pretty good. 

Never can tell when the sales will (or won't) come.

The number of postcards we sold were about average, but we received more for them than we usually did.  I'm not sure why - some of our postcards cost more than others, of course, and I guess those sold well. 

Our photograph sales were strong, and when we have a good month photograph wise, we generally have a good month period. 

We continue to have repeat customers & also customers who make multiple purchases, and I take that as a good sign.

Our international sales were also strong, which is a good sign.  We were forced to increase our international shipping charges for many of our items because of USPS increases, and I was worried this might cost us some international sales.  Apparently not - at least not yet.

However - and this will be another blog post in a day or so - we've made a major decision about how we are going to do business going forward, and it is a major change for us, and a bit of a risk.  My unstated, un-detailed & undefined goal (pipe dream?) is to roughly double the amount of gross income we generate in a average month.  The problem is doing that without doubling the workload, because I really don't want to double the amount of time I spend doing this.  However, this was not the reason for our change, I'm just sort of hoping it's a result.  More on all this in a day or so.

So put February 2012 in the "it was a good month" category, and move on.

If its Monday, it must be about the separation of powers.

I have nothing to write about, so be warned.  This is one of those posts - I have no idea where it will go.

I walk a lot with the dog, and lately I've noticed the dog pays a lot more attention to vehicles when they approach, especially from behind.  I'm not sure why that has started, and I'm not sure how to stop it. 

Yesterday it snowed.  Today the snow is gone.  Just the way it ought to be. 

I find as I get older, more and more people get seriously ill, and more and more people die.   I don't like it.

I dont think Pickles the Dog understands the thermal properties of sun shining through a window.  But she knows it's warm - she's as bad as a cat for seeking out the sun.

I can't remember the dream I had last night, but I know I had it.

I am currently reading "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy.  Many, many pages devoted to a description of a person dying a painful death.   He sacrificed his life for a drawing room.

A drawing room, of course, is not a place where one would expect to find crayons, at least not in a solidly middle class household in 19th century Russia.

Today is president's day, so now I shall expound on government:

The systems of checks and balances set up by the founders to replace the Articles of Confederation after the Revolution has ensured that the United States is a relatively conservative place, politically.  I don't know if that was their intention or not, but I wouldn't put it past them.  These were very intelligent & very wealthy people, for the most part, and I give them credit for knowing what they were doing.

I dont pretend to understand British politics, but it seems that in their Parliamentary style of government, whatever the House of Commons, lead by the Prime Minister, says, goes.  There does not seem to be a separation of executive and legislative powers.

In the USA, that's not the case.  The legislature, in the person of  the House of Representatives & the Senate, have to agree on a bill - which in and of itself tends to moderate things.  The President has executive powers and can veto a bill, and it's not easy to override.  But even if a bill comes out of Congress and the President signs it, it can be challenged in the courts and the Supreme Court can potentially overturn it, and it seems they have pretty much the last say.  The only way to override the Supreme Court is to amend the constitution, a process that takes quite a bit of effort and time, and involves not only the US Congress, but the State legislatures.  Its not often that amendments are attempted, and almost all of them fail.  Which I guess is as it should be.

With our system government, it seems like a miracle that we have anything like Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, or anything in place to protect workers, but we do.  Its not surprising at all that we don't have a national health insurance, that we are only one of two or three nations on earth that don't use the metric system, and that there is no large scale nationwide mass transit network. 

I'd love to be able to take the train from Valdese to Asheville, spend a few hours & come back, but I can't.  Railroad passenger service between small towns and small cities just doesn't exist, and that is not an accident or an oversight. 

Economically, though, we're a giant, even now, even in these times.  The country generates enormous wealth. 

Militarily, we're also a giant, an extremely powerful nation able exert its power pretty much anywhere on the planet it takes a notion to.

Part of this is due to our size and location, but a lot is due to the fact that the USA is fairly conservative when compared to most other industrialized "western" nations. And that is because we have a system of government that makes change difficult. 

The founding fathers set up this system of checks and balances in the Constitution in order to protect against "tyrants".   When they thought of a tyrant, they were thinking specifically of King George III, and what they considered the unfair control of markets & taxation.  And when the USA finally became independent, it ultimately set up a system of government which which separated the various functions of government and was quite radical in the 18th century.  I think it's still quite radical today.  But whether it was intentional (I tend to think it was), or an unintended consequence, an abrupt radical change on a nationwide level is generally not in the cards.  The checks & balances, the separation of legislative, executive & judicial powers installed to keep too much power from residing in one person, insures that it doesn't happen.

I suppose.  I'm just thinking.

The highlight of my day, yesterday

First, happy Valentines Day to everybody who reads this.

Yesterday the highlight of my day was a little grocery shopping at Food Lion in Valdese.  I've written about Food Lion before, and the alternate universe qualities of the experience, but just because I've written about something before has never stopped me from writing about it again. 

Food Lion is a mid-sized supermarket (meaning it's not small by any means, but I've seen larger), in a small town.  It is the ONLY supermarket in town, for a couple of years now.  And though it's not that far to Morganton or Cajah's Mountain or even Hickory, most of the time Food Lion is where people in town end up going for their groceries.

If the people of Valdese were water, Food Lion would be the water purification plant.

If the people of Valdese the dark matter of space, then Food Lion would be a quantum anomaly where the universe contracts and expands simultaneously. 

And so on. 

Eventually everybody in town is going to go in there, buy something and leave. Because of that Food Lion of Valdese is a very big fish in a small pond.  It exerts enormous influence.

The influence starts when you enter the store.  Although there are no signs, no requirements and no physical barriers, the physical layout strongly encourages you to go to the produce section immediately after entering.  You'd have to make a conscious effort to go any other way.  Then once in the produce section, the physical layout strongly encourages you to go down the aisle at the end of the store.  No physical barrier keeps you from going any other way, but you would have to make an effort.  So you head down that aisle, and before you know it you are in the far corner of the store - right where they want you.  The more you walk around, the more you buy.

Everybody in Valdese is subject to this subtle behavior control. Food Lion - the great leveler.

And it is a great leveler.  It is possible for 2 people to go into Food Lion, fill up two carts, and not have bought a single thing in common.  But over time, in a large enough population, people are going to buy the same things, and Food Lion will cater to the items that people buy.    The good people of Valdese have a very similar Food Lion diet.

So any rate, I did a little light shopping at Food Lion yesterday.  I got some milk and some cereal (nowhere near each other, btw), some chicken (parts is parts), ground turkey, a case of water, something for Pickles the Dog to gnaw on and some other stuff.  Though one item I was going to get I didn't, because there were some people who apparently decided to camp out at the section right where the item I wanted was.  They were elderly, and they weren't going to budge for awhile.  So I did a quick cost/benefit analysis and decided it wasn't worth it and went paid for everything and left.  I can only handle so much.