Technical Difficulties

Let me apologize for my general absence over the weekend. Like many of you, ended up spending way too much time trying to buy any. darn. thing. during the Virtual BreyerFest Online Experience.

I have some other commitments to take care of over the next few days, so I will have the physical Samplers ready by the end of the week. I’ll let you all know when they’re ready and what to do.

Back to the actual official BreyerFest stuff….

While I eventually ended up getting almost everything I wanted/needed, and a Cheesecake too because he was actually available one of the times I refreshed the Store page and I went for it, it took me most of the weekend to accomplish this.

Benelli never showed as being available, Kelpie was available only once (and gone when I clicked on it), and while I did manage to “get” a Grab Bag once, it was cart-snatched from me during the checkout process.

Overall I found it to be an unpleasant experience that left me unable to enjoy most of the video content. Once I even got them to work. (Refresh. Reboot. Switch browsers. And so on.)

Anyway, I did get my four top choices for Ticket SRs, which was nice, though it did take an extended phone call to Customer Service to figure out what the heck went wrong with my second ticket time.

It gave me five choices, I picked the two I had originally selected, attempted to check out, and… then nothing. Everything disappeared. I think everything is fine now, but I can’t access my bank account at the moment to make sure there aren’t any outstanding issues because of course I can’t.

I can only imagine what kind of week everyone is going to be having at the Reeves HQ as they sort all this nonsense out.

I did better at the Virtual Show than I expected - either 31 or 32 placings out of the 182 photos(!) I ended up entering. No firsts, but three seconds, two thirds, and only one tenth!

I’ll talk in more detail about the show in my next post, because I haven’t quite finished processing/analyzing it all. As far as participating in the “actual” show next year, that I have not decided. (It’s simply not an analogous experience; if there’s another online photo show, yeah, maybe…)

Since the show was the only moderately successful/pleasant aspect of this event for me, in lieu of making a memory box of the event like I usually do, I’m going to make a quilt inspired by the ribbons I won, incorporating the fabric I purchased that never got made into Ninja Surprise Bags.

(Not using the actual ribbons themselves, because I like my quilts machine washable.)

And finally, to address an issue/question that might be coming up over the next few weeks regarding my absence from another part of the “Model Horse Internet”.

All I will say in public is (a) it was not my decision, (b) it is not likely to be resolved any time soon and (c) I am currently exploring other avenues to interact with hobbyists online. (I have a lot of my plate for the next two weeks, so it’ll be a bit before decisions are made.)

Being unable to be with most of my co-hobbyists in a meaningful way the one week of the year I want (and need!) to be actively social was probably the roughest part of this whole… thing. It’s been something I’ve been wanting to work on anyway, but just like this year’s BreyerFest, circumstances are forcing my hand.