When I was a kid Hopalong Cassidy was my hero. I had the complete Hopalong outfit - shirt, pants, cowboy boots, the double holsters with matching six shooters, bandanna, and the trademark hat. If memory serves me correctly, I even had several pair of Hopalong underwear. The only thing I was lacking was a white horse. Even though we lived on five acres on the very edge of town, no amount of begging could get my parents to agree to my own version of Topper.

I insisted my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and siblings all call me Hoppy. I spent three or four months making sure mom and dad knew I had to have an official Hopalong Cassidy bicycle for my sixth birthday. There likely wasn’t a more excited kid on the planet when one mysteriously appeared on our garage the morning of my birthday.

I ate, slept, and breathed Hopalong Cassidy. My goal in life was to become Hopalong Cassidy.
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Saturday morning I’m leaving for a week long fishing trip in Ontario, Canada. We will be returning the weekend of June 14/15 so there will be no new posts here until after I get back.

During last summer’s trip I caught the 30″ walleye pictured above. If tied for the largest walleye caught out of the resort we go to last summer.

It appears our trip this year will be wet. If the weatherman is to be believed, highs will be in the 60s and it will likely rain every day we are there. Last year, it was sunny and in the 80s and 90s every day except for one.

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The photo to the left is what I saw out my windshield as I was waiting for one of today’s garage sales to open.

I woke this morning to eleven new garage sales in the paper and to between 1.5″ and 2″ of new snow on the ground. To make it more enjoyable, the snow had a lot of moisture in it, making the residential streets in town slipperier than they had been all winter.

One of the sales was postponed until next Saturday, but everyone else just toughed it out, put on their winter coats, shoveled their driveways, and opened up on schedule.

The pickings were kind of slim. My purchased amounted to:
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I left the house this morning in a good mood. My to-do list for the day was relatively short and tomorrow morning I would be leaving for the NCAA Frozen Four Hockey Tournament in Denver.

First stop - Holiday Gas station for a steaming hot cup of Columbian coffee. Life is good.

Second stop - The ATM machine where I bank to withdraw some money from my PayPal account using my PayPal debit card. As soon as I’d entered the amount and pushed the enter key, my card was immediately spit out and the screen read “Card not accepted. Please contact your financial institution.” A second attempt produced the same results.

A phone call to PayPal produced a twenty-minute wait on hold after which a pleasant customer service rep told me that my PayPal debit card, along with many others, had been canceled because the card number had likely been compromised due to a security breach at a merchant I had used it at. I was able to have a new card issued right over the phone, but was told it would probably be 7 to 10 business days before I would receive it.
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There ended up being a total of five garage sales that opened in Grand Forks today.

My first stop was a church sponsored sale where I paid $2 for the opportunity to get in at 8:00 am, an hour before the general public was admitted. My purchases there amounted to a 3 DVD set titled Legendary Lighthouses for $1 and the A & E mini-series Pride & Prejudice on VHS for $2.50. Legendary Lighthouses was listed on Amazon for $26.99 and Pride & Prejudice will go on eBay.

My second stop was a sale that had advertised ‘lots of books’. They weren’t lying, but they were nearly all old romance paperbacks with water damage. My guess is they were in someone’s basement eleven years ago when Grand Forks was almost entirely underwater. I did buy about a half dozen Great Northern Railway Historical Society fact sheets and calendars at this sale for a dollar. These will go on eBay starting Sunday evening.
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Every week I get emails from readers asking various questions about how and what I sell on eBay and about eBay in general. Some of them don’t even have anything to do with eBay.

Since many of these questions, and their answers, would be both helpful and of interest to other readers, today I thought we would do something a little different.

If you have a question you would like to ask, use the comment form below and I’ll answer it.

First though, a few guidelines before we get started.
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I was a bit surprised that Midwinter Stonehenge Wild Oats pattern dinnerware I had on eBay didn’t do that well. Of the four auctions, only the salt and pepper set sold and that only for the starting bid of $9.99. I had thought both the coffee pot and the 4 plates would sell for sure, which just goes to show how smart I am.

The three unsold listings have been re-listed and are once again live and will end on this coming Sunday evening.

Overall, a total of eleven of the sixteen listings sold for a total of $518.58.

The best money makers were the two Zenith Trans-Oceanic radios that I paid $25 each for. The sold for $203.50 and $136.27. They were followed by the Canadian Pacific Railway plate which sold to someone in Canada for $78.77.
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Here are the links to the eBay auctions for the Midwinter Stonehenge Wild Oats pattern dinnerware I bought last week after reading about the pattern in Lynn Dralle’s newsletter.

I’ve also included links to the other eBay auctions I have running this week, along with where I got each item and what I paid for them.

The fifteen pieces of Midwinter Stonehenge dinnerware were split up into four auctions - the coffee pot, the salt and pepper set, four cups and saucers, and four salad/bread plates. I paid $5.00 for all fifteen pieces at our local Boys Ranch thrift store.

I I have twelve other auctions running this week which are:

A book titled Isabel Bloom: The Artist And Her Legacy. I paid $.50 for this at a local thrift store.

A 1996 Dayton Hudson Marshall Fields Santa Bear mug. Another thrift shop purchase for $.10.
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It was 23 degrees, overcast, and a light snow was falling at 9:15 last Monday morning when I set out for a trip to all seven local thrift stores.

The first stop was the Holiday gas station a few blocks from home for coffee. Being way too cheap to pay $4 or $5 a cup at Starbucks’ or Caribou, Holiday stations are where I get my coffee fix in the morning when I’m on the road or just out-and-about. They offer four varieties but I’ve found that their ‘Dark Roast’ seems to attract more inventory then the other three, so that’s my blend of choice if I’m shopping.

Armed a steaming cup of coffee, I was on my way to…..

The Salvation Army Smart Shop. Unlike a lot of Salvation Army thrift stores around the country, this one is strictly up-scale. In fact, built nine years ago, it serves as a model for newer Salvation Army stores in upper class neighborhoods around the country.

Sadly, that means that probably 80% to 90% of what comes in the back door never gets into the store itself. It’s thrown right onto a semi-trailer and, when the trailer is full, it’s hauled to Minot, ND where it’s bundled and sent either overseas or to other stores in poorer neighborhoods of large cities. I’ve been trying to get into their back room on a regular basis for years without any luck.

This is one of two thrifts in town where I’m often able to buy college textbooks for a dollar or two each. Mondays visit there produced five non-fiction books dealing with various religions for an investment of $3.50. All five books were listed on Amazon prices ranging from $12.99 to $27.29.
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If I live 200 miles from the nearest airport, I’m probably not going to spend too much time worrying about a Boeing 747 falling on my home because it came up a little short of the runway. If I live one mile from the end of the main runway of a major airport and their landing lights have a history of malfunctioning, then it might be a different story.

That was my first thought a short time ago when I read Randy Smythe’s post And So It Begins! in which he talks about a new web site for “serious eBay sellers” called BidBlocker.

BidBlocker’s home page says:

“The only way sellers can protect themselves from unwarranted negative feedback is to block problematic Ebay customers. Customers who have left negative feedback in the past are more likely to do so in the future.”

Unwarranted negative feedback? - In more than nine years, selling across six eBay User IDs with a total of more than 14,000 feedback I’ve received a total of eight negative feedback ratings. Were any unwarranted? Two may have been, but even those two were from buyers who honestly felt they had a legitimate complaint.
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