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. 

Full of Surprises

My life is weird, part 100 in an infinite series:

I went outside Thursday night to pick some flowers to show everyone at work – they were curious to see what these “Ammi” flowers I had been talking about actually looked like – and then I suddenly heard the Harlem Globetrotter’s theme song. I turned my head and noticed the whistler-in-question was wearing a bicycle helmet and a backpack and coming down the road on a unicycle. Our house is at the bottom of a rather steep hill, and he rather casually road up and over the hill without missing a beat of the song.

I just stood there a moment, because I wasn’t quite sure how to react. Did that just happen? Have I officially seen everything? 

I walked in the house, brushed my teeth, and immediately went to bed. I mean, what else could I do? 

To celebrate my one day off this week, I went to Taco Bell and did a little horse shopping. I almost bought an exceptionally well-shaded Peptoboonsmal, but instead I came home and just completed my order for the latest Stablemates Club release Raider, on the G1 Seabiscuit mold:

I also threw in a Chasing Rainbows Blind Bag because they were having a sale on Stablemates this weekend, and those particular blind bags have been hard to come by in these parts. And there’s always room for more Stablemates!

But back to Raider: apparently he has a slight purple iridescence to him, not unlike the Unicorn Mare and Foal set Mira and Antares. While I wasn’t interested in that set, I think it was more a matter of the molds than the colors, because all of the photographs I’ve seen of Raider in-hand make me love him even more. 

Technically the Seabiscuit mold has come in overo before, but that was in the 1990s when masking was much less sophisticated.

I also bought a box lot online, but I am not entirely sure who or what I’ll be keeping of it until it gets here. Since I didn’t get a chance at one of those NPOD grab bags this year (yet somehow some folks ended with multiples, grr…) I’m counting this as my official Grab Bag Surprise lot.