Hey there, I'm still winding down after my books-and-CD's-scanning job came to an end last Tuesday morning. My boss, who had been running a selling-books-and-CD's-on-line business for the last 18 months, suddenly realized he couldn't make enough money at it to keep it going plus cover his overhead and pay his three employees.
So I am now Officially Retired.
I dunno, it SHOULD have worked. My boss said a change in policies at Amazon regarding warehousing space and buying books from us was part of what put him into negative income. He hadn't paid himself in two months.
So I'm mildly bummed. I liked the job and I learned a lot -- it seemed like a perfect retirement job for me, just a little something to keep a few $$$'s coming in. But it did beat me up a bit, physically. I'm not 55 anymore.
Anyway, I'm now hoping to write more, read more, listen to music more. Musicked-out for four hours last weekend, my first serious music session in a month. Am watching a lot more movies in the evenings -- God knows I have a lot to catch up on there.
Read three long stories by fantasist Tom Reamy yesterday afternoon, all horror stories -- "Twilla," "The Detweiler Boy" and "Insects in Amber." Reamy, who died way back in 1977, was certainly no stylist, but his stories work. He won a Nebula Award for his 1975 novelette "San Diego Lightfoot Sue," a story I read more than 40 years ago, but maybe it's time for a re-read because I didn't really "get it" the first time around.
Hoping to find some more good short stories to get into before trying to read another novel. These days my mind seems to wander with long fiction. But I had no trouble reading Reamy's chillers yesterday.
Despite what I posted here previously, I am still posting on Facebook. I'm addicted to the quick feedback there, which is way more than I get here. Maybe I'll post the obvious stuff there and the more personal stuff here, who knows?
That's all for now. Hope you all are well.
3 comments:
Its a lonely life trying to keep the blogger stuff going and each passing day I tend to consider to finally give it up after 20 years and hardly anybody else (outside of you) who comments. There's a constant hatred of Facebook?Meta but it seems everybody is still there.
I did the Amazon buy and sell thing but haven't in the past ten years. Too many rules and red tape and I wasn't making that much anyway. Always somebody undercutting my stuff to the point that I made better money donating them to charity. Unless you know what you're doing, you'r going to be lose lots going Amazon. I was never too smart to own my business of used music.
Record World will continue till I decided I had enough of seeing my old postings from years ago still make the the top ten most read. But then again, this has been a habit that has stayed par for the course longer than anything else that I have tried. Like Bargain hunting, it's very hard habit to break.
Hi Crabby! I did eBay for a few months after I got fired from my gas-station job a couple years ago. Interesting experience -- I offered some old science-fiction books and magazines, and a couple newer CD's. People offered me half of what I asked, or wanted me to ship things to China or the Czech Republic. I learned just enough to realize I didn't have the patience for it. And with eBay's fees, PayPal's fees, and my bank's fees, I wouldn't have made much money out of the deal. So maybe now I'll retire and write novels!
The Amazon thing went fairly well for a couple years till I send an Albert King Best of overseas APO and it got lost and the petty nitpicking from folks leaving a bad review since their jewel case got cracked (thanks to Louis DeJoy and the uSPS) over a dollar cd that this cheapo bitch could have gotten elsewhere. I did return the favor and gave her a two review. It'd be nice to give my unwanted music a good home and not get reemed by EBAY or PayPal and being fee'd to death. Even while trying to live the dream as used music salesman, the public's petty ways took the fun out of that. I'd like to clear out my vast cymbal collection but don't have the time to weigh them out in Grams and have somebody try to low ball you on that.
This is the reason why we became hoarders. Getting pennies on the dollar for our stuff.
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