del squared

I deleted my tagged account.

It was getting too strange there. I kept getting these friend requests that was something like "22 year old from New York City who looks like a model has added you as a friend"

It's like, yeah right. In reality

you're not 22
you're not from NYC
you don't look like a model
you don't want to be my friend
you do want to take money off me

It was just too skanky so it was easy delete and now I don't miss the daily tagged e-mails.

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On a somewhat related note, I noticed this really impressive site Plenty of Fish. Some of my friends mentioned POF was pretty good. But I was surprised at how good. I did a search for white women around my age within around a 10 minute drive of where I live.

It's like wow, pages and pages of results. And there's a lot of quality in the results. Women with education, good jobs, attractive. See for yourself [page 1] [page 2] [page 3].

If there was a way to short the bar scene I'd go for it. This is a game changer. Bars are great for catching a live band, hanging out with your friends. But trying to meet someone, forget it for the bar scene. POF and the Internet makes you realize how dismal, miserable, near useless the bar scene is for that.

Scanning the profiles you can form a bit of a composite of what these ladies are looking for. Good communicator, wine drinker, cuddling, good with tools, no head games, don't care about whatever shocking, horrible things your ex said or did. I tend to disqualify myself reading these want lists, oh well.

I haven't joined and I'm not sure if I'm going to. I'm not sure if it's for me. My style may not be aggressive enough for that type of site. It might be my best plan to meet someone in person eventually however unlikely and see what unfolds.

As part of getting the old baseball cards organized I decided to work to complete some sets. There were also other sets which had too few cards to make the effort to complete them.

I decided to list one of the sets on sportlots. It was 120 cards from 1980 o pee chee baseball. I didn't really expect anything to come of it.

But I was surprised. Last week there were two orders from the same person in Washington State USA. He ordered 12 cards in total. The sale amount was around $10. After sportlots listing fees I got around $5. I took the proceeds as credit on the site since there's some football and other cards I still want to order. I ended up losing a small amount on the postage to USA so I'll have to revise my postage fees slightly to ensure it's enough to cover my own costs.

It was a mix of cards from well known players like Robin Yount and Paul Molitor; and some obscure players.

As a seller I noticed some of the other sellers make a lot of pricing mistakes. Some people foolishly list their cards for the minimum $0.18. That's crazy. Anyone who bothers to go to sportlots is a motivated buyer who will always be willing to pay more. I didn't list any of mine for the minimum and I never would. Even if others had listed a card at $0.18 I set a min price of at least 25 cents.

Sometimes with older sets like the 1980 there will only be one card listed for a player. That means the seller has a local monopoly on that card. So you can basically charge any reasonable amount and you'll get it. Incredibly I saw people with the monopoly on a card listing it for 18 cents! For my cards even the most obscure and irrelevant player; if it is the only card listed then it becomes at least a 50 cents card due to the monopoly. For better players with any kind of name recognition then it is at least a dollar card with a local monopoly. That's how I was able to get a $10 sale on 12 cards.

I was pleasantly surprised at how my trial listing went. I'm now going to list the remaining baseball cards from the 1981, 1983, 1984 o pee chee baseball. I also have some loose Topps, Fleer and Donruss baseball from various years 1978-1983 which I'll also list.

I picked up some more baseball cards recently.

I was working on the 1982 o pee chee set. I had around 200 cards and needed around 190. I went to the local dealer Strictly Singles. When I got there the place was boarded up as the building is being remodeled. I didn't know if they were even still around.

I just typed it in on my cell phone and luckily thanks to Google it picked up that they have moved down Almon Street. He has a nice spacious new shop now so it was nice there. He did have a good supply of 1982. I found all but 3 that I needed. He just charged by count and it was only $30 for nearly 200 cards, around $0.15 each, a good price.

Then I went online at Sportlots and there was a good selection there too for the 1982. There were 4 people who had all three I wanted. I went with a guy who had the fewest sold, just 50. I thought I'd help a smaller dealer get his totals up. It worked out well they were listed at $0.18 each. They arrived quickly.

And so I was able to finish off the complete set! It's nice being able to turn all the pages in the album with no gaps.

That's about it for acquiring baseball for now. There's a small number of 1978 and 1979 to get. Those sets are about as far as they can get for now. If I visit a bigger city some time I'll have to look for a local dealer to see if I can finish those two sets off. With baseball done I'm going to move onto football next.

I took my car in for an oil change recently. I got a bit more work done too. The mechanic recommended a transmission flush earlier so I got that done.

All together it came in a bit under $200. Oh well sometimes oil changes end up being expensive. I still have a power steering flush to do next time I have the car in. Which will be in a little while for the winter tires.

All in all the 2005 civic is running well. So I'm glad of that. Although this time as part of their courtesy check they said there might be an alternator problem. They'll recheck next time and if the reading is the same then I'll have to get that replaced too.

The car has 108,000 km so I guess stuff will break more frequently now. Still it's expensive taking care of these things. It will be good to get this vehicle paid off. A little under a year now and that will be done.

In the future I'll aim to avoid 5 year financing, even if the interest is quite favorable. My recent and ongoing experiences demonstrate it's better to get the vehicle paid off before it gets too many years/kms and maintenance costs start to jump. Still it sucks to think there's people out there with 6 and even 7 year vehicle loans.

I switched laundry detergent recently. I had been using Gain for around 2 years. I switched to liquid tide.

I'd used the tide in the past, over 10 years ago. I always thought it was better. But it does cost a bit more. I was pretty happy with Gain as it did a good job. When I was at Costco I decided to get the tide again.

The tide does a good job. It does come out cleaner and brighter than gain. However gain has a nice scent and the original tide is pretty much unscented.

At costco everything is large size. The tide is about a 100 load jug. I found it hard to cart it to the laundry room. Plus the measuring cap was a separate cup which didn't drain back into the jug. So that was messy and wasteful and not very good.

So I went and bought the smallest size liquid tide I could find. I picked it up at zellers. The smaller size is of course lighter and the measuring cap pours back into the container. That's a nice invention the measuring cap draining back in. So I'll use the small size tide and just refill it from the large container.

I do around 2 loads of laundry a week. So I should be set with detergent for around a year or so.

I donated blood last week. I hadn't donated in a long time. By the records the last time was 2006. I didn't realize it was that long.

I kind of fell out of the routine and hadn't got around to setting up a new schedule.

I went to the Gottingen Street clinic after work when it was open on Thursday evening. I hadn't been to Gottingen St. in quite a while, around 10 years. The donation went pretty well. I went right through with no waiting. That was good luck. It only took 6 minutes to get the amount of blood they wanted so that was pretty quick. The treats at the end were good as always.

The nurse took my blood pressure before and said it was pretty good. I don't know what the numbers mean but they look pretty consistent with the numbers on the card from years back. I should look up what the blood pressure numbers mean. Still it's good to get a good report.

I'll probably continue to go to the Gottingen St. evening clinic. That works pretty well for where I live now. In the past I went to a mobile clinic at the local community centre. The best time for donating was when I was at BIO as a software contractor for Y2K. They had the clinic right in the facility in the auditorium during daytime business hours. That was so convenient.

Now that I went again I can get into a new routine. I can do a bit better than every 3 years for donating. Maybe not every 2 months but more than once a year is definitely possible.