Susan Barrett Price's Blog, page 57

Ambient on Pandora: Can I Work to Music?

Always looking for ways to make myself stay in the chair and focus. Sometimes I think the "right music" will do the trick, but usually I'm kidding myself.

This week I'm experimenting with "ambient" music, the experimental "anti-music" genre that arose in the early 20th century along with Dadaism and Futurism. (I'm reading from Wikipedia.) Brian Eno is credited with coining the term "ambient music" in the mid-1970s, referring to music that can be either "actively listened to with attention or a...

Can you be both "hunkered down" AND "on a roll"?

There is no place more comfortable for me to work than my desk, with its perfect Aeron chair and double-wide computer screens and Bose ipod speakers and every little thing trained to be within arm's reach. It's high production.

But it's also full of little reminders… what's up next on ebay… time to put a capful of bleach in the sump pump… ding I've got mail… hey, look at that deer out my window… maybe I should pay bills…

Time to retreat to my cave.

Notebooks, netbook, iPhone go into a dorky...

Week In Review: Writing! Sales! Roar of the Greasepaint!

An intensive, productive week in writing, in rethinking my Ebay strategy, and in firing up the old camcorder. Read on>>>

Ebay Blues: Redoubling My Effort

Earlier I was obsessing over over my ebay fee hike and was planning to bail out. I couldn't get it off my mind, so I dug into my store paperwork to tidy up my records before jumping into a new strategy.

By noon I had talked myself into upgrading from the $16/mo. Basic store (with 20-cents/item/mo) to the $50/mo. Premium store (with 5-cents/item/mo). Long story short, I can make up the shortfall by shifting my sales focus from trashy ten-buck items to more treasurable $50-$100 buck items. At...

Ebay Blues: I'm Outta There!

Ebay sends out a press release and letter to sellers:

The upfront cost of selling on eBay is about to be dramatically reduced with our lowest Insertion Fees ever.

The retweeting set mindlessly repeats the headline. Problem: the lowest insertion fee ever (3-cents per item per month) comes at the cost of a $300/mo store subscription. If I keep my current store subscription ($15/m0), my item fee will go from 3 cents per month to upwards of 20 cents per month — more than a 600% increase. No can d...

There Once Was A Dame With A Project

There once was a woman who dangled;

Her comfort zone ever so mangled.

So she shot out the door,

Saying nope, nevermore.

Now she's feeling a tiny bit jangled.

This sums up the scope of my memoir — or personal mythology — project. Reducing its theme to a limerick (mixed metaphors and all) reminds me not to take myself so seriously.

Childhood Of My Discontent

[from work in progress:] I was restless from the start, the kind of fussy first-born baby who needed rocking chairs and car rides to fall asleep. I was shy, but my doting parents assumed I could do anything.

I was anxious about starting kindergarten. It wasn't separation anxiety. I was worried that I couldn't read well enough already. On the first day I was horrified to see children crying, scalding tears on their faces while mothers fluttered about. I didn't have time for that nonsense. Let's ...

This Week: Meandering Memory Lane

Digging into old photographs and more. This week in review, continued>>>

Kathie Price, Theresa Tighe, Susan Price, Jackie Price. July, 1955 at Castlewood.

Thinking About Nuns

How often do Catholics over 50 think about the nuns who educated us? I know there are a lot of sly looks about the inadequacies of women ill-equipped for family life and consigned to join the convent. And there are a lot of wincing jokes about nuns who smacked the hell out of little boys or who made little girls sit at their desks till they wet their pants. I witnessed the first with Dominicans and my mother fell victim to the second with Notre Dames.

But still, in these days of cynicism...

Susan in 1952

I went to my file to pull a couple photos and slipped down the bunny hole of scanning my childhood photos. Being the first child, I have a lot. I did through 1954. Here I am in 1952 at age 3-1/2, standing in our backyard with my doll Nancy and the neighbor boy — I think his name was Dickie. (I still have that gap between the 1st & 2nd toe on my right foot. But it's nice to see my left foot without a bunion.)