Getting A Life

eBay: are you kidding me?

So I found this really awesome silk blouse at Goodwill not long ago. I mean, it’s wonderful. I think it’s made of Dupuoni silk. It’s not my size, but I thought I might be able to sell it on eBay at a profit, because who doesn’t like Dupuoni silk?

I think eBay’s new search algorithm is working against me, though. I have a whole bunch of stuff listed and only one bid–on the plus-sized jeans I have up for auction because 24Ws are too big for me anymore. (Not that I’m complaining about that.) One bid. One cent. And there are seven hours left on the listing, so even though there are four watchers on the auction, I don’t see it going anywhere.

I suspect eBay’s new search algorithm is a large part of what’s going wrong. I have only gotten one negative feedback (and to me, it’s not “only”–I’m aggravated with myself that I got it at all, and it was over a stupid misunderstanding), and that was over a year ago. If you look at my feedback it is all praise about my fast shipping and about items being as described. I have never gotten a neutral rating. Never. But because I haven’t sold enough in the past however long eBay has been doing their “detailed seller ratings,” I don’t have enough of those to move up in the algorithm.

So the gist of it is I need to sell more to get more detailed seller ratings, but I can’t get more detailed seller ratings unless I sell more, but I can’t sell more if people don’t find me in search results. WTF?

Avon did something similar when I sold for them. If you plug your zip code into their website you get all the Representatives who live in your geographical area, probably within X number of miles of and including your zip code area. Formerly you could only search by zip code. This worked out very well for me as I was the only Rep in my zip code when I began, so if a new customer found me on the website, I was the one they called. When they changed the algorithm, I became a name in a list, and as I was still a new Representative and therefore had no reputation to speak of, this worked against me. I had signed up with Avon in the first place because in theory, someone can start a business with very little money and take orders right away because of Avon’s practice of extending credit to its Representatives. I certainly didn’t have a lot of advertising money. So the search change hurt me more than helped.

I know that there are no shortcuts to wealth but I wasn’t really even looking for that. I just wanted to make income for myself and my daughter and to be able to take care of us if something happened to her dad. Granted, she qualifies as a survivor for Social Security benefits but let’s face it, everybody from the personal finance blogosphere on up to the President wants to kill Social Security, so we can’t count on that. (It would almost exactly replace what he pays us now, except we would have to go on food stamps until I could increase my income if I didn’t have any already at that point.) And I don’t need to have to crawl and crawl and crawl until I can get my income up. I want a return on my efforts sooner rather than later, because time is working against me.

Getting a job is a nice idea in theory, but a job by itself wouldn’t fit the bill either. I need to make a living wage, not something that has to be supplemented by child support or Social Security or whatever. So having stumbling blocks thrown into my path that didn’t exist previously and that don’t have to exist now, that’s not very encouraging.

I mean, I can deal with obstacles. God knows I’d be dead now if I couldn’t. I just don’t get the stupid, pointless stuff designed to force people with already limited resources to have to pay more through the nose just to make a ripple. I’ve done pretty well on eBay in the past–when I was held at equal footing with every other seller. I could be doing pretty well right now. I do a good job as a seller. I would have more negatives and lots of neutrals if I didn’t! If work really leads to reward, what is going on here?

So… I’m discouraged, and I think it’s time to start listing things on Freecycle because let’s face it, this is going absolutely nowhere. There is still the possibility I could sell jewelry on Etsy and maybe do a good job there, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

eBay, however, is a wash. And I’m still having problems with PayPal as well, because my debit card with them no longer works and I’m getting the runaround, so I’m about ready to dump both and call it good. Sigh.

Messages from the universe

I have a really bad habit of hanging on to things long after I should have let them go. Not by anyone else’s standards, but from my own point of view, since I would know better than anyone else when it is time for me personally to let go of something. Anyway, I did a dumb thing the other night: I went looking somewhere I had not looked in over a year to see if the dust really had settled. I should have stayed away.

On the other hand, I got another pretty clear message from the universe, or God, or who/whatever, that I was right about that person to begin with and that I should probably stop worrying about it and feeling guilty about my part in things. My philosophy is that a lot of so-called sins are easy to fall into through lack of boundary-setting, and so one’s participation in them is sometimes passive. For instance, an opportunity to commit adultery might more or less fall into one’s lap. But thieving is always an active sin, as in the thief must make an active choice to steal and then seek out the coveted item(s). As such I hold thieving to be a more serious sin than most others a person could commit. (I’m not letting passive sinners off the hook, just paying them a little slack because people don’t always actively seek out wrongdoing, and setting boundaries and defending them is not the easiest thing for some people to do.)

As you might have guessed, I found out that a person with whom I share a long history of drama and heartache is a thief on top of everything else–by her own admission, and in a tone which said that she didn’t consider stealing from me to be wrong. And I had a lot of doubts about my part in things with her, and I still think I was a jerk and behaved immaturely in some instances. But considering that her household was always a lot messier than mine and I never once got the impulse to steal anything from her, I think it is telling that she bragged about taking something out of my apartment and that she used the fact that my apartment was a mess to excuse her behavior. And it wasn’t something minor, like a bookmark or a nickel. It was an inkjet printer.

So I’m just not going to worry about it anymore. I had suspected for quite a long time that when she put on a public show of caring about me and wishing me the best that it was just an act, and that her behavior indicating that she didn’t care how she behaved or how that affected others was closer to the mark in terms of her true character. Now I know that is true, so as far as I’m concerned, all bets are off. I feel sorry to a certain extent for the people who are in her daily life now, but at least one of them has known her since 2002 and ought to be savvy about her by now, so too bad for him. The rest of them will have to find out how she is sooner or later and it probably won’t be a fun experience. But that is not my problem anymore. Frankly, it never really was.

Unfortunately, though, I still have to associate at least a little bit longer with two people who were close to her, and one or both of them knew she stole my printer and neither of them told me. They then had access to read of her boasting about the theft, and still said nothing. She didn’t have keys here, so one of them would have had to let her into my apartment in the first place, and this after she had not set foot in the place for almost a year and had written me off as not worth her time (so she had no reason to be there to begin with). So I’m looking askance at my association with both people and wondering when the other shoe is going to drop (or another one–we’ve been suffering from footwear avalanches around here for quite a while now), and also wondering exactly why I should trust them to tell me what the weather is outside, much less in matters like helping me care for my daughter, which both have expressed interest in doing.

Haven’t done what you’d call getting a sign from the Universe about that, and I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic who reads signs in everything she sees and hears–it just seems like I get a clear signal every now and again as though something way bigger than me is clocking me upside the head and yelling, “Hey STUPID! Yoo-hoo! Lookie here!” In this case I haven’t got a whole lot of good alternatives, at least not as far as I can tell.

However, I have gotten more signs about the feasibility of staying in this neighborhood another year.

The first was what for all the world sounded like a semiautomatic, or more than one, going off in the alley behind my building early yesterday morning. I had already stayed up late and gone to bed after 3am; when the noise went off I had not yet gone to sleep, although I had begun to drift. Thea jerked and snuggled close to me, my heart started racing like mad, and after that I couldn’t sleep at all. To top it off, she had gone to bed early and after the noise happened she gradually woke up and stayed that way. So I was well and truly screwed.

We get a lot of talk around these-here parts about how the neighborhood’s going to be revitalized, but the truth is that what we really need are good cops and an effective anti-gang program here, and we have neither. It’s as if they take all the bad cops with attitude problems out of Upper Arlington and dump them here, and we don’t have enough police, either. (Maybe they send the absolute worst ones to Cleveland and Detroit?) We’ve already had one gun go off next to my building, about two and a half years ago. I know for a fact that one was, because I saw the shell on the sidewalk the next day. We’ve been lucky here so far in a neighborhood where I hear the gangs shoot back at the cops, but our luck is going to run out eventually, so it would be really stupid from a safety standpoint if I renewed my lease for another year.

On top of that I have had almost-constant problems with plumbing issues in this apartment since I moved in, and apparently the landlord’s idea of “maintenance” is to grab random scruffy-looking guys off the street, hand them tools and pay them to come into my apartment, look at the problem, tinker with it a little bit, and leave, and the problem is always the same or worse after they leave than it was when they came in. Except for when they installed a new central heating system, but for all I know they screwed that up too and it just isn’t obvious yet. Although they smoked in my kitchen that time without asking me, so they’re still jerks.

Right now it’s water leakage under the bathroom sink, apparently involving one of the intake pipes (or whatever you call it–one of the pipes bringing in water, not the drainpipe). Maintenance guy showed up yesterday to look at it, said he had no idea what was going on, tightened a few things, told me to call him when the leak happened again (it’s intermittent) and left. After he left, it happened again.

But what is that? A real plumber would come in, look at the problem, go “Hm, I can’t tell where it’s coming from,” and then do something to find out. But I don’t think I have ever had a real plumber come in here in the over three years I’ve lived here. It’s always some yo-yo with a toolbox who would fit in better out on the street corner with a sandwich board.

At this point I’m inclined to just not bother anymore. It’s not my building. Every time I call them about a problem there has to be stupidity and incompetence. And I don’t even like those guys, and I sure don’t want to have to keep calling them back about the same issues over and over again. And if the landlords don’t want to take care of their building, it’s no skin off of my nose. Not my problem. They’re probably just waiting for the neighborhood to turn around so they can cash out, anyway–even if they ruin the building with their negligence, they’d still get a pretty penny for the lot.

So it’s as if both the building and the neighborhood are telling me to get the hell out while the getting’s good. And I hate to do it, because this is the first home of my own I’ve had since I left Memphis in 2000, and this is where I brought my daughter home from the hospital. So far she has grown up playing in this living room. I know a few of the people around here, I recognize people at the grocery store and the laundromat, I mourned the passing of a neighbor who died in a bad way… we sort of belong here.

Only… not. And between the demonstrated lack of support from people who ought to be supportive of us, and the demonstrated lack of suitability of this neighborhood, could be we’ll be making a long trip come July. My mom still needs my help, I’m pretty sure, and my daughter needs to be around my family. At least, some of them.

Friday Roundup

OMG, I almost forgot this and the day’s almost over.

• Carole Fogarty at the Healthy Living Lounge explains why mess is not clutter.
• Antishay Ventenne tells us how to embrace hobbies without breaking the bank.
• Johnathan Fields at Awake @ The Wheel thinks it is possible to teach compassion. Gee, I hope so. I’ve known a few people who could use it.
• Big Bright Bulb shares Impression or Illusion? 4 Ways to NOT Bullshit Customers. Aaand now I’m wondering what the heck BBB reads on the intarwebs in her spare time.
• Cleochatra at The Lighter Side of Low-Carb shares her recipe for almost carb-free crisp taco bowls. (Now, of course once you put things in the taco bowl, there will be carbs. But good ones. Good carbs=veggies. Take that, South Beach.)

Restless

My camera is acting really weird. I have a serious beef with Kodak digicams anyway; they used to make good cameras, but they seem to have lost their touch. Both my digital Kodaks have been gifts and the first one broke in a very stupid way which required me to tape the battery door shut, while the second one’s automatic lens cover went on the fritz after my daughter touched the lens and I cleaned it. (Hint: Never apply lens cleaner straight to the lens of a digicam with an automatic lens cover. @#$%ing modern electronics…) Things went downhill from there. First the motor in the zoom lens started acting up, and now the beast is draining batteries well before their time–and it isn’t the preview screen either, I’ve always used that in exactly the same way and I’ve been using my camera lately less than usual.

I wasn’t happy with the way the camera rendered some colors anyhow even though I could get around some of the problems by adjusting the white balance, but these latest issues are going to sink it for me because it’s already been refurbished once and if they didn’t get it quite right that time, they won’t this time either.

The camera is a creativity outlet, poor as my creativity is, and a possible source of income. At minimum I don’t want to have to miss anything cute my daughter does because the stupid camera has died, and I have enough old dead rolls of film around this apartment that I need to see if I can salvage in some way. Plus digital cameras imprint the date taken in the photo file so that I can go back later and make sure everything’s organized where it’s supposed to go.

So I am doing something I should not be doing, and acquiring a new camera if possible. This is better than expecting my little girl’s dad to get it for me, which will make me feel like I owe him, which is somehow worse than owing a faceless entity. Plus it’s a possible credit-score boost later.

Meanwhile I am contemplating just not bothering with this town anymore and going down to live with my mother if that is still a viable option, once the lease is up in July. I have all kinds of reasons to do that, all kinds of reasons not to do that, and so I feel sort of paralyzed. There have been times I’ve made the leap and taken the chance and all that rot, only to find my reach had exceeded my grasp and if I trot out one more cliché I think you all are going to reach through your intarwebs connections and strangle me. Sorry. Point is I’m afraid of falling on my face again. Oops.

If nothing else we would have more people around us, we would have real nights again, my little girl could play outside relatively safely, and I wouldn’t hear random weird people knocking on the downstairs apartment door at 3am, like I just did. And I wouldn’t have to overextend myself financially to make it happen (well, except the move, but I have a free place to stay at the end of it–in a house I may be inheriting, no less), so that’s a plus too.

I just wish it were easier to decide what to do. We’ll see.

Wow, the worth of my blog has gone up.

According to some little Technorati widget, my blog was worth $2258.06 or something like that. Now… *points to sidebar* …It has gone up a thousand bucks. Must be those two weird links I got that for some reason weren’t anti-spammed off.

Hey, I’m not complaining.

The story of my son, RDCV*

Someone dropped by on my About page to remark upon my statement that I have lost a child to adoption. Some of the things she said got me thinking that perhaps telling the story might interest some of my other readers as well. I guess this is going to come across as dry or something, but it’s been a long time and it’s late right now and I’m kind of tired. (I am about ready to swear off coffee because once again, having a second cup made me sick.)

I married in March 1995 to a guy I’d known for about a month and a half. Sean was born a year later. So it was not a shotgun wedding, but we still started our family pretty quickly. At the time it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, as he and I both worked full-time (my maternity leave lasted six weeks, mostly because of understaffing at work) and we were pretty much on top of our bills. We had a great little guy and we were crazy about each other.

Then we moved.

I am not the most internally motivated person. Even when I manage motivation it takes me a while to build up steam and get going. This has always been true; it’s rare that I’ll jump right up and do something. (The one exception being getting involved with someone new, but I consider that a problem, not an asset. Hopefully it’s a problem I’ve outgrown. We’ll see.) On top of that, North Carolina was a completely different job market and I could not seem to find any 8am to 5pm file clerk jobs like I had had in Georgia. This made finding daycare very difficult. I thought I had found a provider at one point but apparently she had misunderstood my son’s age somehow and she called me at work one day a couple of weeks into my new job to tell me that she couldn’t continue watching him. She was a military daycare provider and they were very strict about adhering to numbers and age mixes and that kind of thing.

I wound up bouncing around to one or two more jobs and getting frustrated and giving up, which was a horrible thing to do as we had bought a house when we moved, and we also had a credit card to pay off. Long story short, between that and other stresses to the marriage, we were on the brink of divorce by the time my husband got in trouble right after the New Year in 1999. He had broken into a building on Fort Bragg that New Year’s Eve and stolen a bunch of computer equipment. Yours truly had to turn him in. Much mayhem ensued.

At the end of it I was staying in a weekly-rate motel north of Memphis and wrote to his mom asking her to come get Sean and keep him for me til I could get on my feet. She’d already offered, and I finally caved in when I realized that if I had had trouble coordinating daycare and weird work hours with a husband around, it was going to be that much harder with nothing but weed-smoking relatives nearby who had their own problems and didn’t really want to help me. My mother-in-law came to get Sean on my ex’s birthday. I’m sure it was complete coincidence.

Right after she got him back home I got a nasty letter from her stating that he was six months to a year behind in his verbal skills and she was sure I’d done something to him and she and her husband (not Sean’s biological grandfather) were going to sue for custody (I had given them an in loco parentis) and a few other choice things about my character and fitness as a wife and so on.

I was gobsmacked. I guess I had felt there was something weird about my son, but as his father and I were not paragons of normalcy ourselves and as no one, not even his daycare providers, had ever mentioned to me that there might be a problem, I hadn’t thought much about it. He was my first child and I didn’t know much about little kids. I knew, also, that I had been slow in learning to talk.

Unfortunately, I also knew that I barely had enough money to keep myself in an apartment and my car insured. I certainly didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer, and I wasn’t sure about legal aid. I was, however, pretty sure that even if I could manage to get their help, the judge would take one look at the state Sean was in and immediately blame me and I would not have a chance in hell. And I’m pretty sure my MIL knew that too. So they got him with no legal battle from me.

Next up, a year or so down the road, was the prospect of divorce. I still didn’t have the money for a lawyer, and now they were telling me that in the state of Florida (where they lived by then), if neither of the birth parents were custodial they would both owe child support. My ex had just gotten out of prison and was a convicted felon; his job prospects were not what you’d call the brightest. My car had died by then and I was getting by on the charity of friends to get back and forth to work. Neither of us was in a position to have chunks of our pay sent to his parents.

So… They suggested being allowed to adopt him. Again, having no lawyer to fight it, I caved in.

The adoption was finalized Halloween of 2000. Sean sat singing to himself at the table while the grandparents and the judge talked it over and he looked at Sean and then at them and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?” She told me about it afterward and I wanted to slap the officious bastard. Maybe it was easier than yelling at her.

In 2002 the MIL left a message on my then-homepage’s guestbook offering an apology “for all the things I have said to you about this child.” It turned out they had a family friend who worked in speech therapy, and he happened to play with Sean one day. He took them aside afterward and said, “Have you had him evaluated for this?” It turned out Sean has a disorder called a central auditory processing deficit, in which his hearing worked just fine but his brain had trouble processing about fifty percent of the new words he heard. This explained why he was so slow in learning to talk; he couldn’t parse what he was hearing!

I found out later that very young children develop what is called receptive language before they ever really learn to speak; basically, your infant understands your words before she can repeat them. Sean had missed this important milestone to some extent, so he couldn’t learn to express what he didn’t know.

In retrospect I do remember that interacting with him was… odd. I could tell he was a smart little boy, and I did sometimes seem to get through to him, but mostly he seemed impenetrable. About the only thing we did together verbally was count things, in the last year or so that I had him. He had learned what counting was before he was even two years old, and by the time he left me, when he was almost three, he could count to twelve and muddle through the teens and say, “Twenty!” He also recognized some letters. We just weren’t really communicating with one another.

Talking with him is still weird because he had a late start and because he also tested as having a genius IQ (the MIL initially told me he tested at 160, and now she says she thinks the person who tested him let him off easy, which I think is hooey but I’m prejudiced), so he doesn’t think like most of the rest of us do–his mind goes places you would not expect. But the point is I can talk with him now, at least sometimes.

It’s just… It would have been nice to not automatically have had the worst assumed about me. It would have been nice to have had more choices when I was faced with adversity.

I’m afraid I am not someone to consult about the virtues of adoption. My situation with my son was not the only time I had intimate acquaintance with the issue. I went through an extremely bad patch with the father of my daughter during my pregnancy with her, which ultimately killed the relationship. Although my children are almost nine years apart in age, I caught a former so-called friend talking about me on LiveJournal intimating that my unfit little self was dropping them like kittens while she had to take fertility drugs and suffer, even though she had a job and a house and a husband. (I was a full-time college student when I got pregnant with my daughter.) I had another so-called friend offer to take my daughter when I was contemplating giving her up, until my MIL told me she wanted to keep the siblings together if that would be possible, and then the friend guilt-tripped me for changing my mind. I’ve heard stories of Americans adopting babies from third-world countries only to wonder later if they might have been guilty of child theft, but they don’t seem to be losing much sleep over it. Poor women, and especially poor white mothers of white babies, or poor ethnic women of cute ethnic babies, seem to be viewed as brood mares for the infertile middle class and rich. It’s disgusting, and I won’t condone it.

My daughter recognized my voice shortly after birth when they brought her into my room. She was crying, and I called her name and she immediately calmed down. I can’t believe that children taken from their mothers in infancy don’t know what is going on, and I can’t believe they don’t suffer for it. God only knows the mothers do. Adoption is fine for children who absolutely can never go back to their parents again, but all too often, that is not how adoption is used.

My mother-in-law told me later that even if she had known I didn’t cause my son’s speech problems, I still wasn’t fit to keep him with me. I want to know where this committee is that weighs every mother’s fitness. So I can beat them all to a bloody pulp, the same way they did me, only emotionally.

edit: Speaking of my issues with adoption, here’s another one. They “need” babies, they are “entitled” to have children–more so than us nasty poor sluts!–but when the child is not “normal”, they can’t handle it.

The former friend who guilt-tripped me about my wanting to keep my children together also guilt-tripped me because I don’t like the way adoptive parents turn down disabled children. My logic is that when you give birth to your own, you get the luck of the draw, and that even when your child is so-called “normal” at birth, bad things can happen later. About the best she could do was, “Don’t I have a right to a child that my husband and I can handle?” This is the kind of mentality of the people who go around splitting up families so they can have their own. Nuh-uh.

—–
*Reader’s Digest Condensed Version.

Not that I’m dieting at the moment, but…

Weighed in, and I’m at 231.5.

I started low-carbing last July at 237, maybe 237.5. A couple weeks ago I was at 230.5. I mean, obviously I’m eating crap here and there. OK, maybe more than just here and there. Now, oftentimes the “crap” consists of things like rice cakes and popcorn. You wouldn’t think those would make you fat, but… And I’m sure the pizza didn’t help either. Crust City.

I need to get a handle on this. I don’t want to spend another year above 200. This is not natural for me and I’m sick of it.

230 / 231.5 / 140

“I’ve got… CHECKS!”

Ever see Perfect Strangers when you were a kid? I did, a few times. I don’t remember much about it, but there was one episode that sticks in my mind to this day. It was the day Balki got his very first checking account.

I knew things were going to go south in a hurry the first time the question was brought up of whether Balki could really afford something, and he got this wicked gleam in his eye and said, “That’s all right. I’ve got… CHECKS!” and whipped out his checkbook with a big grin on his face.

It turned out he had misunderstood what a checking account was for, and was using his checks like free cash. I forget how far in the hole he got himself before they got it all straightened out, but it wasn’t pretty.

It doesn’t take an immigrant who obviously had spent his entire pre-immigration life in a bunker–I mean, it isn’t like checking accounts are a uniquely American invention!–to misuse a checking account. Whether because the idea of a checking account is too abstract for some people or whether some folks just like to gamble, lots of us misuse these accounts. The advent of debit cards doesn’t help, either; even when we keep meticulous track of where our money’s going, occasionally a business will put an unreasonably high hold on the account, causing an overdraft. So it gets pretty ugly.

That said, it’s also really nice when you can maintain a checking account sensibly because believe me, sixty cents here and eighty cents there for money orders sure adds up! Not to mention the having to go out of your way to stand in line to buy them, the fear you’ll lose the receipt and the carbon copy and not be able to trace the money order if something goes wrong, the being refused when you go to cash them, etc. It’s amazing to me, in the last example, that places which will cash a personal check with a fair-to-middlin’ chance of bouncing will not cash a money order that–guess what–is backed by cash. They won’t cash cashier’s checks either. It’s mind-boggling.

So… I got my first two books of checks today from Kemba, and am very pleased I don’t have to go through any of that garbage again. Yay!

Related aside: Has the practice of issuing starter checks without the accountholder’s personal info pre-printed on them finally been abolished? It’s one thing when you have an account with a bank in another state, but last time I got an account with a local entity, they gave me checks first thing. This time I had to wait and they were pre-printed. Not that I am complaining. Nobody takes the starters anymore.

Random note

Dear trackback-spammers:

Thank you for getting my name right for once, but in this case, flattery will get you nowhere.

Love,
Dana

Home organizing progress

In other news, and not quite so verbosely, I busted my bootie yesterday fixing my bedroom up. It is not finished, and it’s still going to be kind of plain for a while even when it is, but I feel better just looking at it. The bed has been pulled away from the wall, I have created a sort of impromptu headboard by positioning my linens chest at the head of the bed, and the Big-Ass Heavy Dresser is now in the far corner as you stand in the doorway, which makes the room look more anchored. I also vacuumed and got rid of copious amounts of dust.

I need to eBay a bunch of stuff this week, give it another go, simply because I need more money freed up. As I manage this I will free up a lot of space.

But the room is more restful now, by a long shot.

I had photos, but I forgot to put my card into the camera so I will just have to re-shoot them tomorrow, as I have no idea where the USB cable is. Pout.