Hoping For Better Days

I’ve occasionally made the joke about how any time I’ve done “well” at BreyerFest, I always end up paying for it in the end, regardless. 

I was hoping to avoid that fate this year – or at least, mitigate the damage – but the shoe might be dropping this week, and to be frank I am kinda scared. I can only hope that I am believed and that I come out of the experience relatively unscathed. 

But there is no guarantee, and I did not sleep a wink Saturday night. 

Needless to say, any positive energy you can send my way would be very appreciated. 

I had some shopping to do on Sunday – mostly craft and storage supplies – and while I was out I finally managed to see some of the Tractor Supply Specials. The Stablemates were quite tempting, and the FFA Decorators were much nicer than I expected, but I managed to walk away without pulling out my wallet. 

If any of the Gibsons had been the Chalky variation, I would have bought one, but they were not. 

Since I’m not feeling particularly chatty again today, here’s another BreyerFest purchase:

This Seabiscuit – and another one painted a semi-leopard Appaloosa, in hobby enamels – were the only purchases I made from the Linda Walter estate. By the time I had made it into the room, most of the better Breyer items were already gone, and I didn’t trust myself to bring home any clinkies unbroken. 

But for some reason this little guy (and his partner) really caught my eye. I already have several variations of the original G1 Seabiscuit, but this one was – as you can see – exceptionally well-shaded. So well-shaded, in fact, that for a brief moment I mistook him for the Hagen-Renaker original.

The melancholy part of all this is that the context is missing. Was he just a lucky find on Linda’s part? Did Marney find a particularly nice one at the factory and send it Linda’s way, because of her love and advocacy of Hagen-Renakers in general? Or nothing at all?

I’ll probably never know.

I had another Stablemate in my showstring that I was having some second thoughts about, and I swapped him out for this guy. 

And I believe he was the first model that even placed for me in the show. For a while I was worried that that would be my only placing (and a tenth, at that), but things got better for me.

I can only hope this week ends the same way. 

The Blind Spot

I’m sure there are quite a few of you in the crowd that reads this blog that are familiar with the webcomic xkcd, and particularly number 1053, “The Lucky Ten Thousand.”

Basically, it’s about common knowledge: even when things are allegedly “common knowledge”, there’s a large group of people who – every day – learn about it for the very first time. 

I was a member of “The Lucky 10,000” today, but I am not feeling particularly lucky. In fact, I’m feeling sad, mad, bitter and a little overwhelmed right now.

Today is the day I found out Linda Walter passed away. Back in January.

Yeah, I am NOT okay right now. 

The worst of this experience is not the cruel irony of me being unaware of this news for five full months. Or the fact that I had a blind spot in my vision so large that an entire person, someone very important to me and my personal history, fell into it. 

Or that nobody even mentioned it to me even casually or wondered why I didn’t say anything about it before. 

When I don’t talk about a popular or trending topic it’s because (a) I don’t have anything worthwhile to say about it, (b) I’m legally obligated not to talk about it, or (c) I know/knew nothing about it. 

It may seem like I am all-knowing sometimes. But I am not, and it does not hurt to drop me a line and let me know. 

I haven’t been able to get around the Internet much this year for reasons I’d rather not discuss now, aside from my Paramount Plus subscription. (Because seeing an optimistic vision of the future is something critical to my mental health.) And I do not do Facebook because I already have too much drama in my life and that much social interaction sucks the life out of me. 

(A couple of you were kind enough to let me know about the APH situation as it unfolded on Facebook, and I’m grateful for that. You guys, specifically, do rock.)

No, what hurts the most is the fact that I only learned of this now: I simply have no time to grieve. My boss was kind enough to give me a day to process my rawest emotions, but now I have to put them back in a box and take care of all the other things I need to take care of over the next three weeks.

It’s only when I’m in some of those big empty spaces in between the places I’ll be visiting in Wyoming that I think I can unwrap that box and set them free.

“You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.” 

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections