Scurrying About

Things are… better. And I’ll leave it at that. And I have to work this Saturday, too, but that’s mostly unrelated. It sets me behind a bit on my crafting, but I can’t argue with the paycheck! 

I am still moderately amused that I was not chosen for a Yellowstone, even from multiple waitlists. It just slays me that their efforts to make some Special Runs “easier” to acquire (i.e. significantly larger piece runs) usually result in making it harder for me. 

Aiming for the big stuff seems to be working out better, at least for now. I’ll pick up a Yellowstone eventually. 

I was thinking about going to BreyerWest next year, but the flights are all significantly more expensive than my Wyoming adventure was, so it might be a no-go. Off to research Derby tickets, I guess!

(Yikes! Maybe that wasn’t such a great idea either.)

Anywho, the rest of my week is full of meetings and appointments, I’ll keep it short again today. Here’s a better picture of my two Scurries, one of whom is actually a variation of a variation, but one that wasn’t necessarily planned for: 

I find it amusing that the two choices I made on my one and only ticket this year were both 50/50 variation splits. Considering that they were among the less popular choices this year, you think they would have included the variants in them to encourage sales, instead of including them in runs that would have sold out regardless, like Peanutine, and (eventually) Speos.

I also wasn’t overly enamored of them using Hamilton as the Surprise model this year – not because they didn’t turn out nice (most of the color options were really well done) but because it now sets an uncomfortable precedent.

Instead of the unpredictability that was part and parcel of the Surprise before, there’s now going to be an expectation that the Surprise must be the Current Hotness, and if you’ve had more than half of a day’s experience in the Model Horse Internet, you know that for the loudest voices among them that nothing else will now suffice. 

And if Reeves accedes to that demand, the Surprise will no longer be all that… surprising. Or for me, all that interesting.

(Still annoyed that we didn’t get an Old Timer this year. I know the reasons why, but I would have paid that premium, dammit.)

Relief, Rather Than Joy

The month of August is continuing to mess with my head; all I will say about the week is that I am very much looking forward to the weekend, as it is the only time I am allowed to get anything done. (And this will be going away sometime in September. Busy season at work and all…)

I also wanted to be clever about this reveal, but since my time is extremely short today, I will just cut to the chase:

You know what was funny about this? When I opened her up, my immediate reaction was not joy, but relief. And frankly, sometimes the feeling of relief is better.

I mean, I am extremely grateful and stunned that I basically got almost everything I wanted out of this year’s BreyerFest (except a Raffle Model). But for the moment, I’m getting more satisfaction over the fact that for the first time in a long time, it feels like things might be going my way. Am I out of that darkly forested section of my life, at last?

My hope is that this eventually translates into something beyond these material totems. But for the moment, pretty horses will suffice.

(FWIW, she does have three or four noticeable factory flaws, but I’ll worry about those another day.)

Second Chance Sale 2023

Looks like this week isn’t going to be much different from last week, ugh. Anyway…

Like everyone else, I also participated in the Second Chance Sale. Logged on at 1 p.m. on the dot, dropped the two Arabas I planned on in my cart, saw the Peanutines were still available and dropped a couple of those in my cart too. 

Then (big mistake) I poked around on the sales page for a moment to see if there was anything else I really needed, went to check out, and the Peanutines were cart snatched. The Arabas were still there, so I completed my check out and… that was that.

I went back to see if other “good” things were still left and there were, but since I already had everything else that I wanted, I walked away. The Speos Variant was not a must-have for me, and I was only going for another Peanutine because my herd is woefully deficient in rare Brighties, and just one would have been nice. (Seriously, Brighty collectors be crazy.) 

The only surprise about the sale is that people were surprised at all at the quick sellout. 

Uh, why wouldn’t it?

One: it was both advertised and highly anticipated. Seriously, everybody was waiting for this sale to drop.

Two: They allowed way more participants this year, including Online-only attendees.

Three: Everyone saw how much the Variants are going for, and they are not so rare that a gamble was not worth it.

Four: They allowed people to order up to two of everything, and not just one. 

As far as I know, the whole “But they allowed people to buy whole cases at BreyerFest” thing some people were grumbling about was not a significant factor, because that was only two cases total. (And the gamble the buyers took did not pay off: they did not get the Variant they were looking for.)

I also have a hard time mustering much sympathy for the complaint “But why didn’t they advertise the sale at BreyerFest?” They’ve been having these “Leftover” Sales since the beginning of the Special Run sales in the late 1990s. It’s not something they’ve really felt the need to advertise. 

Part of it is because the sale itself is so fluid: they never know what the situation is going to be like at the end of the event. Will there be a lot of models? Or just a few? Sometimes they limit sales to one per person, sometimes two but they have to be different; this year they allowed two the same. 

It’s true it’s been like four years since we’ve had an in-person Leftover Sale – last year there was a concern about the weather, and the two previous were online-only events – but all you had to do was ask any random Reeves employee. (Or me, same diff at this point...)

The only thing I would have changed in the online portion of this sale is getting rid of the option of buying two of the same item in the same transaction: the models with the Variants in them would have sold out regardless, and the one per customer limit per Special Run would have allowed more to participate in the fun.

I could see them pairing up the “one SR of each type” component with a one transaction per ticket/attendee limit, too. Then if there are any models left after that initial sales deadline passes, then they could have a “Last Chance/No Limits” Sale. Whatever is left after that would then go into Grab Bags. 

And if you didn’t get any of the SRs with Variants in them and only want the originally advertised color anyway, I suspect a lot of those will be up for sale soon, at prices not too far from issue price. I’ll probably be selling my Speos (bought it to help out a friend get the Variant, she got it herself anyway) and at least one (optimistically) of my Arabas for cost plus taxes/postage/etc.

That is pretty much all I have left to say about that matter, depending on the contents of my box....