Kerinthian's

In the past week I’ve been mauled by an angry cat, survived a 4.8 magnitude earthquake and received a rude email. Quite an exciting week really! Thanks to Felix, my ginger Rodentus Enemius I have a two and a half inch scratch marking the drumstick region of my thumb with its pain and bloody glory. I was trying to do him a favor by taking him to the vet but we never made it past the getting-him-into-the-cage stage as his back legs suddenly and miraculously turned into spinning lawn mower blades for my own special treatment of say-good-bye-to your-thumb pink face! (Sometimes Felix communicates with me through my own imagination so there’s a small chance I made that last part up). Nevertheless, there was nothing fake about me cancelling his vet appointment and swearing that he can die from whatever it was he was meant to be getting immunized against before I try putting him inside that cage again. Either that or I’m going to need one of those police shields you see used in riots, that a...

The islands of my fortune lay on the distant horizon; I’m so close except I brought a rocking horse instead of a boat! At least that’s how it feels. In all great exploits one reaches the point where you just want to get it over and done with, partly because you have other things you want to do and partly because boredom is stimulating your yawn glands! As you know about six months ago I set myself the arduous task of transforming $100 into $500 no matter how long it took. The vehicle for my journey was Trademe , the Kiwi equivalent of eBay, on which I would list old books I scored from various op-shops for bargain prices. I started this series with just over a hundred books left over from my last series; I now have just over 350 listed. Last week I complained about the sad fact that listing fees, success fees and the acquisition of new books to sell left me with a profit the size of a tooth pick in a cocktail sausage, nevertheless I am determined to continue until I reach th...

Wow, I just realized it’s been nearly six months since I started this thing! Actually that’s a little bit depressing. In this series I set myself the challenge of turning $100 into $500 using Trademe, an online trading site not unlike eBay. Specifically I began by buying books from op-shops; listing them online and then using the money I earned to buy double the amount I sold. When I started this challenge I had about 100 books left over from my first series Pimp My Twenty Bucks. Now, many months later, I have close to 340 books listed and very little space to keep them all! I have unfortunately reached that place in any journey where you feel like the proverbial pencil who thought that a pencil sharpener was a great idea until one day he woke up to discover he had become a pencil stub. It used to be fun twirling around in circles until he realized that those pencil shavings on the floor were all that was left of him and he would never ever become a real boy. That is of course...

Wow, writer’s block. Doesn't happen often but when it does its like trying to force a cinder block through the tips of your fingers! It could be that too much time on the computer has fried some of my synaptic pathways, or it could be because I went all hippie on my back yard today and planted two new fruit trees, leaving a blister the size of a Kansas right in the center of my right palm, which would be true if Kansas was the size of my blister. I’m clearly not used to physical labor, the handle of my shovel might as well have been a potato peeler for the damage it did to me, I feel like I’m typing while a small meteor burns its way through my hand! So in short, this week’s entry will be brief and written through gritted teeth and possibly tears… er, manly tears of course, the kind that would take Chuck Norris’ tears down in a fight. Regardless those tears won’t be from my gardening injury, but rather from the puny figure on my little accounting sheet here. It...