A-friggin-men sister.

Listen, all you people running for president. Calm yourselves. Don’t make me hate you all as I will eventually have to vote for one of you.

I am trying to be zen about the election. My husband’s take is that its not worth it to get involved until after the primaries since it doesn’t matter anyway, but I cannot help it!

I have been trying to wash away all the political thoughts with tabloid stuff but all the Tom Cruise brainwashing my Joey Potter stuff made me all stressed again and it was actually less stressful to read about the election.

Dear god, Election Day is so far away.

For anyone that received the slightly intimidating letter from eBay today about changes to the Trading Assistant Program, I wanted to take this opportunity to quickly go over what these changes mean in plain English before anyone started to panic.

Essentially, the TA program is changing in several ways, most of which are behind the scenes and will just lead to greater visibility. For the average seller, this means very little in how you run your business other than you may suddenly have more volume. But you do need to do something to “opt-in” to these improvements.

eBay is trying to ensure that all Trading Assistants are aware of the new changes and are making sure of this by essentially forcing you to re-sign up for the program at http://www.ebaytradingassistant.com. There you can accept the new User Agreement and make sure that you are still eligible. You will also need to re-fill in your TA profile so I would recommend having your old profile open in another window so that you can just copy and paste.

For all TAs, home based or retail stores, the following changes affect you:

• There is a new User Agreement. You will need to read this and accept it at http://www.ebaytradingassistant.com
• The terms for sellers have changed slightly. The new terms are, “To qualify, all Trading Assistants on eBay are now required to have an eBay Membership in good standing, a minimum of 100 eBay Feedback (98% positive), and sales of at least 10 items on eBay in the prior 3 months.”
• New TA Directory and Sales Lead Section to help customers to better find you. You will have to re-create your profile to be included in this on the eBay Trading Assistant site. You should be able to just copy and paste from the old to save time.
• They debuted new marketing materials such as logos, press releases, etc.

For Trading Posts only, there is one very big change. As the message from eBay indicates, “The name “Trading Post” has been changed to “Registered eBay Drop Off Location.” Use of the term “Auction” or “Auctioneer” in a Trading Assistant business name, signage, and marketing materials is no longer permitted (unless you are a licensed Auctioneer).”

While this may seem like a little detail, if you have already used the older term on your marketing materials, this could be a big inconvenience or expense.

Overall, the big change over only took me less than 5 minutes so, while the email from eBay makes it sound like a big deal, it really is a very simple process. If eBay is making it easier for customers to find us, that can only be a good thing, I say!

Expect to see this new info in The Trading Assistant’s Assistant: How to start a part-time job or full-time consignment drop-off business on eBay in the next few months. It will take us some time to update the text but luckily the majority of the changes don’t affect the info in the book.

No one has really asked me this but I like to pretend that you all were weeping beside your computers all this time while there were no post from me and wondering bitterly where I had gone and why I wasn’t posting and were just to timid to ask. Don’t ruin my illusions, people, play along.

Well, the month of November was a bit of a struggle just to keep my head above water what with my usual job, busy eBay AND a little thing call NaNoWriMo that I kicked butt at. Then December came along and kicked my rear more than any month that I can remember in recent history. This was a fetal position weeping, "I just physically cannot work anymore but I cannot stop because I have too much to do!" kind of month and while it was profitable, it really took its toll. December is always the biggest eBay month of the year and to put it in perspective, at one point I had 500 listings going all at once which is a personal record for me.

Unfortunately, the week after Christmas was not as nothing filled as I would like because my in-laws are under the impression that nothing would be more enjoyable for us than to drive back and forth to their house as often as possible. They kept packaging it as "a nice vacation" but we were not fooled as we would prefer to be in the comfort of our own home, darn it. I did, however, manage to squeeze in a few video games and only worked a little (because I am physically incapable of stopping work altogether) and it was nice to try out this leisure time thing that I have heard so much about but seldom experience.

I have several New Years Resolutions this year but one joint one I made with my husband was to work less. This actually can be better put with the old Scrooge McDuck adage, "Work smarter, not harder." Both my husband and I work way more than the average human and we need to stop. I cannot speak for him but I know that there is a lot of what I like to call "time bleed" in my day where I will start obsessing over the look of an email signature, suddenly decide to find out whatever happened to such and such actor on some random show I used to watch and get trapped on IMDB for hours or something equally stupid and somehow waste a lot of time. Basically, I want to figure out how to make the same or more money next year without working myself to death. I think this is reasonable if I cut out the time bleed, but easier said than done, you know?

The sort of unique issue for me is that, unlike in a normal office job where the company pays you the same rate for that hour you were on facebook as the hour you spent writing that project, for me, that facebook generates no income and then I need to just work an extra hour. This is how I end up, like today, working until 2 am. I always feel like I still owe myself hours.

Anyway, I decided to put this into practice right out of the gate and the first two weeks of January tried to do less work. Somehow, my brain rejected this and I had a bit of a "Now, I am not getting enough done!" spaz and this week I dove back in head first with working like a fiend. I am still trying to take breaks though and we have been watching a lot of movies so I think it shows some progress.

It’s totally like there are two of me. One is rational and wants me to take nice breaks and have fun. The other wants to work all the time. They are at odds with each other and I cannot reconcile them.

My possible issues include:

• I am a night person and just work better at night. I suspect this might be something because it always seems like I really get into the swing of things right around when my husband gets home and then I work great until about 3 am when I start to get a little loopy. But I also suspect that if I just got up really early everyday I could force myself into becoming a morning person. Not sure I want to do this, though.
• I have poor time management. I tend to get totally obsessed with one project and want to work on it until it is totally done with I cannot do because I really need to work a little bit on everything each day. "Make yourself a schedule," has been on my To-Do list for about a year now. The odd thing about this though is that I am pretty organized in a lot of other ways so you would think this wouldn’t be so hard.
• I don’t like most things. That is mostly a joke but, honestly, I don’t really like watching TV unless its a specific show (and there is only one that I watch, Lost), I have to be in the right mood to want to watch a movie, play a game or read a book and The Sims always sucks up so much time that I only play it about once a month, if that. So many nights, when faced with my choices for leisure or work, I end up choosing work because nothing really strikes my fancy and if its between wasting a night in front of the TV or getting stuff done and freeing up time later for when I might be in the mood for something I really want to do, I will always pick the latter.

So, I am a whiner, apparently. A whiner who hasn’t blogged in a while.

Anyway, expect several woefully topically outdated posts over the next few weeks. There are a lot of things over the last few months that I wanted to blog about but I was too busy so expect those topics to resurface.

Future entries will include:

• The 50 Book Challenge: Did I make it? Will I do it next year? What did I read? Do you care? Find out either way!
• NaNoWriMo: Done but not dead. I have a lot of undigested thoughts about this that I will definitely be going on about in the near future.
• Reviews, reviews, reviews! I listened to a ton of music this year, read a lot of books and saw a large number of movies, some of which I really liked, some I was totally "eh" about, and some that were total crap (Spiderman 3 dance sequence, anyone?)
• A rant about being "Busy"
• A photograph of my garbage can

That’s all I have for now, folks. Hope you are all well and that you have neither impregnated a Nickelodeon star nor joined a cult about aliens thus far in 2008.

Smooches!