BOXING ZINES

Sloth costs.   An internet friend has agreed to pick up boxes of Pros zines to take to Bistocon for the charity auction or to sell at orphan zine table for charity donation.  I went and got several small boxes to test packing.  The six British Takeaway zines just barely fit in one box which is a good thing.   The six zines are a tiny portion of the stack I have put aside as not keepers.   Every single zine I own I paid minimum 20.00 to purchase…never mind the additional money for postage.  This first box …if I valued each zine at 10.00 is worth 60.00..ouch ouch ouch.  I need money badly and here I am giving it away.    I really must buckle down and learn how to sell and ship.  I sold two S&H zines…very rare worth 40.00 apiece for 30.00/ea.  plus shipping which, from Canada, is exorbitant.   I set up Paypal for receipt of money.  She paid the postage into my Paypal account and will pay for the zines when they arrive.  Fingers crossed there is no hiccup.  It will encourage me to persevere in actually putting my zines up for sale on Zinelist.  I really would like to make some money back.  The thought of casually giving away 10,000.00 worth of zines for free just to make sure they get a good home before I die…well I am just not that philanthropic.   This first give away is full of zines I have just read in the last year and that I know I will not have time to ever reread.  There are about ten stories in the zines that I plan to type up for myself before they go.  The really really rare and valuable zines are also the ones I loved to reread and are currently keepers and those are the ones it would really hurt to just give away.

Yvi from Germany is stopping off for a coffee on her way to Algonquin.  I sorted my X-Files in the same way and reread the eight I felt ready to part with.  She may refuse to take them because she either has them or weight limits on flight home.  Since they are free she could box them and mail them home to herself.  It will be her choice.  If she refuses, maybe they will be the first zines I list on Zinelist to sell and mail off.    Baby steps.    I cannot donate to any university in the USA that might take them because I cannot afford shipping and if I have to wrap and ship and pay, I might as well go the extra step and sell.

So, why am I procrastinating here when I should be reading my way through more zines to put on give away pile, sort through which to read next, test pack a few more, type the stories I want to keep, list the contents of each box on the lid so they don’t have to open it to see contents, Printed matter for crossing border with list of titles.  I am feeling tired just thinking about all the work and this is not even putting a dent in the collection.

 

 

 

 

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PARKING SPACE

Told Bea about renting parking space..feel bad but really. Lori told me at beginning of March that Carol was selling her apartment and Lori wanted to rent my parking space.  She also said she doesn’t like my space on outside of building with snow blowing in on her Porsche but her mother could park there and Lori would park in Bea’s spot.  However,  the process of selling could take a month or two and they are driving to Florida  for the month of April  so I would be on hold with no surety. So at her convenience I should have refused to rent today and wait another month or two ..losing money. Am I wrong…I don’t think so but maybe I should have given her a choice. Problem is…I really really needed the money this month and even with the full amount of seven months rental (to October 31) I still will not be able to meet all my obligations and next month is tax month which brings its own debt. She is rich and likely will not understand and I would not have felt good about her having to pay me while she still had a parking spot that she had paid for on a contract she cannot get money back from. If she pays monthly, then she should have moved more quickly and informed Carol that end of  March she was leaving and locked me in or told me to give her first refusal. I sort of said okay she could have it and have gone back on my word. I feel bad. I hate feeling bad.   Her brother died November 25th and her father February 17th and she is dealing with her mother and probably too stressed for picayune things like this but it does seem like she has time for a lot of things and is perfectly capable and acts like she knows better than the rest of us how things should be done…so she should have put her money where her mouth was.  This is all bluster trying to make myself feel less like a schmuck.  I rented the space for seven months…hell it might take seven months to get the unit in shape and sold…who knows.   I do not care a button what Lori thinks but I hate to have upset Bea because she will have to listen to Lori rant about my faithlessness and feel bad that her friend disappointed/failed her daughter.  Rock and a hard place.

First day of spring, sun is shining, lake is still solid white.  Ash has bad diarrhea with pink spots…reminds me that vet visit will be on list of money exits next month.

 

SHOTS

Just got notice from vet’s office that Ash is due for shots.  Rabies is mandatory in my city but the combo is not and I had decided against letting her have it.  She is sniffing around fourteen years, she has not been outside to put paw on ground for five month this winter and even when we did go out it was never for long walks and she is not one for picking up stuff or sniffing other dogs.   The difficulty is…trying to stand fast against vet disapproval as they try to guilt you into something.   Information is so confusing.   As a human I have lived 95% of my life not getting booster shots for anything…so why does my dog need a booster every year (okay after decades they finally changed it to every three years).   Then there is all the controversy about vaccinations altogether.   My problem with vaccinations across the board is…combos.   I think each disease they are vaccinating for should be individual with time for the body to produce the antibodies for that disease before going on to the next.   If it is expense…they could stagger the shots …one type per year on annual exam.  That is my personal gut feeling which will stand me in good stead when I do not allow the vet to give Ash that particular shot.    I find it so hard to say no…anxiety attacks and stress but I am learning how and not backing away from the challenge of standing up for myself and what I believe…only took me 73 years.

WONDERING

If I could upload the covers of my zines from my computer, and copy and paste information on the content of the zines, add the publisher and date of publication…all the same information demanded by Goodreads to this blog…would I do it?  The fine thing about Goodreads was…as I entered every zine read for my 2017 challenge, at any time I could go in and see a full page of thumbnails of covers of all the books I had read that year.  A very pleasing thing to do.  That is what I want in an app to track my reading.  Will have to keep looking.

GOODREADS

Lost all of my Pros zine entries to Goodreads…days of work.  I really wish there was an app that was as good but not as commercial so that I could enter my reading without arbitrary rules.  The librarian manual says fan fiction is allowed but zines are not.  Which makes no sense whatsoever.   Reading Librarian posts today and someone is adding a ‘book’ with 14 pages.  In my mind, nothing with 14 pages qualifies as a book.  There are two types of zines and fan fiction zines, with as many as 200 pages, full colour artwork cover, either novel length or anthology of completed stories with names of authors, name of publisher, date of publication…qualifies it as a book by any standards.  To exclude them and include graphic novels as books is asinine.   On the other hand, if I was lucky enough to find an app that is suitable could I face the work of re-entering 300 books…

RANT OF THE DAY – GOODREADS

I will be weaning myself off Goodreads. I read the manual and thought I was allowed to enter fan fiction zines. After three plus years, I woke to my 2018 Challenge decimated. I thought it was an error so I spent a day and re-entered 50 zines that had been wiped off. Today I logged on to enter yesterday’s read and found someone has wiped out all those entries plus more. No warning, no note to me saying you read the rules wrong…just arbitrary removal. I find that a bit impolite and unkind. I was already a bit offside with winning reader of the year having 1800 books READ in one year to her credit..which I find impossible. She might have entered 1800 books to the record which helps Goodreads files but she did not READ them. So, effective today, since I am reading my way through a stack of zines that will take me at least another year….this site has become useless to me. Did this happen when Amazon took over and they only want books that they actually sell themselves? Zines cost more than most paperback books, have a word count higher than a lot of books, have professional grade artwork and print quality and editing, the information on editors, writers, publisher, date of publication, page count and list of contents and photo of cover is all equal to a graphic novel or other books that lack ISBN numbers. Their only drawbacks as books are….they are limited editions, you cannot get them at your corner library or buy them on Amazon. I liked being able to see a page of covers of books and zines I have read but I don’t need it. Since my reading is only in competition with myself…I don’t need it for the challenge (since, as I said, that was fake news anyway), I did like seeing books read by others that interested me but my TBR pile is so high right now and my ‘to buy’ list is in the hundreds…I can afford to quit while I am ahead. It was fun while it lasted but like most things I like…it gets spoiled, discontinued or changed out of recognition. New brooms always want to put their fingerprints all over things and generally spoil what was great enough to bring it to their attention in the first place. Amazon has already priced its Kindle books out of my comfort zone. time to wipe their website off my computer’s memory.

As I logged on this morning:

52 books completed

30 books ahead of schedule

52/200 (26%)

View Challenge

February 10^th it showed this and on 11^th it wiped it  out, again, all the entries for zines entered since November 2017 are gone.

This is what it looked like this morning…I went in and reduced my challenge to 1 book before I copied this.

2018 READING CHALLENGE

2018

READING

CHALLENGE

Congrats!

You have read 23 books of your goal of 1!

23/1 (2300%)

View Challenge

Dumb and dumber.

 

Reduced zines from 265 to 219.  Someone hates me.  I give up.

 

 

Watching The Weather Network

Curious and letting mind wander.  If, as a given, we believe in experts…like electing a President because he is supposedly an expert business man then:  it should be acknowledged that there are experts and knowledgeable men in all fields.  If you are not an expert on weather…and the people who are acknowledged as experts tell you that global warming is a fact and then tell you what is causing it and the signs and what we can do to stop it…why would you refuse to believe?    The President of the USA stated recently that global warming was fake news and as a reason he pointed to the cold weather happening right now.    He does no research, he speaks with no experts, he merely spouts and his ignorant followers believe.    The fact that all of the bizarre weather, including polar vortex, bomb cyclone of cold, floods in countless places in the world that never had them, more hurricanes in any given season and stronger ones year following year, wild fires in more places and more frequent and more devastating, plus tornadoes and tsunamis in conjunction with all the other disasters coming one upon the other in rapid succession, should be a strong hint for a wise person to do some research to discover the whys and wherefores.    Global warming can mean an equator too hot to live near and a north too cold to live near.

Listening to the men at the top, with the power to truly effect change, actually refusing to believe, is  like listening to flat earthers and those who believe we never put a man on the moon except those people do not have the power to help destroy the world.  Right now doing nothing or going backwards with policies in order to make a few men and corporations richer in the short term will increase the disasters and death and cost.  The blindness is unbelievable.

If Trump went to the hospital and a doctor diagnosed a brain tumor and said he needed an immediate operation…would he refuse to believe the doctor who is an expert in his field and listen to a faith healer instead or listen to the Koch brothers tell him he can make money by not having the surgery.  Refusing to believe in climate change is equally absurd.

I am watching the weather network to avoid new television shows that broadcast doom and gloom and conspiracy theories that are too close to the bone and depressing.  Old shows I have re-watched so often I need a break from them.  I spent the entire Christmas holidays watching  a Bones marathon.