American Girl has a lot of very overpriced dolls that I could never afford to get my daughters, but also a publishing arm that offers great advise books for the 9 to 12 year old girl crowd. I’ve gotten several for Mika (well, I got them through swaptree and I have not actually gotten them yet), and I’m impressed by how they tackle everyday issues that girls that age need to deal with.
I wrote before about how Mika enjoys the Just Mom and Me book, which offers different activities for moms and daughters. And now American Girl has come out with Just Dad and Me: The Fillin, Tearout, Foldup Book of Fun for Girls and Their Dads
I haven’t gotten the book yet (I just ordered it and will review it once Mike and Mika make use of it), but it’s interesting from the description alone how different the activities for moms and daughters and dads and daughters are. Mika and I have made songs together, reviewed restaurants and spent a lot of time answering questionnaires about each other. Those questionnaires also seem to be in the dad version, but they also include things such as making paper helicopters and coming up with secret handshakes. Hey, I personally don’t find anything wrong in the differentiation – but then again, Mike and I have a marriage divided pretty much along typical gender lines.
In any case, I thought that other families might be interested in this book (I just read heard about it today), and thus this posting.
Page 35 of 177
I originally wrote this posting in April 2010. I’ve recently taken a new look at listia, and I’ve revised this posting with the current (April 2012) credit values. While “prices” for many items have increased as the value of credits has plummeted, the problems outlined below continue to be an issue, in particular for items that are not very popular.
As followers of my blog (and my friends in facebook) know, I have been using lista.com for a few weeks now, mostly as a buyer (they give you a bunch of free points when you sign up), and finally as a seller. Well, after some calculations I’ve decided that Listia.com is as bad a business for “sellers” as Mary Kay.
In the last week I’ve listed a bunch of small, lightweight stuff: scrapbook embellishments, beads, pendants and little bottles of perfume. I offered free shipping in all of them, and put minimum bids so that it wouldn’t end up being a completely losing proposition. Still, I pretty much lost money on everything I “sold”. And by losing money I mean that I will end up having to pay in shipping costs more than the number of credits I got for the item in question.
While listia.com sells credits for 2-cents each (it was 10-cents in 2010), the value of each credit is actually about 1/6th of 1-cent (1 cent in 2010). If you post a $1 Amazon.com gift card code in listia, you will get about 500 to 750 credits for it. That means if you want to buy credits all you do is buy the online gift card from amazon, then post it on listia, send the code to the winner and pocket the credits.
Meanwhile, postage starts at 44 cents for letters and $1.22 for one-ounce packages. This means that the minimum amount you need to break even on shipping alone is 220 credits for items that fit into a regular one-stamped envelope and 610 credits, if you’re going to actually send a very lightweight package. Anything you send in a small flat rate box better net you at least 2575 credits, and don’t do a large one unless you are sure you can get 7325 credits from it. The actual numbers are actually higher, as you must pay for delivery confirmation or risk having the credits returned to the buyer. Packaging materials also add up (though once you start getting stuff from listia, you can re-use the ones you get).
Given those numbers, it’s usually hard to recoup the costs of shipping items for free. Very popular items – or very expensive ones, such as Coach purses and silver and gold jewelry – will easily net tens of thousands of credits, but a no-brand purse, a pair of shoes or even a mystery box filled with low-priced cosmetics, will likely sell at a loss.
More and more people are realizing this and they are charging shipping – but as shipping consists of real dollars, it’s easier for users to figure out when they’re getting a good deal and when they’re not – and people are on listia to get great deals. People are willing to pay shipping for expensive or unusual items, but don’t count on getting it for an old t-shirt.
That said, many ebay sellers who can’t afford the high posting fees on ebay are moving to listia, and are trying to “sell” their items by asking for shipping costs many times over the real ones.
Listia is also starting to push their “local” listings, to be a competition to craigslist and freecycle I imagine. If that takes on, there will be more reason to join.
If you do want to join, use this link and you’ll get an extra 100 credits.
I was thinking about Juana Azurduy today – the lyrics of Mercedes Sosa’s song often run through my mind. And as compelling (or catchy) as the song lyrics are, Juana’s story is even more so. She was a mestizo woman from the Alto Perú (currently Bolivia) region of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (currently Argentina). She rebelled against being a nun, was committed to the ideals of popular rights and freedom, and married a like-minded man. Together, they raised an army and battled the Spaniards using guerrilla-like tactics. She continued fighting even after her husband was killed in battle and she was injured, she through pregnancies and births – for over fifteen years. She received the official title of Lieutenant Colonel and later was named commander of the Northern Army. At one point she had over 6,000 troops under her command – waging a guerrilla style war against the Spaniards.
Her end was like that of other revolutionary heroes – not exile this time, but being set aside and left to die in poverty. She was only rescued from the pages of history a hundred years later, I’m not sure to what degree by Mercedes Sosa‘s beautiful song. Today, of course, she is recognized along the other heroes of the independence war in Argentina and Bolivia.
I learned Juana’s story and song when I was in elementary school in Argentina. The song really stuck with me, even thirty years later I remember many of the lyrics (press on “continue reading” below for the lyrics in English and Spanish). Part of me is surprised that I actually learned the story and song in school, given that our military government couldn’t have been too fond of any vindication of guerrilla warfare or anything associated with Mercedes Sosa. Still, the Argentine military did venerate all things martial, and specially those associated with the revolutionary war (after all, that has been the only war the Argentine military has fought /and/ won – if we don’t count the Conquest of the Desert, whereas the Argentine military conquered Patagonia by exterminating most of the Mapuche population) – so I guess they figured they might at least throw the girls a bone and tell them about Juana.
And Juana’s story is one that I want to tell my daughters. It’s one that inspires me and one that I imagine has inspired many other revolutionary women in Argentina. I want my little girls growing up knowing that women, as much as men, were responsible for the social changes that brought us freedoms and rights (which is also why I will tell them about Eva Perón, even though I was raised a radical and still cannot shake my bone set antipathy against her :-), and that it will be up to them to continue the struggle for rights and freedoms.
As I was thinking about Juana, it occurred to me that I couldn’t think of one female hero of the American revolution. The only one Mike could come up with was Betsy Ross (the woman who sew the first American flag). There must be other, more real ones – but they seem to be lost in darkness. And I wonder if having Betsy Ross as the “woman” of the American revolution does not do more harm than good – does it imply that the only way women can help revolutionary movements is through domestic pursuits? Do we only have men to thank for the freedoms and rights we enjoy in America? At least in Europe you have women throwing salons and contributing to the spreading of the enlightment, on which not only the French Revolution but the independent movements in all of the Americas are based. And you have women /directly/ participating in the war efforts in WWI and WWII (including in the French and Italian resistance movements – I’ll write about one such woman later). But where are the revolutionary women in America?
I’m not sure what is the chicken and what is the egg, but this led me to think about just how terribly sexist American society is. And I mean sexism in the sense of people believing that women are actually intellectually and/or ethically inferior to men – not /different/, I think women and men are different, but ultimately less. It’s not the sort of thing that you can pinpoint easily, but if you lived in other countries, you’d know what I’m talking about. For example, why is it that twice as many girls in the Arab world chose to become engineers as in America? Why is the idea of having a female president still so revolutionary in the US, when there have been women presidents in South Asia, Europe and Latin America for decades? But even those are just symptoms – what I’m talking about is something much more ethereal, something that you can actually feel and that my daughters will have to grow up to counter.
Below is the video of Sosa singing and the the words of the Juana Azurduy song, my free translation in English and the real ones.
This may very well qualify as the frilliest, most stupid post of my not very proud posting career. But hey, I can be as frilly as the best of them.
For some reason I decided last week that I wanted to get a lot of small lipsticks – I figured the girls might have fun using them to play make-up and they were less likely to cause much damage if they were the sample size rather than the full-size (plus the others would be cheaper). So I went looking for sample lipsticks at e-bay (where else? the things are not supposed to be sold), and quickly found out that there were two main kinds: Avon and Mary Kay, not surprisingly, given that these are products sold face-to-face by “consultants”.
I’m not much of a makeup wearer, and my only experience with Avon was when I was a child and my mother used to sell the line to her friends (though mostly I think she bought things for herself). I’ve never even met with a Mary Kay representative. I remembered the tiny lipsticks and that’s what I wanted – but I couldn’t tell from the blurry pictures on e-bay whether the Mary Kay packaged samples contained a small, skinny lipstick inside them. I could also not find any information about that online (imagine that – but that’s why I’m posting this, in case someone else is in the same dilemma ;-). But the Mary Kay samples were cheaper (about 17c each vs. about 25c for the Avon ones) so I decided to give them a try. Oh well, you win one you lose some.
As you can see by the picture above, the Mary Kay sample consists of a tiny applicator and a very small, thin layer of lipstick. They are not kidding when they say it’s for ONE application. There is probably enough to use on both my daughters, but they have small mouths.
The amount of lipstick in the Avon samples is much more generous, plus they are more like lipsticks, so I think the kids would like them more.
The real test, of course, will be what they find more fun.
Recent Comments