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I’m a real chicken when it comes to online auctions. I’ll spend days watching an auction, psyching myself up to bid, and when the price jumps suddenly in the final minutes (as it inevitably does, because there are at least two dozen other people watching in the final minutes), I wuss out and decide not to. I suppose that’s better than the alternative, though: showing no fear in the face of electronic commerce can lead to insurmountable digital debt. :)

Short story long, I still haven’t gotten my grubby little hands on a Lomo. I almost bid on one last night, but in the last 10 minutes of the auction, the price tag went from $26 to $46 and I got cold feet. By the time I convinced myself that $46 for a $200 camera wasn’t bad at all (and considering they go for $70 - $90 regularly on eBay), the auction had ended and I was out of luck. Silly me. Now I have another long stretch of hanging out in the shadows of online auctionhouses, watching Russian cameras sell like American hotcakes during Stuffed French Toast days at IHOP while making cryptic notes in the margins of my notebook and warily eyeing the other bidders, trying not to let on that I’m scoping any item in particular. Or something like that.

Someone’s coming to look at our apartment Thursday, which means Megan and I will be spending all evening Wednesday cleaning and making things pretty. We’re hoping the prospectives actually interested this time (the last people were here all of two minutes), because Megan moves out Friday and I’m hoping to move out a week from then, and we’d both prefer not to pay rent on a place we don’t use. Ironically, the girl saw my ad on an ISU-based electronic message board, not on the pretty fliers I spent far too much time working on. Ah well. The fliers gave me a chance to play with visual design, and I’d missed that.

I think I’m going to try to visit my family in Des Moines for at least a couple of hours Easter evening. I’ll still be on call, but here’s my theory: people, particularly the sort of people that manage gift shops, will probably want to get home to their families on Easter evening. Managers only bug me when they’re in the stores, not when they’re at home with their families. So, perhaps their wants (to get out of the store) and my wants (Easter candy to spend time with my family) aren’t nearly as mutually exclusive as usual. :)