A Little Cheese Please!

(NOTE: This post was added Thursday, but shortly disappeared due to technical difficulties with Blogger. Since it has not shown up again I am reposting in hopes that it will stick this time.)

Surprise! Here I am again, partly out of guilt for being so remiss and partly because I will be gone all weekend to Michigan where we will see our kids and our Infinitely More Adorable Than Normal little boys, as well as attend Bookstock ’11 in Livonia. The latter is a gigantic week long book sale held in a shopping mall that sounds like great fun, but is actually not. The preview begins early Sunday morning and from what I hear the campers arrive by four. It’s only about a half hour from our daughter’s house, but there is no way we are going to show up that early. As it is, we will have to creep out of the house like a pair of mice to keep the little guys from waking up. Tyler has built-in Grandar – the second I move a muscle he catapults out of bed faster than Jonathan Horton off the balance beam.

Last year this sale was held in April, but it was just a week after baby Dylan arrived from Korea, so we ended up bringing our daughter and both little people along. We got there about fifteen minutes after it started and the scanners were already blazing like six-guns. We really didn’t get much – the only thing I can remember being in love with was a gorgeous set of art prints on laid paper published by a NYC gallery. The only reason I got it is because it lacked an ISBN. There seemed to be very few older books and specialty items like that in Livonia, sad to say.

Anyway, today I’m rather cranky and forlorn. Last night I went to a NOBS meeting and the talk centered on the Cleveland book fair to be held in the fall. Oh, it sounds so wonderful – piano music, a buffet, a lovely setting, and lots more dealers than in Akron. AND WE CAN’T GO! Eric will be at a show in North Carolina that whole week. It may be for the best actually because unless I get some good stuff in here I could end up with less inventory than I have now, as I’ve been selling my best off the office floor since I got back from Akron. But it still left me feeling like the girl who doesn’t get to go the prom.

THEN, to add insult to injury, I have not attended a decent estate sale in so long I am begin to think I hallucinated all the ones from the past. And wouldn’t you know – it’s the perverse nature of things – this weekend there’s a Saturday sale that not only has old books, but even some antiquarian ones, as well as old magazines and ephemera in stacks and piles and heaps (I saw the pictures). But I won’t be here Saturday because we are leaving early for Michigan to go to Tyler’s soccer game at noon which I would not miss for all the paper in Ohio. Little boys are only little boys for a short while and as much as I want to go to this sale I won’t sell out my little guy who plays the game with all his heart and soul. Oh, and while I’m kvetching I might as well add that Sunday is the Medina flea market too, the source of much ephemera, including this catalog I got there last time. If you’re into furnaces, I’m telling you this one would have you in need of smelling salts.

But things are what they are, so I guess we will try to pull a rabbit out of the hat in Livonia. Every sale is different, so maybe getting there on time and knowing the lay-out will result in a better outcome this year. One can only hope. Meanwhile, I could use some cheese with this whine. A wheel of Montery jack with jalepenos oughtta do it.