e-Bay, Diaries, Babies, and Alexa the Bitchy Virtual Assistant

I have my dining room table back! Since the end of August it’s been e-Bay Central and since I don’t like listing in the winter when the roads are iffy and unpredictable, the last of my auctions for 2018 ended this week. No more running to the post office. Ya, I know I could arrange for pickups but I’m a control freak when it comes to e-Bay. I have a 100% feedback rating and I want to see with my own eyes that packages I put in the system get scanned---proof that can keep an e-Bayer out of the weeds. In just under three months I sold nearly $3,000 worth of mostly lighters and tobacco related advertising pieces. My husband had weird collections and of all the things I’ve sold since he died, this batch was the hardest and least fun to list. Why? Because tobacciana collecting has dropped off significantly here in America but it’s really hot in the Orient so I was getting a lot of messages written in broken English that had me scratching my head. I will start do some more e-Baying next summer---I have a box of transportation advertising under my bed that needs to go next---but for now, I’m free to tackle other projects.

One of those projects I’m tackling this winter is to go through decades’ worth of old diaries that I think I’m finally ready to dispose of but I’m thinking about picking out a few passages here and there to put all in one book along with some old photos. One or two pages with an iconic passage from each year of diary keeping. I could start from a point in the 1950s when I saw Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis at a live concert. I’m pretty sure I can make a book like that work (just for myself, not for mass marketing) and it sounds scary fun to try. Scary because once I commit to a project like that there’s no turning back, no restoring pages and diaries that I’ve read and shredded.

I’ve often wondered if the fact that I’ve never been a mother plays into my obsession about wanting to create something that will last longer than I will. It must be nice to look at a child that came from your womb, that you’ve mentored and influenced and think, “I made that, that’s my legacy to the world.” A fellow blogger who has cancer and is near the end of her life gave a baby up for adoption 50+ years ago and through a popular DNA test she was recently re-connected to that child. Reading her story and her bio-son's loving post about his adoptive mom---he’s a blogger too---was amazing. I don’t have a secret child out there but it was not uncommon in my generation for unwed mothers to go away to have and give up their babies in secret. And secrets like that revealed later in life come with unpredictable results.

I remember a day when I teased my husband that someday he’d answer the door and there on the steps would be a stranger with a suitcase who’d say, “Hi Dad!” It never happened but that day he and a neighbor went around and around about whether or not he’d feel instant, fatherly bonds with a child he never knew about. She said he would, he disagreed. She was a parent. Don never was. Recently, I was reminded of our ‘hi dad’ conversation when a random guy was being interviewed on TV and was asked if he had any children. He replied, “God, I hope not!” Cracked me right up. A woman might answer a door someday to hear “Hi Mom” from a stranger but at least she’d know with 100% certainty that the ‘hi mom’ scenario was in the realm of possibilities. Guys who might have sown a few wild oats in their youth could never be sure that it couldn’t happen to them.

Change of topic to my fur baby: Levi my mighty schnauzer had to go back to the vet’s office this week to get a follow up test on his Lyme disease. It’s been six months since his diagnosis and treatment, and I haven’t noticed any difference in him. He’s still doing the chicken-on-a-hot-plate dance that’s an early symptom of the disease, but he's as spunky as ever. I won’t know the test results until Monday but before leaving the place we’d run up a $350 bill that included the blood work, a winter’s worth of flea, tick and heartworm prevention meds, two ear cleansings, two weeks’ worth of antibiotics for something on his lip and a tissue analysis of the junk that came out of his lip. We have to get the infection cleared up first before the vet can see if there’s an underlying issue causing the lump that apparently bothers Levi because he's always digging at it.

And while writing this I learned that Alexa won’t spell ‘pussy’ as in pussy infection. She just told me, “I’d rather not answer that.” Okay, turning ‘pus’ into an adjective probably isn’t a real word which is why I wanted confirmation on how to spell it in the first place, But come on, she didn’t have to cop an attitude about it! I tried to ask a couple of times, enunciating clearer each time, but the bitch wouldn’t spell what she wrongly thought I was asking. And how does Alexa know I wasn’t writing an article for Cat Fancy Magazine and really wanted to spell 'pussy' as in pussy cat? Instead, she probably put me on a list of people who sexually harass virtual voice assistants! ©