Delays, Changes, and A New Plan

The beginning of the school year always throws me off.  I suppose that I shouldn’t be too surprised by that.  I go from having nothing but free time for three months to a life of real responsibility.  But every year I find myself in a state of near total confusion:  wait, this is what most people do every day?  How do they manage?   How am I going to get rich?  Surely, I can’t put up with the indignity of going to work every day for the next few months.   

After about a week or so of thrashing about, however, I usually settle down and even come to enjoy the rhythms of the school year.  But during the first part of the year, I get very little done besides complaining to my girlfriend about how unjust the world is.

That is part of the explanation for my not writing a blog entry recently.   But there is another reason: I have become increasingly less satisfied with my idea of holding the auction for Charlie’s painting at the Brickhouse and have been trying to figure out what to do before writing something.

I have two reasons for my dissatisfaction.  First, planning and holding an event takes an enormous amount of organizational skill.  Now, I do have my ally, Shelly.  And she has been quite helpful in generating ideas.  But as we have been talking about the matter I have realized just how difficult it is to pull off a successful event of the sort we had envisioned. 

The second reason, however, is what really has persuaded me.  If I hold the auction at the Brickhouse, I will lose the potential participation of everyone on the internet including just about everyone who has been reading this blog.  And that strikes me as a very bad move.  Why would I want to limit the number of people who might bid on Charlie’s painting to the few who might show up the night of the auction?  To my mind, that makes very little sense.

So, I have a new plan:  I am going to conduct the auction right here on this blog.  How I am going to do that is still a bit of a mystery to me, since conducting an auction on the internet is as new to me as conducting an auction at a bar.  But the basic idea seems pretty straightforward.  And I even have a new wrinkle.

I will conduct two different types of auction: one will be cumulative; and one will be non-cumulative.  I will explain in my next post what exactly that means and why I want to have two different auctions.  But I will say that I am now as excited about the new two-fold plan as I was about the old plan.  And since I have finally grown accustomed to the cloak of responsibility, I should be able to post my next entry fairly soon.