Okay, listen up, people. I am right here right now on Ebay, TOTALLY FREE, gonna tell you the SECRET SHORTCUT to eternal happiness and success and thereby put the entire gazillion-dollar-a-year self-help industry totally out of business.

The secret is (shh! She's about to say it!), THERE IS NO SHORTCUT. The ONLY way you are going to be successful at whatever you attempt (lose weight, make money, be happy) is to Work Really Hard at it, Every Single Day. I can now hear the disappointed groans from thousands of lottery-players and self-help book readers out there, but I'm sorry, there is no way around it: Work Really Hard Every Single Day.

Button, button, who's got the button? Apparently YOU will if you win this auction. This plastic case of buttons came with the house when we bought it several years ago. I have no idea how old they are (not very, since the case is plastic!) nor what they're made of (they appear to be metal, and some at least brass-coated) nor how many there are. No, I am NOT counting them! There's 18 compartments in this case, and a minimum of five buttons in each compartment, so we're talking well over 100 buttons. They range in size from about 1/4 inch to 3/4 inch. There seem to be five or six patterns and multiple buttons and sizes of each pattern, but I don't really care enough to go through them all and catalog them. What you see is what you get.

Handmade Origami Sculptures

People ask me, Mojo, what do you do with your time when you're not writing these fabulous Ebay item descriptions for your craptacular? The answer is simple. I do other things. Like this.

One thing I do is, I sell origami animals as greeting cards. They're called Sculpted Greetings. People write a message and/or upload a picture, choose a color, and all this personal stuff gets folded up into the model of their choice. As a result, I have a house full of these tiny little origami animals that I folded ages ago to take the pictures for the site. They have no messages or personal pictures in them--or if they do it's a bogus message--but they are otherwise too cool to really throw out. Which puts me in an odd psychological dilemma--I don't WANT them anymore ... they have served their purpose ... but I can't bring myself to throw them out or burn them.

Sure, I built plenty of treeforts when I was a kid. I was quite the little monkey/carpenter for a few years. It was all part and parcel of the idyllic Leave It To Beaver childhood I enjoyed, which of course is an integral part of my current happiness and contentment. And then someone gave me this coffee-table book for Christmas on Treehouses of the World by Pete Nelson, and I came to an important realization. That even though to this day I still climb the occasional tree (sometimes to see where I am in the woods, or just to pretend I am not as middle-aged as I fear I have become) I am... how shall I put this?.... Oh, what the hey, I'll just say it... I am FORTY TWO YEARS OLD and hence I am (staggering as it may sound) NOT REALLY INTERESTED IN TREEHOUSES ANYMORE.

(minus that litter box smell...)!

You might not know it from reading these descriptions, but despite my snarkiness I actually hail from a fully functional, loving family. My upbringing was pure Leave It To Beaver in that most of my childhood traumas revolved around Not Getting The Part in the School Play or Eddie Haskell Said a Mean Thing About Me Behind My Back, and not the really awful things some kids live through nowadays (and back then, too, but it was all hidden so nice people could at least pretend it didn't exist and lament about how much nicer it was back then).