I lost, and I'm mad about it!

Biscuit loves the fire station he picked out at the consignment sale we went to the other night. At least 5 times since we got it, he's walked over to me and said, "Thank you for buying that fire station for me, Mom. I like it a lot."

Besides the fact that I'm amazed and proud every time he uses his manners, I just love that he's starting to understand gratitude.

Remember the cool retro fire station Biscuit got for Christmas? Well, he has arranged what you might call a "fire station village." He's got his two fire stations, what seems like 85 fire trucks, a few mismatched firefighters and one fire dog named Sparky all grouped together near the fireplace. (I'm not sure if the fireplace location is on purpose or not.)

His new fire station came with a truck, but none of the firefighters he has fits in the driver's seat of the truck. The set originally came with a couple of firefighters and a couple of hoses, but even without those pieces, it was still worth $4 for just the station and truck. I went online to see if I could find a couple of replacement firefighters. To buy them new, they were incredibly expensive. To order one male firefighter, one female firefighter, one fire dog and one hydrant, it would've been $29.99, not counting shipping. I don't think so!

So I found some on an online auction. There were two firefighters and a fire dog of the namebrand I needed, and the highest bid was $2.75. The auction was 19 hours away from being complete, so I decided I would keep my eye on it and bid close to the end. The shipping price was $2.50, so I had some room for raising the bid without breaking the bank.

I waited until 10 minutes before the auction ended, and I upped the bid by a quarter. It was at $3.50, and I was poised and ready to kick it all the way up to an even 4 bucks.

I figured out that normally, raising a bid is a two-step process. You type in your bid and click OK. Then you get a message saying "Are you sure you want to raise your bid to X?" And you click OK again.

Then I noticed a button that said, "One-click bid." I made a bad assumption. I thought I would wait until 10 or 15 seconds were left, then I'd use the one-click bid button, and I'd win the firefighters for Biscuit.

Wrong. The one-click bid button didn't work. I lost the auction.

I was SO MAD! Especially because the other available firefighters were just not what I wanted.

I told Jeff that the whole thing was sort of silly, anyway, because it's not like the kid NEEDS another firefighter, much less two more firefighters and a fire dog. But sometimes, you just want to complete the set.

Or if you'd rather hear the sad truth, I WAS WINNING!!! And I LIKE to win!