Realtor reality check. Ugh.

Yesterday I showed my house to the first of three or four realtors I’m interviewing to see who might best represent my precious place to the most appropriate buyers.
IMHO my house is special – beautiful grounds, mature landscaping and trees, beautifully remodeled, uniquely inviting, views from every window, secluded and quiet yet close in….  etc [...]

One way to go about downsizing

Over at DailyKos today, blogger Timroff describes what he and his wife are doing this weekend, as they prepare to move from a 4 bedroom home with full basement to a 2 bedroom apartment with little storage:
So how does one decide what stays and what goes?
What we did was take some graph paper and a [...]

Baby steps on eBay

Last week I listed four items on eBay: a collection of vintage “Reprints from SingOut!” which are probably worth about $25 (sold for $3  – oh well); a set of 6 CDs on ear training for improvising musicians (sold for $20 -yay!); a CD-music set Bluegrass workout (sold for $12 – yay!).  $35 more in [...]

Stuff: never mind the quality; feel the width…

“Never mind the quality; feel the width…”  a catch phrase popularized on a “60s British comedy show about two Jewish tailors always trying to palm off cheap materials on their customers.
I was going to do a spreadsheet inventory of everything I own,  marking a “K” by each thing I planned to Keep and an [...]

How much is my time worth to sell this stuff??

I have listed a bunch of things on-line, which means I had to describe the thing in enticing terms, photograph it, figure out how much to ask for it, and go through the posting hoops.  Time-consuming. Nibbles on most of the stuff not happening.
I also made a trip over to Powells Books in Portland this [...]

Impermanence: snow melts and tempus fugit

Impermanence:  n. an essential element of Buddhism – that everything is changing, inconstant, in flux. Because things are impermanent, attachment to them is futile, and leads to suffering.

The Portland area was blanketed in nearly a foot of snow for most of the week up until Christmas. My California grandkids were thrilled to share a white [...]

P-Touch Power!

David Allen, the productivity guru and author of the perennial best-seller, Getting Things Done, recommends that followers of his organizing principles get themselves a little device known as the P-Touch labeler. It’s a hand-held battery-operated gizmo with a miniature QWERTYUIOP keyboard that produces crisp black letters on white sticky tape and can be used for [...]

Powells Books: they sell and they BUY

Powells Books is an iconic Portland landmark that takes up a full city block but feels like a rabbit warren of intimate spaces and temptations.
Aside from selling almost any book on almost any subject, they also BUY books. What a great service to the community (and a profit center for them, most decidedly).
So I [...]