So things are rough these days. A fam­ily member’s very sick, and has been in the hos­pi­tal for nearly a month — never a good thing. We all spend a lot of time dri­ving, vis­it­ing, com­mut­ing (Colum­bus to Ann Arbor and back again), wor­ry­ing, bitch­ing at doc­tors and so forth.

But not actu­ally work­ing. For, you know, pay.

By way of thought­less busy-​​work, in the last few days I’ve man­aged to start “clean­ing up” some of the back­log of books, paper, craft mate­ri­als and so forth (and so forth, and so forth) that have piled up around the house over the last decade or so. We go to a lot of estate auc­tions, and friends and fam­ily have con­signed (or just given) things to me. Since I sell stuff on eBay… arguably. I list stuff on eBay. Some small frac­tion of it sells sometimes.…

I do tend towards unre­al­is­tic esti­mates of required effort, in all things. Sue me; I’m an optimist.

So we’re hav­ing a big-​​ass online garage sale. Alter­nately, you could think of it as res­ur­rect­ing an old side busi­ness. Take your pick.

As of this writ­ing, there are about 700 books at Ama­zon in our store­front there, and about 200 items on sale in the store at eBay. Sev­eral thou­sand more to go, in both loca­tions. Just take a minute and have a look, would you? I’ve just started re-​​working the mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial and brand­ing, so imag­ine there’s lit­tle black-​​and-​​yellow “Under Con­struc­tion” 90s-​​style ani­mated GIFs every­where, OK?

Some­day soon I’ll have the brains to write more. At the moment, it will have to be other people’s stuff you read. I’d obtain some sense of vic­ar­i­ous ful­fill­ment if what you read was some­thing you bought from me. You know, just to hold you over until I can write more of the good stuff.