Linda with a Smile

February 8th, 2008

The Lady Behind the Smile

Hi! I'm Linda and I'm a really happy lady because I have a really happy life. I've been married for 21 incredibly fun years to a really, really great guy, and we have a great son and daughter-in-law who are just as happy as we are. And I have Bailey, a sweet little cockapoo puppy who's an angel and just like a little stuffed toy, and Augie, my lovable little lap cat who has the wannabe personality of a 300-pound lioness and is absolutely convinced that live mice make the very best presents!

     We've lived all over the United States and even a year in Ireland, and now we're happily settled in sunny southern California which I can honestly say comes pretty close to paradise. In fact, according to National Geographic , we have the the best weather in the United States and I have to agree — it's just about perfect with year-round sunny blue skies, rolling green hills, the sparkling blue ocean only minutes away, and best of all, no bugs or humidity in the summer, and no snow or sleet in the winter. On top of all this, I have loads of great friends, and my family's near by, so there's really no secret why I wake up with a smile and go to sleep content.

     I've been an HR manager for two very large computer firms, an import/export manager for a satellite navigation company, then I went into sales and sold building control systems, then wine , then finally real estate . I couldn't work during the year we lived in Ireland so I took an "early retirement" until June 2005 when I went back to work for my husband as the facilities manager for his printer supplies company. Then in January 2007 I retired again to have surgery on my feet, and in January of this year I started a 6-month major renovation of our house. After this I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I won't be bored, that's for certain!

      So how did I ever get to the point of designing my own website? Well, I had kind of a computer epiphany, you might call it. Up until about 5 years ago, I only used my computer for writing letters and sending email and managing our finances. I knew absolutely nothing about how my computer worked or what the Internet was all about until I stumbled across eBay's website one day. I started buying little things at first, and then bigger items as I became more comfortable with the bidding process. And then I decided to become an seller. It was easy to learn how to sell because I knew my way around eBay's website so well from having been a buyer. But I also knew that the secret to selling was having great photos on your auction listings so I bought an nifty digital camera and spent countless hours learning how to tweak the best out of it.

      So then I had great photos but my auction pages were boring and I wanted to jazz them up with catchy graphics and colors and layouts. But it wasn't long before I discovered that in order to do this, I had to learn how to write in HTML which is the programming language that controls the way the entire Web is formatted. So I decided to teach myself HTML and I became a woman possessed, staring at my computer screen late at nite for hours on end (who needs sleep anyway?) until finally, one day, everything just seemed to come together with a and I said, "I got it!" And then, just to see if I could do it, I designed my own website and published it on the Internet. Me, who only six months before, barely knew my way around a computer.

     Now here I am, a geek of all things, and I never even knew I had an aptitude for technical stuff. I'm a great teacher and I understand how to explain things in very simple terms, so if you have any questions about HTML or the Internet, just email me and I'll be happy to help you if I can, or point you in the right direction if I can't.

     I'm also a textile artist and at the moment, I spend most of my free time hooking rugs. Rug hooking is a textile art that allows me to be very creative with design and color, and I found it's the perfect medium to scratch my artistic itch. I also do every kind of needlework imaginable, and I paint , and I even combined the two when I dabbled at painting needlepoint canvases, but that didn't last long because it finally dawned on me that my pretty paintings were being stitched over and all my hours of work would never see daylight again so that ended that!

     I also love antiques which is obvious from the liberal sprinkling of antique furniture, hooked rugs, miniature woodstoves , vintage chalkboards and oil lamps , and other treasures throughout my house that I acquired during my travels in America and Europe. And these are some of the items that I occasionally sell on eBay . . . great finds of my own that have long been in storage and need a new home, as well as great finds from estate auctions and the legendary southern California swap meets. Sometimes, too, I even sell first day baseball covers (cachets) for my dad which is another adventure in itself! My eBay ID is lindawithasmile so if you have a minute, click here and see if I'm selling anything at the moment.

     On top of all this, I've always got a project or two going so life is certainly never boring. And I'm not the only one in my family who lives like this, just ask my cousin, Gail, there's nothing like a new project to jumpstart a new week!

     So that's a little bit about the lady behind the smile. Please email me if you have any questions about my website or my auctions, I'm always around and I'd really enjoy hearing from you. Thank you so much for stopping by. May you, too, wake up with a smile and go to sleep content!