Self Portrait meme

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

This photo's a bit unusual in that it's how I see myself; Mac Photo Booth automatically does a mirror on it. When I flip it back to how you usually see me, it looks way out of kilter.

Did I learn something, or not?...

I'm trying to devote a bit of energy to being more intentional about how I spend my time. Partly inspired by other friends who've talked about the same- cutting back on things that gradually have taken over- partly from pointed questions from my sweetie- and partly because it is so so easy for me to lose a few hours in the blink of an eye, and not feel like I could say much about how it was spent.

Not that there's anything wrong with wasting time- but wasting too much time feels like a fairly serious mistake to me.

So, this last Saturday I made a mistake that might have positive results in the end.

...I donated a large box of stuff from this summer's closet clean-out to a benefit garage sale on campus, and Saturday morning I went to check out the beginning of the sale. I was about to leave when my eye caught sight of a box of D&D stuff. "Huh," I thought, "that's in fairly good shape." It turned out to be a complete basic D&D set, plus a D&D expert set, plus a standalone module. From selling dan's old AD&D on ebay, I figured it was probably worth about $75 to somebody. It was stickered at $10.

Yeah. So. Maybe you can guess what happened, and that was my first mistake. Second mistake: it took me about 3 hours to set up the ebay auctions, where a good chunk of the time was taking many photos and figuring out shipping, 'cause it seems it's awfully expensive to ship from Canada to the US. And it really wanted to be three auctions, not one, 'cause that seems to be the way these things are done. Grczh. Why did I think this would be fun?...

At some point I flipped a "don't care any more" bit and just listed the damn things with a 3-day auction so they'd be out of the house before dan got home. And the first one sold in 2 hours to a Quebecois guy at my asking price of $35 plus shipping, and it was out the door the next morning with another hour to box and print postage via paypal and ship.

The standalone module sold to someone in Texas for $.01 because I didn't bother setting a reserve price, and I basically broke even on shipping. (hm, actually I made $2). But I still had to drop it off, and I guess it cost me half an hour of time that I was slightly grumpy about spending.

Fortunately, the Expert Set didn't sell, which means I can freecycle it and save some time. (Hey- does it have your name on it? Let me know and it's yours!)

Total time spent for these two items, maybe 5 hours. It's loads of fun to get stuff out of the house into the hands of people who are happier for having gotten it, but while I think I'm fairly good at writing up an auction, it's really really not worth my time to do so. And apparently this weekend I thought my time was worth $7/hr (and I suppose, in the end, good feelings for getting this Quebecois guy's kid a D&D set to play with.)

To show for my time, I now know that paypal makes it quite easy to print postage (domestic and international); ebay has gotten more annoying for dealing with international shipping.

And I really need to pay closer attention to the difference between, "it would be cool if somebody did this" and "I should do this!"

I think this is, as they say, one of my growing edges.