weather and whatnot

Zim reports the 25th straight day of rain in his hometown of Seattle (he'll be happy to hear someone else has it worse!).

Meanwhile, the local rain streak has ended at two. Today is bright and clear, but at least it's cold. Well, California cold. It's probably in the upper 50's...oh wait, a quick visit to our friends at sloweather.com tells me it's actually 53 degrees.


We still haven't gotten our new bed...let this be a warning to anyone pondering a mattress purchase from Gottschalks.

I've been cleaning out all the extraneous books in the house this new year, a serious undertaking triggered by the impending arrival of this alleged bed. Selling used books is a little like panning for gold, but mixed in with the dirt and the gold are all sorts of other precious, semi-precious and base metals.

95% of the job is pretty obvious if you know what you're doing, but after years of sorting and sifting and hoarding you end up with plenty of oddball stuff that might be great or might be worthless, or is neat but not necessarily salable, or is very salable but has some kind of condition problem, etc etc etc.

Pre-internet, this wasn't a problem. You'd just take your best guess at a price, put it out in the store and either sell it to someone in the business who knew what it was and had a market for it, or notice it was still on the shelf two years later and toss it.

The internet has changed the used book business as much as anything. Now most of the time you can find the market for the weird, obscure or regional. Books you'd have priced $12.50 and hoped a dealer would buy you can sell for $50 or $60 to the people they'd have sold it to.

Of course, it's also drastically deflated the price of a bunch of stuff that was once perceived as uncommon but turned up in droves online....but you take the good with the bad.

I have metric tons of books that fall between the cracks, the book equivalent of the stuff you find in the couch cushions, or grandma's attic. And like all the used book people I know, at heart I'm a collector and hoarder so letting it go is a trial. The wife has been helping by carting off all the stuff I've sorted out so I don't have to deal with the mechanics of selling it, and the inevitable pangs of covetous regret.

Hopefully the bed will arrive soon and the wife will be distracted from her bibliophile bloodletting...