Unbearable

I'm scanning vintage postcards and photo sets for Ebay today.
I have a bunch of them, including a set of views from 1940s Yellowstone National Park. Here's one of them - a shot of tourists feeding bears along the roadside.
We now know what irresponsible insanity this is, but as late as the 1960s people went to Yellowstone with the intention of feeding bears from their cars.
I think I mentioned earlier than when my parents took me to Yellowstone in the summer of 1956, we counted 29 bears along the roads during our two days in the park.
The National Park Service has pretty well stamped this practice out and the park's bears no longer see park traffic as a food source.

Monday crap

Most of my Ebay transactions go off without a hitch, but I'm dealing with a couple of major exceptions today.
I've been disposing of a set of dishes that Maria no longer wants and am happy to report that we've made more from them on Ebay than she paid for them and that almost all of them have gone through the mail stream without damage.
Except for the cup and saucer bought by Betty Mapes of Nebraska. She said they arrived broken. So I carefully packed a replacement set this morning and will mail them presently.
And then there's Maria's Nikon D100 SLR digital camera.
I sold it on April 25 to a guy in Colorado who was slow to respond to emails and welshed on the deal. He claimed he mailed a check, but it never arrived and I'm willing to bet that it was never sent.
So I voided the deal and re-listed it.
This time the buyer was a guy from India, living in Canada, who writes in very broken English. To his credit, he paid promptly by PayPal. But a few days ago he wrote to say the camera wasn't what he expected and he wants to return it for a refund.
I have been selling on Ebay for 10 years and have 568 comments in my profile - all positive - and I have always striven to make sure the customer is satisfied. So I agreed to let him return it with the stipulation that the camera, batteries, charger, and manual all arrive in the same condition in which I sent them.
And I will refund his money via PayPal.
I've been asked to shoot photos for the BMW MOA rally in Gillette, Wyo. next month and I was originally planning to take my D200, but now I think I'll spare the more expensive camera from the dust and vibration of a motorcycle trip and carry the rejected D100 instead.
For the record, the guy in Colorado has only 5 comments in his Ebay profile - the sign of an Ebay novice or a crook. From now on, I sell no big ticket items to bidders with less than 100 positive comments in their profile.
And I'm not crazy about the hassle of international transactions, either.
Now, I'm off to the postoffice and to take my Honda del Sol in for an oil change and lube and to get the hood latch repaired.
It's always something.