No blogging for me yesterday. It was the dreaded Ohio sales tax day, which used to be a piece of cake, or at least a piece of Form UST-1. But then came 2009 -- brave new worlds – when the state tax gurus declared mandatory electronic filing. Once you find it online, filling out the $%%#$ form isn’t all that hard, but I had somehow forgotten my user ID and couldn’t retrieve it. Your password they will send you, but lose that User ID and your account’s locked up tighter than a cat’s mouth in the presence of a pill. Long story short – what should have taken twenty minutes took the whole morning.
On the bright side though, yesterday also marked my first BONANZLE sale – four books to the same buyer, a fellow shop owner. I left a post on the forum announcing the great news – people do that there when they get their first sale– and immediately congratulatory messages poured in like jelly beans into a candy dish. Brightly colored fonts, animated dancing girls -- all I was lacking was a bottle of Martini & Rossi. Those ebay pangs I was feeling the other day? Forget about ‘em!
Then this morning I had to run uptown to the nicest jewelry store on the square (Medina’s town square is so quaintly cute that a model of its gazebo is going to grace a float in the next Rose Bowl parade) to drop off a couple books purchased by its lovely owner. The sun shone fetchingly and I was still feeling chipper from the bonanzle score, so I decided to walk the mile and a half since it wasn’t too hot. It's been years since I’ve walked anywhere in the middle of a work day, but there I was strolling around like I hadn’t a blessed thing to do. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that after I dropped off the books I decided I deserved a little bibliotherapy of my own and popped into the library too.
Medina has a big fancy new library which I wrote about last year, or whenever it was they opened, but useage is so insanely high that many times, especially during the summer, the new book section looks like the last day of the church rummage sale. Sure enough, the pickings were slimmer than a cross section of a blade of grass, but I came away with two titles: The Secret Life Of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn (which I actually thought was a new nonfiction about Dickinson I’ve been wanting to read, but is not); and The Red Thread by Ann Hood which is a novel about, in part, international adoption. Since both of our daughters and both little grandsons are all Korean adoptees, mention the A word on a dustjacket and I’m all yours. It remains to be seen how good either of these are, but I have promised myself that I am going to work until four today and then repair to the porch with Hood’s book and read for an hour before I make dinner.
Wow -- imagine it! A Bonanzle sale, a walk in the sun, a visit to the library, and an hour of uninterrupted bibliotherapy. Sales tax? What sales tax?
