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He even manages to sneak into the Christmas card pictures!
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 As a proud graduate of Northern Illinois University, my heart aches for everyone affected by the senseless tragedy on 2/14/08. My thoughts & prayers are with the NIU community at this time.
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That's the question I hear often. The answer is quite simple & I guess perhaps a little humorous.
Years ago a little stuffed frog came into our life. He started out as a gag gift but soon Hopscotch Jellybean (a.k.a. Hoppy) became an integral part of our household.
Both my husband & I used to do a lot of business travel...separately, not together. Hoppy used to travel with one of us to give us a memory of home. It became a tradition to take a picture of him with a local memento.
When I decided to open up an Ebay store, I was stumped as to what to name it. As I thought & pondered, I looked around the room. Lo & behold, there was Hoppy looking down from perched atop a picture frame. Ever since we've had children, poor Hoppy has kind of taken a back seat in our lives. Not too much traveling & not a whole lot of photo opportunities.
Since he'd been a part of many of our happy memories & adventures, it only seemed fitting that dear old Hoppy would help play a part in the opening of my ebay venture. So that's how Hopscotch Jellybeans Treasure Trunk came to be!
As for this Ebay store, it came to be once I discovered how much stuff we had accumulated over the last few years. I guess it creeps up on you, especially when you have kids who are spoiled by generous friends & family!
So after years of being an Ebay buyer, I decided to try my hand at selling some items. As if I don't have enough of my own items to list (and trust me I do...I really do!), once word got out that I was doing this, friends started dropping off some of their stuff also!
The bottom line is that I somehow managed to turn this into a little business. While of course a little extra spending money coming in is nice, I have to say that I also really enjoy the aspect of knowing that my items are going around the world & will play a role in making new memories for new owners.
My background is as varied as the items I sell. My degree is in Elementary Education. It's a long story that includes getting into a car accident with a police officer as I was moving out of state to start my first teaching job, but I never actually ended up teaching in a school setting. Instead I landed in the Educational Technology market for over a decade. I traveled all over the world attending trade shows & marketing educational software/hardware products....so I like to at least believe that my college degree was being put to good use! I discovered that I enjoyed public speaking and this former extremely shy person found herself doing presentations to hundreds & in a few case, thousands, of people regarding how technology could best be used in schools.
I eventually got married & started having children of my own. While I loved my career & all of the opportunites it afforded me, I decided to cut back & in essence, for the most part, am a stay at home mom. I do work out of the home several days a week. It gets me out of the house, makes me feel like I'm making a difference in the lives of others, provides my kids the opportunity to interact with other kids their age & in general just works out great for all of us.
I do miss some of the "glamour & fame" of my former career days but am finding that selling on Ebay is giving me back the opportunity to use some of my marketing skills in listing the products & I've met (or I should say emailed with) some really great people! Unfortunately I've also run into a few people just trying to get something for nothing but fortunately that doesn't happened too often. I'm never going to get rich selling on ebay, but will definitely keep at it as long as it's fun to me & I can keep selling enough to cover the expenses of doing so!
Thanks to all of you who are reading this and an especially big THANK YOU to those of you who actually end up purchasing something. I try to be completely honest in describing everything I list & really believe in the customer service aspect of conducting transactions.
I'm happy that you visited my little part of the world & I invite you to bookmark my web page & visit again soon. As I find the time, I will continue to list new items...who knows, maybe there will be something that catches your eye! http://stores.ebay.com/Hopscotch-Jellybeans-Treasure-Trunk
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments!
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