"And Into June"

With this year moving right along into June now, we're still somewhat slow at work "customer-wise". So much so that in the wholesale department there's talk of laying at least two workers off. Don't see that I have a whole lot to worry about in the retail division tho' as there's only two full time employees there (counting myself) and one part-timer. Most of the time only two of us are working at a time, however. The tool department is definately pulling the main part of the weight, out-selling such items as fiber optics, dolls and knick-knacks 4-to-1. This is naturally my department to keep stocked, and all by myself. Needless to say, this keeps me hoppin' all day long, and that's not counting the time I spend doing other things such as selling trailers, fixing bad light fixtures, and so on and so on into infinium.

But I feel fortunate to have a job such as it is, and I'm still getting pretty much full time hours each week. One week I'll have 36 hours and the next 40+, which evens things out. Just a matter of how long I can keep up the pace in my advancing years since everything is more or less manual, physical labor.


And on to other things...My eBay auctions went pretty bad. I put the blame on this entirely on myself because I was letting someone do the listing and selling, letting them take out the various auction fees, then just splitting the money from what was sold. BIG mistake. The guys listing my items told me they were going to put ALL of the items on at one time for the biggest haul, when in fact they've thus far listed on three seperate times. Now that would have been fine, save that instead of putting on the items for 5 to 7 day auctions, they had them all at 3 day listings, giving potential buyers little of no chance to see them.

Next we look at the listings temselves to find little real information about their content, anything in particular about the items, or their actual conditions. That's something very important to the buyer, natch, so this hurt sales as well.

Finally, they wanted to save money on the listing fees and put large lots of comic books starting out at a mere ninety-nine cents (thinking buyers would bid them UP). On MOST they did not, thus letting anywhere from 45 to 70+ comics go at a paltry "nothing". So I'm just hoping that the few items that did indeed do well end up making up some of this loss.

So today I picked up 10 various size large boxes of comics that hadn't sold (and more to pick up in the next few days), bringing them back to having to store here in the pc room (and just after I'd made space for my art board as I mentioned in my previous blog post). I went back thru them and pulled out 3 boxes just to keep. I figured that if I couldn't sell them for what they were worth, I might as well keep them and try selling them later on myself (and do the listings RIGHT the next time).


So...what else.....


I won a nice set of the Warren/Kitchen Sink magazines, The Spirit, and should be getting those pretty soon. The set was only missing five issues of the 41 issue run from the 1970-80's. Lotta nice Eisner work in those! And a friend sent me decent scans of both the front and back covers for my coverless Quality-Vital 1944 issue of The Spirit "nn", giving me now a decent reader copy for my collection.


The legal proceeding are going right along with my father-in-law's estate and the will should soon be read. Still no plans for the auction of his property until that's all taken care of,so...


Finally got around to scraping the old paint off the under-eves on the back of my house and replacing the old wood and repainting that as well. But the door skins I had saved from the past year of so (that my father-in-law had given me) are totally useless as when I checked them today i found them wet, warped and molded; nothing but garbage now to be hauled away. Instead I'll have to use thin plywood to cover the sides of the screen-in back porch now.


The Weather: Here locally we've not had but a few drops of rain in nearly three weeks. My mowing is less frequent, at least.


"Dat's th' gist o'it".