BreyerFest in a Box

More technical difficulties this week, that (I hope) are finally worked out.

On the plus side of being mostly offline, I’ve been able to (a) finish dusting, (b) clean the garage, (c) sort and “triage” my quilt projects and even work on them a bit.

(The situation there is not as bad as I thought – I may still be able to hit my original pre-pandemic target by the end of the year!)

I’ve also – mercifully – been able to avoid most of the Online NPOD/Grab Bag “reveals”, which have become something of a sore point with me this year. While I am glad that I managed to get what I could get when others could not, that was one thing I was really hoping to “participate” in this year.

But alas, like so many other things this year, I could not.

My “BreyerFest in a Box” arrived Tuesday, and I’ve slowly been opening pieces throughout the week, as my emotional needs warranted. The first model I opened wasn’t the Surprise, but the Thorn:

I knew when they revealed that the Thorn was the Gloss/Matte Split model that that meant I was still probably getting the Matte, because my lack of luck with Glosses extends even to releases where I have a 50/50 shot (or better, with Lancelot!)

And as chance would have it, the Gloss Thorns are especially nice, and all the people who had him as their 5th or 6th choice and ended up with the Gloss are now either deciding to keep him, or using his “new hotness” to procure something more to their likings.

As you know, I do not play that game, so it’ll probably be a while before I add a Gloss Thorn here. I’m hoping it’ll only be a year, maybe, but the prices for a lot of not-that-rare things are absolutely nonsensical now so it’s hard to judge. Either way, it means I’ll have to wait.

(I was not expecting to see Kochab – the Stablemate MiniMe of the Duende North Star – going for nearly a hundred bucks on eBay, but that’s where we are right now.)

So I didn’t have a whole lot of hope when I finally decided to open my Surprise Friday night. When I took off the orange outer bag I could see that it was the Silver Dapple Black, so I immediately and logically assumed it was the Matte – who appears to be the most common color/finish combo of the Surprises this year.

And I was fine with that, since the color is beautiful and something that they could definitely put on all the things going forward. So when I took off the inner plastic bag and discovered this instead:

My brother and I used to joke that if Mom ever had the luck of actually winning the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes, they’d never be able to use the footage in their commercials. Instead of immediately bursting into tears or screaming for joy, she would yell something along the lines of “It’s about [expletive deleted] time!” grab the giant check from the hapless Prize Patrol people, and slam the door in their faces.

And only then she would have cried.

Yeah, that’s what I did.

One tiny bit of redemption in a BreyerFest that was otherwise not what I wanted, or expected.