(I didn't make this, but I did find it amusing, anyway.)

By the way, if you're wondering just what Australian eBay store operators are complaining about with regard to the fee increases, have a play with The FeeBayulator. It's a simple calculator that will show you the increases that FeeBay claim are "about 6%".

And just for the record, FeeBay's stocks are still in the toilet at the moment, so, for some strange reason, pissing off tens of thousands of sellers all around the world didn't help raise stock prices. Strange, isn't it?

Well, I've emptied out my eBay Store completely. Was a bit upsetting. I feel better now.

I did manage to get all of my perfumes listed on Oztion. Next, I'll start doing the sterling silver jewellery, I think. Haven't decided yet.

I also need to turn the front page of the Uncommon Touch domain into a blog. That's quite tedious to do, though, which is why I haven't done it yet. I've got the design more or less figured out. It's just a matter of putting the template in all the places it has to go and testing it all.

Oh, and we've decided that the Uncommon Touch online store is going to go on its own subdomain and be linked from the main page and other pages within the domain. That way, we can link to it from various auction sites and not be in violation of the rules (well, technically, anyway).

You'll also notice that my groovy kewl scrolling banner thingy is gone from this blog. I'm gonna miss that thing, I always liked it. Oh, well, it'll save me some money, right?

In the meantime, if you're in Australia and you'd like some genuine designer perfume for crazy mad prices, go buy some from me, okay?

eBay sellers found a creative outlet to vent their frustration over Store fee increases that were announced last week. A search on eBay for the term "fee hike" yielded more than 100 auctions protesting the rate hike, many of them humorous.

All right. So in the past few days since eBay announced its ridiculously big bite in their admitted attempt to get rid of eBay Stores (which they created and promoted wildly until they found that they were a little too successful), I've been looking at about a bazillion alternatives and thinking and reading a great deal.

eBay stocks are very low, and took a big nosedive the same day as the announcement that led to widespread revolts and discontent. Any reference to this fact on the eBay boards gets deleted immediately, of course, although all you have to do is look it up yourself.

What it comes down to is that eBay is not a trustworthy business partner. They say one thing, do another, promote something mercilessly, then yank the rug out, they put ridiculous spin on their announcements, they make totally contradictory statments, they're even sending out DIFFERENT announcements to sellers and buyers, claiming different things in each one. They've raised fees five times in five years. They'll do it again, and this time it'll be the auctions again, and yet more sellers will be pushed out, and eBay won't care.

They should care, because without trustworthy and honest sellers (the very people they're alienating) they have no buyers, unless you're in the market for counterfeits, fakes, frauds, and 99¢ trinkets from China with $30 postage.

Anyway, what this has meant to me is that I need to completely reassess my situation. This is not always a bad thing.

What I'm going to do is revamp the business site (it was never done properly to begin with) and put in my own store there, along with a blog where I can promote items I'm selling, new lines, etc.

I'm also going to be selling here:

The site is the second largest in Australia, and a lot of sellers are moving there. The variety of items available is increasing constantly. Please have a look. If we can generate enough support and traffic, this site can give GreedBay a run for their money (and yes, I actually believe that, despite my inherent cynicism; I've seen it happen).

I'm also seriously considering selling at another Aussie auction site, but I haven't done any listings there yet and I don't want to start promoting them significantly until I'm sure I'm there. This is nothing against the site, mind you, just that for now I'm concentrating on Oztion and my own site.

After the fee increase takes effect in August I will NOT be able to afford to sell perfumes on eBay via the store. During the very busy times of the year (Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Christmas) I will probably be listing perfumes on eBay via auction, as I've always done.

I'll also almost certainly continue to list at least some things through auction on eBay, again, as I always have. I have a few items that are very good sellers with an excellent sell-through rate, and those are the things I'll be selling.

And in every, single package I send out I'm going to be promoting MY OWN SITE and OZTION. eBay can use me, but I can use them, too, and I intend to.

eBay are simply not a stable company, and they know less about customer service than they should. They allow all manner of fraud, fakes, counterfeits, and postage piracy, they allow overseas sellers to invade every other eBay site and overrun the place peddling cheap trinkets and outright crap. Their stocks are dismal, so dismal that they're going to have to do a huge stock buy-back to try to get some stability for the company. I think eBay is being run by morons, personally. With some real leadership and some good customer service and business sense, eBay should be thriving, but they're not. That says something right there.

I don't really care if they fail or succeed, really. If they fail. I'll bust my sides laughing, as will millions of other people. The amount of bad karma they've generated (especially with PayPal and the way PayPal like to completely screw people around) is going to be enormous when it hits. You really do reap what you sow, and they've sown a great deal of bad will and corporate greed, and I have confidence that it will eventually hurt them where it counts: in the shareholders' pocketbooks. Many a mighty corporation has failed due to poor management, greed, and bad karma. I've seen it many times. And no empire or monopoly is forever.

But, eBay aside, I have no choice but to do what I'm planning on doing. I may fail miserably, but I'm going to work at it and see how it goes. I think it's the right thing to do and that's the path I'm setting myself upon, so that's the size of that.

Not sure what I'm going to do about the scrolling Vendio banner on this blog.... I don't think it's actually generated much in the way of sales for me, really. I might replace it with a big, fat Oztion banner....

I posted this to The Perfume Blog. I may as well post it here, too:

Due to recent fee hikes by eBay, fee structures that we consider ridiculous and unwarranted, we are being forced to reconsider many things.

Foremost is our pricing. We try very hard to offer our items at good prices that are below retail and we even consider the price of the shipping when we set our prices. Now, however, eBay are going to be taking such a very large bite of the price that we will be forced to raise prices significantly or sell elsewhere.

It will no longer be viable to sell our perfumes on eBay at all, as the profit margin on them is fairly low to begin with and the many overseas sellers with false location details compete unfairly in the perfume category (or just sell fakes). Until we decide how to proceed, we will not be adding any additional inventory to our store.

We will also be preparing listings for other sites, ones that are Australian-owned and Australian-based.

Please note that this will affect ALL eBay sellers in Australia, the United States, and the UK who maintain stores, so you can look for and expect price increases across the boards, along with an increase in sellers who close their stores and/or abandon eBay entirely. (You may want to let eBay know how you feel about this.)

We recommend checking out the following Australian auction sites:

http://oztion.com.au/

http://aussiebid.com.au/

With enough support, either or both of those could give eBay a serious run for its money.

Okay. Whew. I feel like I've been put through the spin cycle.

Went to the dentist. Told them about the teeth issues, and my extraordinary phobia. Dentist was very matter of fact and cheerful and okay about the dental phobia thing. I did assure him that I'm not afraid of dentists, but rather of people poking me in the mouth with sharp objects, and he got the joke, so that's a good thing.

Anyway, he strongly advised against removing all my teeth, and gave several reasons why. He feels that many of my teeth can, in fact, be recovered and that having the natural teeth will help to better anchor the dentures (which, of course, is true). Basically, I'm almost certainly going to lose the front four incisors on the top. Since I've lost the four on the bottom, it'll match. Hah. But it seems that some of my teeth are actually very well set, which was surprising.

There will be four visits to get the "keeper" teeth fixed up, but they'll use plenty of novacaine so I won't have to suffer through all that poking and scraping. And they can remove the rotten teeth (okay, not rotten, but you know what I mean) under local anesthetic, which is also fine.

I was also assured that it's probably mostly biology, as some people are just prone to gum disease more than others. I actually take surprisingly good care of my teeth (since I hate going to the dentist), brush regularly, floss, etc. and yet my teeth are falling out of my head in a few places (Andrew, on the other hand, takes terrible care of his teeth, NEVER flosses, and other than a couple of cavities, his teeth are fine, strong, and healthy, so go figure).

I also need to go to my own doctor and get an order to get a diabetes test (sometimes dental problems are a sign of diabetes, apparently) and while I'm there, I'm going to get a new prescription of Valium. The one I have is actually past the use-by date (I took one anyway, and it seemed to work, but it's never a good idea to take old medication).

One good thing, though.... A partial dental plate is much less expensive than a full one. I paid about $400 for my partial lower plate, I can't imagine that it'd be that much more for an upper one (although the dentist recommends that I have the technician make it so that it can be expanded if necessary if I end up losing more teeth).

I also have a confession.... I've avoided getting a diabetes test because if I do have diabetes, I don't want to know about it. See, if I know about it, I have to actually do something about it. If I don't know, though.... *sigh* Denial of accountability. (Hey, it works for the Prime Minister, after all).

Anyway, that's the end of that. I'm still a little giddy. When I got up off the chair at the dentist I was actually drenched in sweat and now I've got a pounding headache, and I'm still a bit woozy and light-headed and I feel kind of weak. A mad rush of epienphrine (adrenaline) will do that to you...

Okay, so I'm not writing here as often as I'm sometimes known to do. I can honestly say that I'm genuinely busy, and that this is, for the most part, a good thing. When I'm not busy and my mind is free to wander around, I can think of all sorts of stuff to put in this blog. This is good in that it keeps my mind occupied (there's nothing more dangerous than me with an unoccupied mind, trust me), and possibly good for readers who actually enjoy the drivel I tend to put here, but it also means that I haven't got all that much to do, or at least, that the stuff I have to do isn't diverting enough to take away from my ability to spend brain waves and time on the kind of random stuff I tend to write here.

Whew.

So I'm still selling stuff on eBay, and doing fairly well. June was bloody horrible, and I lost my PowerSeller status because my sales averages fell too low. This month, however, has been really quite good, so I should be a PS again soon (maybe next month).

Father's Day is in August, which means I need to get my backside in gear and get some men's fragrances and colognes here, and possibly some men's jewellery (cufflinks, maybe? but then again, modern dads wear earrings and even noserings, too...). Definitely the fragrances, though. I have it on excellent authority that fragrances are a big seller around Father's Day.

My Seasonal Affective Disorder isn't too bad this year, actually. I'm a bit blah, but it's not bad at all. I'm trying to keep up with the calcium and magnesium supplements, which, of course, help with the Fibromyalgia symptoms, and may help the SAD as well.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with the dentist to start the ball rolling to get my teeth out. I'm not fussed about this. Well, I am, because I've got this totally irrational and extremely painful dentaphobia (okay, technically, that means "fear of teeth" and I'm not afraid of teeth, nor of dentists, only of having people poke around in my mouth with sharp objects and other instruments, and the fear that I do have, while admittedly almost entirely irrational, is crippling). I'll have to take some Valium before I go, else I have a panic attack when I get in the chair (seriously, a full on panic attack, as in pounding heart, cold sweat, dizziness, the works).

I'm going to tell them that I just want to be done with the whole teeth business and get them all removed. I'll get plastic teeth and then I won't have to worry about the phobia or the severe gum disease that plagues me, and it'll be better in the long run. There's no way I can (or would) endure all of the multiple and costly and painful treatments for the gum disease, and it's a pretty sure bet that some of my teeth can't be saved anyway, and one of my top fron incisors has actually shifted into a weird position and it looks VERY weird. I also get bits of stuff stuck in my teeth all the time, and that can be quite painful (so I always have to have dental floss handy).

ANYway. I'm nervous. Maybe you can tell by the way I'm blathering on. I could go back and edit all of that, but I'm one of those people who, when I'm nervous, blather on endlessly, talk in loops, make stupid jokes, frequently repeat myself, etc. I may as well leave it, because this post reads exactly the way I sound when I'm nervous. And I have to tell you, thinking about going to the dentist tomorrow is definitely making me nervous.

Good thing I'm careful with that Valium. It would be so very easy to get addicted to it. Of course, that's why I'm careful with it...

Contemporary conservatisn and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.
[...]
Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, ``enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

I used to think that when I bought new music (as opposed to the old stuff I like, such as the Eagles) it was a good sign that I'm not yet at that "too old to try new stuff" stage. That, by the way, is a stage I never want to get to. You can't stop your brain from getting older, but there are things you can do to keep it limber, so to speak. I don't want to get so set in my ways that I can't try something new.

Anyway, I'm still really enjoying American Idiot. What a great album. And I was thinking, "Hey, I guess it means I'm not too old...."

But, actually, Green Day is a really good example of American Punk Rock, which was first popular, oh, more than 20 years ago. So even though the album is new, the style of the music definitely isn't. So may I AM old....

The webcam, she is broken. That's why I've had the same picture there for ages. Sorry about that. I mean, if anyone actually.... noticed.

I desperately need to vent this. I'm going to try to do it so that I'm not giving away any names or too much information.

There's a person who has been an absolute bitch to members of this family for months now. The woman is STUPID, she can't write to save her arse, she's vindictive beyond belief, she's a liar of the first order, and she's like a friggin bulldog with something, she WILL NOT LET GO. She has caused a family rift of EPIC proportions, one that will almost certainly never be fixed, she's even broken a number of laws.

The fact that she's still walking around, happily enjoying her pitiful excuse for a life, acting as if she's the one in the right and everyone else is in the wrong, TOTALLY AND UTTERLY INFURIATES ME.

I sincerely hope I'm able to know about it when she finally has to deal with the consequences of her actions, when she has to reap the harvest she's sown. I want her to feel the stress, pain, anxiety, anger, and every other negative emotion that she has inflicted on everyone else in this matter, and I hope she chokes on it.

And she had better damn well hope that I never see her again, because I will not restrain myself or my "inner New Yorker" and she's going to get a verbal flaying the likes of which she's NEVER going to forget.

That doesn't really feel much better, but it's a little better. I don't think she'll ever read this blog, and I don't care if she does or she doesn't. I just seriously need to vent, and I hope that the Universe is listening, because I'm completely serious. She really had better hope that I never see her in person again. I won't physically assault her (she's definitely not worth going to jail over!), but she'll remember the encounter for a long, long time....

I'm happy. I have no particular "reason" for it. I'm just happy. I'm happy with my life, I'm happy with my business, I'm happy with my family, I'm happy with myself. All of this can change in the blink of an eye, and I'll be cross with someone or worrying about something or annoyed with myself. But right now, at not quite one in the morning on 11 July 2006, I feel extremely contented and happy with life, the universe, and everything, and at peace with myself and with God.

eBay is banning sellers from requesting payment through Google Checkout. The online auction giant updated its Safe Payments policy this week to add Google's new payment service, Google Checkout to its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay.

(Gee, why doesn't this surprise me? LOL!)

I'm happy to report that I did not, in fact, throw my partial plate away. Whew. I don't have to walk around for weeks with no lower incisors.

I am, however, still determined to get my teeth fixed once and for all. Andrew's on the phone now with the dental centre to find out what we need to do to book in, etc. I'll also of course, have to get a new set of choppers made prior to the surgery.

So I have a dental appointment on the 18th of this month to get an exam, they'll almost certainly send me for xrays (because I need to have my head examined, ha ha), and then, I HOPE, I can schedule the surgery and get these nasty old teeth out, get the gums healing, and get some nice, functional, non-painful resin choppers.

Well, the time has come for me to make the arrangements to get my teeth out. This will sound bloody ridiculous, but I'm pretty sure I threw my partial denture away today. I'm still looking for it in the hopes that it didn't actually go in the rubbish, but I'm pretty sure it did. So, rather than get a new one, I'm going to take this as a sign that it's time to do what I've been needing to do for a long time now, and get my stupid teeth removed.

Having dentures is never ideal, but for me, it'll solve a lot of problems, including making it so that I will never have to have my teeth poked and prodded with sharp instruments ever again. My phobia about that is pretty severe, it's one thing I've never been able to beat, and the idea of never having to endure the "Oh, crap, I have to go to the dentist" panic attack again sounds like bliss.

I also reckon I'll have far fewer headaches. I'm quite sure that having a mouthful of diseased gums is not good for me, and I honestly believe that a fair number of my persistent headaches are due to the teeth. So that's another plus.

AND.... my teeth look pretty crap these days. It'd be nice to have a nice, relatively even, ivory smile again, instead of the mess that my poor teeth have become over the years of studiously avoiding the dentist until my teeth rot out of my head. I'm not a vain woman, but it's nice to have an attractive smile.

Andrew will be calling our insurance company's dental centre tomorrow to make the arrangements for the preliminary exam prior to the surgery. He's going to make it clear that I do NOT want to see a periodontist, been there, done that, many of my teeth can't be saved no matter how much torture I endure in a dentist chair, and I'm 42 and I just want to be done with it. Take them out. Take them all out. Give me some nice new plastic toofies and I'll adjust to them and that'll be that. I'll submit to a head xray if I must and I'll let the dentist have a look in my mouth (and I'll have to take Valium first or I won't be able to get in th chair *sigh*), and then I want to make the arrangements to get the bloody things all removed. End of story. Case closed.

I hope I can get this arranged relatively quickly. The idea of walking around with no lower front incisors for months isn't a pleasant one. Most people can't tell, but still, I feel weird. It's like going around with no bra on or something. Not a crime, certainly, but not comfortable, and people really don't want to see that sort of thing...