Happy Birthday to me!

Okay, this is a shameless attempt at getting birthday greetings from around the globe - can you blame me?

But, in addition to being the anniversary of my birth, it was also a very Happy day at eBay. Well, Alan's City of Brass sold for only $18.50 (it had been in the Store at $40), so that was a bit of a disappointment. This week I have Shahrazad up (originally in the Store at $50). We'll see what happens.

But two experiments I tried this week went very well. First off, I auctioned some Complete Common sets from various Expansions. The person who won the Tempest set (for $5.50) then went on to my Store and bought the remaining three Tempest sets I had there at $12.50 apiece - so that was great. And the four Chinese Fourth Edition auctions I had up (Birds of Paradise, Animate Dead and Dark Ritual, plus an unopened booster pack) sold for almost a combined $30. Considering the entire box of unopened packs only cost $144 or so, that's not a bad start. I basically paid $4 per pack, or 27 cents per card for these things. The Birds of Paradise sold for $20.50, the Animate Dead for $2.92 and the Dark Ritual for $1.25 - each a good improvement on the 27 cent investment. And the unopened pack sold for $5.01 - itself not too bad (it might actually come out as a loss if I take fees into account, though, now that I think about it).

Well, anyway, I remain convinced that a profit is to be made on this box. I have 27 Chinese Fourth Edition auctions up this week - each starting at $0.99. Some are for two copies or even four copies of a given common card, as I don't think anyone is likely to bid $0.99 on a single copy of that particular card. We'll see how they go. I have a bid on another box of these things from the same seller I got this one. I may even try to get two more if I can. I think that with a large pool of these to draw from I can easily corner the Chinese Black-bordered 4th Edition card market on eBay!

Oh, and by the way - a Biotech course update for you. I have my second exam in Nucleic Acid Methods this coming Tuesday (that's the class where the first test I was sure I did horribly in). The second (pop) quiz in that class went not so well - 6/10. Ugh! But the first test in Cell Culture went very well - I aced the short answer section and only missed 6 of 54 multiple guess questions. Overall score was 95-96%. Not too shabby!