January Sweeps - Day 707

I say this a lot, I know, but I ran to the library right before it closed, and managed about thirty-five minutes to write.  

And unlike the last couple of times, I wasn't distracted by anything, simply writing a scene with Atticus (the main character) and Daniel (the friend he's made), wandering through an abandoned grocery store.  I have this idea that the different "towns" on the Earth colony had different founders and philosophies (Atticus's, for example, was entirely secular, with no churches or superstitions), and over the decades, each town developed its own culture and attitudes.  I haven't really explored it, though, and I don't imagine that I will.

It's really hard to come up with a futuristic society, especially one that's not just "2021 with ray guns."  I keep meaning to do a podcast with Big about that topic, but keep failing.

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In January: 811

When I got home, I wrote a little bit more.  It's nice when that happens.

Right before it closed, I drove over to the storage facility, to take my mom's Christmas tree ornaments back to her unit (she's got a huge one, big enough to put two cars in, and sadly, a full third of it is taken up with more of my junk), and I was surprised to find a bunch of plastic storage containers sitting outside a unit that had been vacated.  The containers (there were five or six of them) included their lids, and fit nicely in the front seat of my diseased little Toyota, which will help me box up some of the garbage I have lying around, probably to find a new home in my sister's crawlspace (remind me to take a picture of it the next time I'm crawling around in there . . . did I mention the lights have gone out down there and she hasn't gotten them fixed?*).

Push-ups Today: 111
Push-ups In January: 792

I often give you complaints about selling things on eBay, but believe me, it's just a drop in the bucket of what I get from customers every single week.  The prize this week might have been the guy who sent me a message containing a screenshot of a website where you could get the same item ten dollars cheaper than I was selling it** . . . but then I got a dude who emailed me to tell me that he got his figure out of the package, and one of the arms fell off.  While this is irritating (it was him who opened it, not me, so how could I have swindled him?), the next day, he didn't issue a Not As Described dispute, as customers so often do, but an Item Hasn't Arrived dispute.  

Now, this just boggles my mind, because I can't process a Return on an Item Hasn't Arrived dispute.  The only thing I can do (except for email him back) is to enter the tracking number and demonstrate that yes, the item was delivered, despite this guy saying it wasn't.  Now, I've seethed for years about how eBay always sides with the buyer in any dispute, so they'd probably take his word for it that it didn't arrive DESPITE him saying that it did in communication with me through the eBay system, but my cousin claims that eBay has tried to be more fair in the last decade or so, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that they'd actually check the messages we've sent back and forth and verify that yes, the package did arrive.  I guess I'll find out.

Words Today: 1426
Words In January: 5167

*And why would she--she absolutely will NOT go down there, slithering about on her hands and knees like Andy Dufresne in a Maine sewer pipe?

**I nearly messaged the guy and said, "Thanks for the link, friend, I ran over there and bought three!"  But just deleted the email instead.