Skip to main content

Hello NY!


I have been known to spend way too much time on eBay. Not too much money. No, I'm pretty good about that.

But when The Prince gets on the Wii late at night, I'm often found clicking away at eBay on vintage sites -- just window shopping. Although I have to say eBay is an anthropological dream come true. Much smarter things have been written, I am sure, of how much you can learn about history and human kind from eBay, but it always reminds me that if you only learned about the world from what you read in a book, you're in a sorry -- and severely uninformed -- state.

Once in awhile I will push the bid button, and did last week -- one of the first times in about 2 years. My prize? Boxes of mica chips -- in old five and dime containers marked, "Christmas Snow."

I make a lot of my own cards and the image was just too good to pass up (many of you will see it this winter) along with them marked at a great price.

I just got it in the mail about 5 minutes ago, on a perfectly acceptable spring day when I'm feeling dark (as I have a lot recently). On the outside, from the wonderful seller in Galveston, Texas (could there be any more wild sounding place than this?) was that hand written note above.

Not sure what was better. The friendly hello from a complete stranger or the boxes of winter magic that I opened at my kitchen table sending glitter puffs into the air. All in all, certainly a good find for my $20.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the