Thursday, December 02, 2010

Over A Paper Moon


If you heard an enormous sigh of relief that would be mine! What a hectic two days these have been. It all started late Tuesday afternoon while I was online trying to renew my Norton anti-virus thing. The loading process was moving like a bill through Congress, so I let it do its thing and left the computer for maybe ten minutes. When I got back I was greeted with a blue box headed “Microsoft Computer Crash Analysis.” Uh-oh.



First I had a mini-melt-down, then picked up the phone and called my computer gurus, Larry and Sean, in Brunswick. Got Sean on the phone and wailed my tale of woe whereupon he took control of my computer from the store to see what has happening. His first response?


“Uh-oh.”

To make a long story short it was not the disaster it appeared to be. He had me unplug this and unplug that and soon realized that my keyboard had wigged out. My black one that matched my computer had broken almost as soon as I got it, so I’d temporarily resorted to the beige one from my old Sony. Somehow “temporarily” ended up being three years, so I guess it’s no big surprise that a seven year old keyboard got cranky. I went out and got a new one, plugged it in and was back in business – except I I had lost all the cookies that automatically log you in to your sites and could not get on my blog. It sounds crazy I know, but I had forgotten my password and nothing I typed in pleased Blogger. I finally found the thing that SAYS it reminds you of the magic word, but in actuality it makes you change it.


Enough of that though. Yesterday I spent most of the day at an auction (yes, Farm and Dreary delivered) in a town an hour and fifteen minutes away, which meant we crept out of here in the bitter cold at an unseemly hour. I had been to this auction house once before (actually it was the time I referred to the other day when I got all the Architect magazines), so I knew there was at least one thing I’d like -- the auctioneer. Don Wallick is without question the Josh Groban of auctioneering. I mean it, this guy takes country auction patter to such stratospheric heights he’d have you do-si-doing around the room snatching up head vases and Connie Francis albums! The music of it trills and dips and trills again to include snatches of songs. Imagine bidding on magazines while torrents of nonsense syllables pour forth to the tune of Ten Little Indians. The guy’s an auctioneering genius. He’s also very funny.


Fortunately, I refrained from snatching up anything but paper. He had books, but they were a sorry lot, though I did buy a box for six dollars just to get two fairly good ones that I knew would clean up well and already have. They priced out at $60, so I guess it was worth crawling around the floor in the back room. By the time I finished  the knees of my favorite jeans actually created a dust storm when I tried to brush them off. All I needed was a cowboy hat from central casting and I was ready for the big dance number in Oklahoma.


As luck would have it, the most serious bidding was reserved for the paper and, as usual, it was male dominated. I lost one extremely nice Victorian era sign to one of those guys, but the fact that I made him pay for it diabolically assuaged the pain.  Ditto for a box of paper dolls, though I’m a tiny bit regretful about those. That having been said, however, I really can’t complain because I got every single other thing I wanted and didn’t overpay for any of it. In some instances I had to buy an entire table full of miscellaneous junk to get what I wanted, but I’ll tell you right now, if you ever need a pencil I’m your girl. I must have four hundred of them.


As luck would have it, the antiques mall responded to all this new paper, which I have not yet processed of course, by reporting the sale of several items of the old stuff. Five Christmas pieces went to the same customer (amazing how it adds up dollar-wise) and I also sold a high school diploma from the 40’s from a local high school that’s barely even a memory to most people. This  means I have a little more space over there, which is good because I’m totally in love with this new stuff. As soon as I got home I lined the boxes up on the kitchen floor, sat down, and was missing in action for over an hour. I divided it into four categories: salable, useful for art (provided I had time to MAKE any art), trash, and letters. The latter category is a crapshoot because most letters are interesting only to their recipients (well, maybe only to their writers), but every once in awhile you get lucky.


Even if I don’t on those, it’s okay because today I am, as the title says, over a paper moon!

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