A Shiny Object to Distract You

Another less substantial one today - nothing to do with Halloween, it’s just my work schedule messing with my non-work schedule, again. Because contrary to what some of yous may believe, what I do here isn’t work. Work pays the bills, blogging doesn’t.

(Not a complaint, just a mere statement of fact.)

Our weather, mercifully, has been not awful. Not good, but a mere shadow of a shadow that hit the East Coast this week.

The only troubling thing I experienced was watching a transformer explode about a mile down the dark and sleet-covered road I was travelling for work yesterday morning. It was already being repaired when I drove back via the same route about nine hours later.

A small programming note - and unrelated to my personal issues with the concept of time - the big "reveal" will be Sunday night, not Saturday. Nothing nefarious going on, really: it was always scheduled for Sunday. It wasn’t until a day or so ago that all parties involved realized that this Sunday was the fourth, not the third. (My excuse: the way my work schedule is, it’s just better/less stressful for me not to look more than two or three days ahead.)

Like everyone else, I got my Glossy Zenyatta Foal, too. Oh my goodness, he’s beautiful:

There’s some variation in the run - some lighter, some darker - and mine’s on the darker side. My certificate says he’s #259 out of 500, but according to the letter included in the box, they were sent out randomly, and not according to order number. As I talked about before - and more experienced hobbyists know - the numbering doesn’t really "mean" anything anyway, outside of the personal meaning any number has for anyone.

Speaking of that letter, Zenyatta’s people did a beautiful job of marketing and packaging the little fellow - not just a letter, packing slip and receipt, but a "Certificate of Authenticity" that doubles as a "Birth Certificate", and a lovely little Thank You/Business Card.

Ah, if only every super-special were so carefully packaged and tailored to hobbyists. We all love our little bits of paper, don’t we?

Even if I hadn’t gotten him this week, I would have known it from all the Foals popping up, well, everywhere. I know I shouldn’t be surprised by it, at all, but it still grates a little.

I’m old school when it comes to very limited or exclusive Special Runs, always will be, I think. My first thought whenever I stumble across one early enough to take advantage of it is: Do I Really Want One? My second thought is Does Anyone I Know Want One?

If the answer is No to both questions, I generally pass, unless it’s so super-cheap that it’s worth the effort to resell. That’s generally the case when I stumble across something at the flea market, though there have been plenty of instances where I’ve let even those good deals go, just because it wasn’t worth the hassle.

I’ll let someone else have the pleasure of a good deal - or the aggravation of trying to resell it.

Shopping Roundup

I suppose all - or most - of you have found out about the latest Special Run surprise - this one being a Gloss version of Zenyatta’s foal, available on her web site. As of my posting this, there still do appear to be some left out of the 500-piece run:

http://www.zenyattashop.com/breyer-zenyatta-foal.html

Like Pavlov’s dogs, I salivated right on cue and bought one, too. Dark, chocolately bays have been my weakness of late - and in gloss? I was doomed.

Speaking of shopping…

While I love road trips (I’ll be taking one very soon!) I don’t take much joy in day-to-day driving. Getting stuck in traffic jams makes me wish that automotive engineers would stop trying to coax more horsepower out of smaller engines and just devote their time to finally inventing teleportation technology, dangnabit.

I had to do way too much driving for work this week; the only thing that made it bearable was that it gave me a chance to go to stores in areas I would not normally travel to. I like to multitask, so getting a little research done on the way to or from work? Excellent.

The first store I got to hit this week was the Tractor Supply, to check out their holiday selections. Like last year, it’s all Regular Runs, Holiday merchandise, and possibly a smattering of farm store stuff (those trailer sets cobbled together from factory leftovers.) I did really dig the Holiday Horse "Buena Noche", but I’ll save my natterings about him for sometime closer to the holidays.

And I finally managed to get a really good look at the Padre there: I still don’t have a Spirit mold in my collection, and all the other releases in that mold have prices outside of my comfort zone. However, his HUGE ZOMBIE EYES scared me away. Reminded me of that one Adventure Time episode. You know the one (or should):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZdtZIuVzmE

I don’t want a scary-looking horse staring at me while I sleep, either.

While I certainly haven’t been to every Walmart within driving distance of my house, I’ve now been to enough to conclude (for now) that they are only a figment of the Internet. Then again, I didn't see of the Mesteno Mustang SRs in these parts, either, so maybe it’s just a regional thing. (Which doesn’t make a lick of sense to me, since Breyers sell really well everywhere else around here.)

Then, just today, I swung by one of my "local" Tuesday Mornings to check out their latest offerings. Some of them received a small (and unadvertised) shipment of Breyer stock, mostly (but not entirely) discontinued Elvis Collection merchandise.

This store had a couple of Kongs and a couple of Bears; I took a modest fancy in one of the Bears, but I managed to escape without him following me home.

I will admit, it was a close call: my other two Bluegrass Bandits have nonrealistic finishes, and the pretty mahogany undertones they put into what would have been an otherwise nondescript matte black paint job were …intriguing.

Nope. Can’t do it. Gotta save the cash for the road trip. (Yes, it’s model horse-related. And yes, it’s something you’ll all hear about, when it all shakes out. No joke guys, it’s big.)

Ravel, Zenyatta, and Returning the Favor

I was in a slightly out-of-the-way farm supply store (not a TSC) for work yesterday. (It’s not far away at all, just in a direction I very rarely go.) I was a little surprised at the sheer size of their Breyer selection: there were cases and cases of Rising Suns, S Justadreams, and Zenyattas just stacked on the floor. They even had a bunch of the Costco Deluxe Stable Sets - the ones with the Palomino Duchess and the "Mini-Me Dallas" Johar.

Anyhow, after work I found myself going back to take a second look at some particularly attractive Idocuses. (Idoci?) I grabbed a couple to compare - a deep, dark bay one, and a very pretty lighter bay with just the right amount of metallic undercoat. For a moment, I found myself thrillingly contemplating the possibility that I had run across a super-cool variation, until it finally dawned on me that I was comparing an Idocus with … a Ravel.

In my defense, I had been running on about five hours of sleep over the past two days. Nor had I seen a sufficiently large enough sample of Ravels and Idocuses in person to discern the amount of natural variations in the two releases, and the point at which they would start overlapping.

I would have bought them both, regardless of the status of their finishes, had I had the money in the budget for them. But, I didn’t. I did sort of tuck the nicest Idocus of the bunch in the back of the shelf, just in case I change and/or lose my mind in the next few days.

One thing that might draw me back to that store is that huge stack of Zenyattas. Wasn’t she supposedly sold out at the warehouse? Well, I found out where they were stashing them!

The real kicker was that they had been on sale since before Christmas, if the date on the sign next to the stack was any indication. Even the not-sale price was pretty darn reasonable. I’m going to assume, given the nature of the area the store is located in, that the only horsepower the local heathens truly appreciate is the kind that comes with four wheels and a tonneau cover.

I’ll admit I haven’t been all that into the horseracing scene lately either - to the degree that I was in the late 1970s, anyway - so the apparent shortage of Zenyatta models wasn’t a huge concern of mine. She’s pretty, and I do love the color, but I’m well stocked here on Lonesome Glory molds. If I have to buy another Lonesome Glory, it’ll be either the Phar Lap (because of that beautiful color), or the Red Rum (because I was so in love with the real thing, back then.)

It did feel a little weird leaving that huge stack of them behind. I know that the arrival of a fresh batch of Zenyattas to dealers is imminent, so buying a few to gamble on eBay would probably backfire on me the way it always does whenever I attempt to speculate.

However, as a way of returning the favor(s) done for me on the Diamond Jubilees, I’d be more than willing to pick up some for anyone out there, for cost + tax + postage. Cost + tax would be either $28 or $35 each, depending on whether or not they’re still on sale. (I can’t imagine why not, but maybe someone at the store might have heard about that little "Horse of the Year" Award a certain someone picked up this week.) Postage would be actual cost plus insurance, of course.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I didn’t find any Diamond Jubilees in the store, thank goodness. That would have made for a decidedly untidy workday - and a completely different kind of blog post.