Antique mall finds

I had to run a bunch of errands on Friday. Sometimes, errands are just a chore, but sometimes they can be fun. I treated myself, too, to a side trip to the antique malls. It totally paid off.

Buttons: These set me back $1 for the black buttons and 75 cents for the turquoise and white ones. I may leave the black ones on the card since they're pretty ordinary-looking (i.e. I can get modern substitutes easily) and the card is so cool, but I'll probably use the turquoise and white ones on something since the card is no loss.

I don't normally buy Breyers at antique malls because the ones I find there are generally very expensive despite looking like they were fed through a woodchipper. I always want to shake vendors and tell them that, unless they know somebody in the hobby who can help them buy, they need to steer clear of model horses. Model horses are like books: What is old is frequently not valuable, and it has to be in very, very, good condition or it's worthless except as a remake body.

Rose Gold Vandy (Little Red Vandy x Jolene K by Sachem), chestnut frame/sabino Paint mare, was $19.95 and only has a few small marks. Acceptable. Nice model, I love Paints, and the original short-tailed version of the mold has been discontinued.

Bishr (no parents yet), liver chestnut Arabian stallion, has a factory bent eartip and had a badly warped foreleg when I got him--easily remedied with a pot of boiling water--but has no scratches and is a great liver chestnut color. Again--nice model (this was originally produced by Hagen-Renaker; Breyer leased the rights to it for about 30 years), good color, $15.95 and I didn't have to pay shipping, right?

Also, I lost all of my model horse records when my computer croaked. Yes, I know that this isn't vital information--it's not like I lost my financial history or my doctoral dissertation, right?--but it's annoying. I've taken a cue from work and instituted an acquisitions book.

I work in an historical archive. Of course, we keep formal records for everything, but we also have a basic composition notebook in which we write everything that is given to us, or that we deaccession (give or throw away; sometimes we get things that are duplicates, badly damaged, or irrelevant to our collection), in the notebook. Low-tech, but sometimes low-tech is the most foolproof way to go. Things don't have to be super detailed or in perfect chronological order; we just write a blurb before we forget the details.

So, I went out and got a notebook and started writing in the recent new horses. I'll go back when I get back from traveling and start writing in the old ones.