e-bay madness

Balls.

This is one of the problems with doing loads of e-bay auctions - you make mistakes.

A simple example of this is that when I uploaded the auctions I made a couple of errors with the photos, accidentally forgetting to change the photo from the previous auction. This is no great shakes as it's easily fixed, but the other error I've made is a big problem as it's cost me a fortune (well, relative to the amount I got from the auctions).

Basically, I've sent a parcel containing multiple items to the wring person.

I also sent them their correct item, so at least I didn't swap them over, but it means all sorts of problems. First off the real winner won't be happy, second I'm reliant on the person I sent them to being honest and third I'm basically going to have to pay to deliver it multiple times (or cancel the payments made by the actual winner if the recipient doesn't play ball).

And because we're talking multiple items, we're also talking big weight and therefore big cost for postage.

So, "balls!" it is.

black hawk down

Well, this weeks film rental was Black Hawk Down.

Usually I watch the film at the weekend, but as discussed earlier in the week I was horribly busy moving shit about this last weekend. I therefore watched the film on Tuesday night.

I noticed there were several commentaries, but given the two and a quarter hour running time, I didn't have the chance to watch these at all. I also have to admit that I was engaged in some e-bay "parceling up" while watching the film, so perhaps wasn't giving it my full attention.

I mention this as a possible excuse for the fact that I wasn't actually hugely keen on the film.

The problem I had was it didn't really seem to gel together properly. The bit that worked was the combat - it felt real, visceral, chaotic and brutal. The bit that didn't work so well was the - I dunno - characters?

There seemed to be lots of cheesy elements. For example, the young soldier who had run out of bullets and is surrounded by a blood-thirsty mob, who takes out a picture of his young wife and small child. Then when the mob attacks him he tries to hold onto the picture, but it gets pulled out if hands.

I dunno - it just felt a bit corny. The problem of course is that this is a story based on real events (well, it's adapted from a book based on real events) and the guy actually survived, so one would assume this is a fairly realistic depiction of what happened. You never know, though - it could just as easily be pure Hollywood invention.

And to be fair there is a note of truth to it anyway. You would expect someone of his age to have a young family and if he loves them, it's hardly surprising for him to be carrying a picture of them with him and for that to be what he thinks about as he's about to die. I dunno - I think my problem with it was that there was a bit too much of that sort of thing.

What didn't help was that the whole thing was told entirely from the American's point of view. All wars when you get down to it are messy, but civil wars are often the nastiest and that's what the Americans are in the middle of, but it's never really explained why all of the local Somalia's seem to want to kill the Americans.

I know boy soldiers are a part of quite a few conflicts around the world, but here we also had what seemed to be ordinary civilian women picking up guns of the fallen and shooting at the Americans. You can understand the warlord's men wanting to kill them, because he's who they're after, but why there's this general animosity is never explained.

Indeed, the Somali are depicting in a very one dimensional way generally. There's a blurb at the beginning giving some idea of the circumstances, but detail on their side is totally absent. We also get hardly any of the characterisation that's given to the Americans.

There's also a weird note of triumph at the end when people get out.

I'm not saying it's painted as a victory, but this was an operation that went horribly and disastrously wrong, but the end of the film doesn't truly feel like that. I dunno - it almost ends too soon, and the end blurb doesn't quite capture the "this was a terrible cock-up" feel.

£5 you say?

No, five pounds, my good man. Five lots of sixteen ounces. Five of your very best "el-bees" (lb's).

Which odd introductory paragraph is meant to tell you that the big upside of all this physical labour I've been engaging in to keep my landlord happy, is that I appear to be burning fat at a rapid rate of knots.

Let me summarise - this weeks weight loss was a huge 5 pounds, and the increase over previous weeks must mainly be due to the lugging around of boxes.

I think it's also probably due to the fact that last week I made another cut in my caloric intake (dinner has now virtually ceased to exist for me) and also didn't stop walking. Now to be honest, I did trim back on the walking, because of how tired the box-moving has made me, but I didn't stop.

Well, actually, I did stop. On Friday I wanted to do two things. First off, I wanted to rest so that the blisters I'd gotten would have time to heal properly (this sounds like I'm some arctic explorer and my feet were falling off, but it's not like that at all). But secondly, I wanted to see what would happen to the step count if I put the pedometer in my breast pocket, rather than my trouser pocket.

See, for the last few weeks I haven't really been increasing the amount of walking I do, yet my step counter seems to have gone bonkers. And Friday confirmed that this is clearly because when kept in my trouser pocket, the pedometer massively over-counts. I'm guessing this is due to the knocking about it receives, but from now on it's living in my breast pocket as much as possible.

I also didn't walk on Saturday and Sunday. Well, I mean I didn't go for a walk. I did lots of walking, most of it carrying heavy things, so I wasn't too bothered by not doing a proper walk, but the point is that this week I've been back walking again.

So, although I doubt I'll have another 5lb drop any time soon, hopefully it'll keep going in the right direction.

Oh, and I should say that I have theoretically lost a full stone. Unfortunately this stat does depend on that very first reading I took being accurate, which I'm almost certain it wasn't, but even excluding that I've definitely lost more than half a stone, which is pretty good going.

And I also realised that this last weekend marked the four week anniversary of me starting on my diet and exercise plan (wow, that sounds more scientific that "not eating all the pies and not sitting on my fat arse all day").

Still a very long way to go, though.

it still hasn't ended

So yes, the second problem my landlord hit me with.

Despite the months of notice I'd given, "their decorator" had booked a holiday for the exact same week I was away. I still don't get what they meant by "their decorator" but either way I offered to take the week before instead. Only they couldn't do that week either because they were apparently going away for two days.

Which made me even more confused. I mean, apparently their decorator wasn't going to be away that week, but he also wouldn't be able to do the work because they would be away for two days. Given how small my room is (and we're just talking the bed/living room here) it seems bizarre he couldn't do it in the available time.

Anyway, the upshot of this seemed to be that they would have to do it themselves during the week I was away, but because it would be too big a job they would a) have to scale back on it and b) have to do the prep work before I went.

I didn't really mind a, but b poxed me up for multiple reasons.

First off, I'd have to do all sorts of furniture moving so that John could get access to the walls on various days, but also the secret of the bed would inevitably be revealed.

The secret of the bed is that I'd destroyed it. To be fair, it was a really cheap bed, but also, the real problem was of course my huge bulk. For years I've been propping the underside of the bed up using piles of magazines (it's become what I do with all those Japanese magazine I buy!) and there's no way I could loose enough weight for the un-propped bed to support me in that sort of timescale.

Plus of course it gave me somewhere to put the magazines. So now I needed to move all the boxes with magazines into the workshop all in one go as well, and then switch to using my fold-out settee bed thing and tell my landlord to get rid of the old bed.

And that's what I had to do this last weekend - I spent all day Saturday moving furniture around, cleaning the mess I discovered underneath and moving crates and crates of (heavy) magazines into the shed.

What makes this all even worse is that my computer table where I have my computers is a total nightmare. I actually have several machines from where I've upgraded over the years and (pack-rat tendencies kicking in again) I've never disposed of the old ones, but there's also all the peripherals like the printer and scanner and speakers and monitor, etc, etc, there too.

So I've now got a kitchen full of cables and crap while I wait for my landlord to do the bit next to the computer. I requested he do it first, but given how long it took him to empty the shed, Christ knows when he'll get done.

And even when he is done, if I put it all back I'll then have to move it all again before I go on holiday so he can do the actual decorating.

But then there's another factor - the shed is likely to get quite cold and damp over the winter, so if I'm going to sell my stuff I need to do it now. And that means torturous hours of taking photos, prepping and uploading e-bay auctions, then parcelling stuff up before finally lugging it all down to the post office and standing there blowing my entire lunch hour getting the stuff sent.

Now I've posted before about how tedious and rubbish e-baying is, but the scale has now become bonkers. Last Sunday I had more than 40 auctions end while I spent literally all day posting more than 70 more. Now not all things sell, but (and I've actually been kinda impressed by this) nearly 60 of those 70-odd did sell.

To put that in perspective, normally I sell around 20-25 things in one go. And I never have big amounts across multiple weeks. I mean, maybe I'd sell 30 items across 3 weeks if some of them didn't sell and had to be re-listed. I've more than doubled that in two weeks, and all while I've been doing all the other crap too.

So, given how my muscles are still aching and we're nowhere near an end point, you can see why I'm moaning.

when will it end?

I'm a bit sick of this now.

I'm pretty sure I've discussed most of this before, but the difference now is that I'm thoroughly bored of it all.

Basically, a while back, my landlord asked me if he could get into my place at some point to decorate. This would obviously need to happen while I was away, to avoid me having to sleep in a room of stinky fumes.

Okay, it took me a while, but I arranged a holiday for the end of September/beginning of October when I could pop down and visit my Dad (his birthday is early October) and also have a few days off. I informed my landlord of this well in advance - months and months ago, in fact.

But there was an attendant issue - I have so much stuff that was packed into so many boxes, my room was basically like some sort of warehouse. So, my landlord also wanted me to move all the stuff up into the attic.

This meant I was faced with the Herculean job of having to sort through all the boxes and decided to either keep, throw away or sell everything. My preference of course was to sell as much of the stuff as I could. That way I would earn a bit of money back and also it would alleviate the pack-rat tendencies I have which were a big part of why I'd accumulated all the stuff in the first place. If it's going to a good home (or even a bad one), I'd be able to let go much easier than if it was just going into the bin.

I therefore hatched a plan. I would go through all the cardboard boxes, deciding what to chuck away and also repacking everything into plastic stacking crates. I'd also be careful to make sure that 'keepers' got put together and 'sellers' got put together. Once complete, these would be lifted up into the attic and from there I could sell stuff at my leisure.

I had several months to do this before I went on holiday and my landlord would redecorate while I was away.

A perfect plan and phase 1 went well - I sorted through it all, repacked it, chucked quite a lot of stuff and put some of it in the attic and was awaiting my landlord's help in putting more of it up. Only that didn't happen.

Instead, I got called in for a chat where they dropped a bit of a bombshell.

First off - and most importantly - was that my stuff represented a "fire hazard" and therefore couldn't be kept in my room or go in the attic. Instead, it would need putting in the "workshop" (actually a big shed). A space would be cleared for me, but, given the fire hazard status, I would have to move it all right away.

But this also meant that accessing individual boxes would become very complicated. The attic meant relatively good accessibility to all the boxes, but in the shed those at the back would be difficult to get at. So that meant I had to resort it all to maximise convenience. Also, because people could look in the shed, I'd need to cover stuff up so it couldn't really be seen.

So I got ready for the big move, but then had to wait ages while my landlord failed to clear the space. I was therefore completely in limbo, where I could have been using the time productively.

This meant that instead of the couple of boxes a day I'd hoped to do over, say, a week, I had to move all the boxes in a single day. But also, because the boxes had taken up so much room, I'd had to rearrange the furniture in my room to make space.

And this is where we get into the other problem my landlord hit me with.

Actually, having typed all this out, it's way too long, so I'm going to break it into two - more tomorrow.