A person with a competitive streak is not always easy to indentify. If you are a sports fanatic, then you are usually identified as a competitive fanatic by the way you are willing to paint your various body parts with the team colors. A competitive person might also be spotted if as the adult he argues with a 8 year old kid until the kid cries because in your words, “that kid is a stinking cheater” and “that shot was in before the buzzer.” These activities indicate a level of  seriousness around games that might need some therapy. Unfortunately for me, my sweet wife (who by the way is a very competitive person not in the way previously described but still she wants to win) has recently discovered the sport of EBAY. Now, I know you are thinking that EBAY is not a sport. According to my wife, it is her against the world. Most of the time my wife does not see the point of sports. She thinks sports are stupid. I can’t remember a game that I participated where she knew the score after we left the stadium. EBAY has become her new blood sport. On Sunday night, she was determined to out bid this other person (a nameless competitor she had determined to be enemy #1) for a set of books for my girls. The gleam in her eye as she feverishly tapped the keyboard of her Macbook is disturbing. She is not just attempting to get a good deal but she is strategizing like the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a war. I am the hapless Private and she is the merciless General barking out times that I “have to make sure ” she is up to put in the final bid. Last night, I was given orders to wake her up by “3:30am”. That is right, 3:30am!!! I asked why and she said, “because then I can beat out all the other people who have been trying to steal these books from me all day.” Do I need to comment on the obvious paranoia? I responded with a sharp, “Yes Mamm” and set the alarm. Let me set the stage for you. Her laptop is on the floor next to her bed and she is giddy with anticipation. Any other time my wife would require a bucket of ice water to get up at 3:30am. I am concerned that God has set the rapture in the late afternoon just so Amy won’t sleep through the lift off. But last night, the alarm went off and she swung out of bed with cat like reflexes swooping up the laptop and back into bed in one harmonious Alvin Ailey choreograph.  Side table light snaps on and her lap top music evolves. I am half awake and she says, “alright, lets go!”  She is a vigilant gladiator thrown into the floor of the coliseum.  Tense and tapping away at the keyboard, she waits for two minutes before the bid is over and makes her move;  a suburban lioness crouched in the internet jungle pouncing on unsuspecting retail prey. Waiting anxiously and desiring to turn the light out and return to my hibernation, I ask, “Did you get it?” She waits a second and in the most satisfactory sultry voice she triumphantly says, “I got it. HA!” She silently claps her hands applauding her EBAY victory.  I say “good night sweetheart” and roll over as she curls up like a cat that had just finished off a mighty meal.  The lioness - victorious in competition. If you listened closely I think you could hear her purring. AH