Gaiter Bait

I was very fortunate to get the one model (aside from the Centerpiece, which will never happen ever) I wanted out of the event, the Cremello Five-Gaiter Okeeheelee:

(I only just realized today that the Park he’s named after is… full of ‘gators. Nice one, guys!)

I had decided that this was going to be the year I was going to finally acquire those Gloss Alabaster/Albino and Palomino Five-Gaiters that had eluded me all these years. Especially since all the Saddlebred love now belongs to Hamilton, who appears to have replaced both Othello and Silver as the model on everybody’s BreyerFest Surprise Model bingo card.

(Except mine. It’s going to be a while, guys. Seriously.)

But until I got Okeeheelee, it looked like the year was going to be a washout. I kept missing all the good ones – online, and in person – sometime by minutes. Like most models (and most recently, my Alabaster Proud Arabian Stallion) it looks like I’ll have to bide my time until the right ones come along.

So I was plenty pleased – and a bit worried – when I saw Okeeheelee, sitting there right in that sweet spot in between Albino and Palomino. He was my first choice, and my luck in getting picked near the front of lines is generally not good. The same goes with cremellos, sometimes in the most bizarre ways: it took me a year to finally get the “ordinary” Uffington, because the Holographic Silver just had to happen.

I got so lucky: I was seventh in line! I probably shouldn’t have worried, since everyone was having a conniption over the Bouncer, who would have been my first choice if the Gaiter hadn’t been there.

A few more thoughts about the trip itself…

Three things I miss about Florida:

The weather, obviously. Other than the hurricane part: snow is much easier to shovel than water. I spent a lot of my extended Thanksgiving weekend buried under a pile of blankets. 

Secondly, my friends – or more precisely, getting to hang out with other humans I can have interesting conversations with. And by interesting conversations I mean the engineering of stagecoaches, notable Florida Thoroughbreds, or the differences between Puerto Rican-bred and Colombian-bred Paso Finos. You know, normal stuff.

My family doesn’t really want to hear about the horses anymore (something I’m sure some of you might understand), and all my coworkers talk about are reality shows, football and their hair, three things I could not care less about if you paid me to.

And finally: passing as a reasonably put-together and competent person. I sometimes (okay, often) deal with Imposter Syndrome, and being able to walk around and not feel like a completely out-of-place weirdo was nice. 

I get a little of that at BreyerFest, too – the Imposter feeling, not the not-a-weirdo feeling, because I completely lean into the weird in Kentucky – but as I’m not on Facebook (or even the Internet all that much, lately) I managed to avoid knowing who else was going to be present in Florida (with a couple of exceptions). 

So I walked into that situation without any preconceived notions of how I had to behave or who to expect. Kind of like a real vacation, except with the happy coincidence of some of friends coming along for the ride. (In two cases, quite literally!)

And as I mentioned before, all the freaking out at the CSRs in the days leading up to the event also probably helped.

Time to crawl back under those thick, heavy blankets, and look at seed catalogs.