Just a Little Over a Year Ago

August, 2006.  I logged into my eBay account to check on the items I had listed for sale.  As most eBayers are aware, when eBay wants to promote something, they do so at login time.  Usually irritated by these promotional interruptions, I typically click the button that says something like, "Just take me to my originally intended destination, already!" and, having bypassed their roadblock with only minor (if redundant) irritation, I am back on track, busily managing my store or browsing those of others.  This day, however, their promotional message caught my eye, and I followed the link to "find out more" about the eBay Blogs, and, more importantly to me, the competition eBay was holding -- the blogging and guides competition.

To make a long story short, that is when I started blogging.  I was intimidated at first and wrote very different pieces from those I write today.  Let's just say, I had no idea what I was doing, but the WHY I was doing it was clear.... I liked the idea of the competition.  The 10-week competition was broken into five two week periods, with monetary awards being announced at the end of each period.  My early participation won me a "low" monetary prize the first period, which only served to draw me in further.

Before long, I was making "friends" with other bloggers, watching blog fights, blog romances, blog profanity, blog bullies, blog spamming, blog reporting, blog scamming.... let's face it, there was a little bit of EVERYTHING on those blogs.  By the time the competition was over, daily writing had become a way of life for me, and connecting with this on-line group of people who had really very little in common except an eBay account, was, for the most part, entertaining.

For more than three years, this was the extent of my blogging.  Having started out trying to write helpful tidbits for other eBay sellers, I soon realized that most of the folks on those blogs were more seasoned sellers than I and no matter what "helpful" hints I might have, there were always those who had been there, done that, and knew better.... basically, there was no point in posting these types of posts.  And anyway, there was a natural inclination, when sitting before the computer, fingers poised to author a post, to tell a story.... and the stories that came to mind were those true experiences of my life.  So, over the years, that's where my posts evolved.

One of my earliest attempts at the story-telling posts follows:

"Monday, August 21, 2006

Another first husband funny -- true story

My post yesterday about my first husband and his DE accent got me thinking about some other funny episodes.

Every year, we had a big Halloween party for our friends in our local community theater group. (They love to dress up anyway.) We lived in a house in the woods with a 1/4 mile private dirt/gravel road/driveway. My then-husband, James, decided the number of people coming to the party would be more than we could easily accommodate parking-wise. So, he asked the folks at the little church at the end of our dirt road if we could use their parking lot for our guests. They were fine with that and James devised a plan. Our guests would be directed to park in the church parking lot and then he and another of our friends would give them rides on the trailer behind the tractor up to the house. Everyone agreed.

On the evening of the party our friend, Rich, arrived in time to help with the parking/chauffeuring duties. I opened the door to find this 50-something, very heavy, jovial friend of ours dressed as a ballerina...pink tutu and all!

I said, "Rich! What a great costume!" to which he smiled and explained, "James said he wanted Ballet Parking!!!"

I laughed until I cried! James' version of the English language always cracked me up! I could just see him having told Rich he wanted Valet Parking!"

In August or September of 2009, eBay announced they would close the Blogs... Let me tell you, there were naysayers.  They simply could NOT believe eBay would take away this forum that, they contended, gave eBay zillions of hits per day via the search engines.  They simply could NOT believe eBay would determine our "playground" to be less cost effective than they wanted.  They simply could NOT believe eBay was going to close the door on all of those on-line friendships that had developed over the years.  I believed, and went through the painstaking process of copying all of my posts that I determined worthy of "keeping" over to my new blog, a blog I had created on Blogger.  It was a lot of work, but by the "night the blogs went down in eBay,"  my posts were up and published in Blogger.

Maintaining those eBay-born friendships on-line since that time has been a more concerted effort.  There are alternate sites where others post their blogs, and there are the Facebook and MySpace forums, but nothing has the same ""feel" as did those blogs.  I'm not going to say I want the blogs back on eBay -- they definitely had their "issues," but I am happy they brought me to the blogging world.  I enjoy it.  It is an outlet and a chance to just "muse" on an almost daily basis.

October 31, 2009 was the date eBay announced was the be the last day for those blogs.... in true eBay "trick or treat" style, they shut them down a day early...

RIP eBay blogs.... I enjoyed you while you were part of my life!