When Good Ambushes Go Bad

It’s good to be home, back into the heart of Moggie Mayhem.  Everyone lost weight while we were away, except for Calypso who is growing into a solid little miss.  She’s just turned 8 months old, and is coming into her own in terms of power and confidence.  The rest of the gang turn into idiot kittens around her, and there is a great deal of galumphing about the house, crashing and bashing into things.  So much for Feline Grace – unheard of at our house.  Calypso is still perfecting her ambushing skills, though, and has varying degrees of success.  A notable attempt this week involved an excellent start, in that she was able to leap out unexpectedly behind all three of the others and scare the bejesus out of them.  However, everyone fluffing up and madly running off in turn scared the bejesus out of her, so she fluffed up and ran in the opposite direction.  So it was a short-lived triumph, but she’ll get there.

Meanwhile, we’ve been back in the shop for a week and a half now, and things are going really well.  We’ve sold lots of the new jewellery (lucky there is plenty more where that came from), many of the Ming Dynasty pendants, about a third of the Roman bronze medical instruments, an Egyptian 30^th Dynasty necklace, a few of the car mascots, plus a variety of the Deco glass and ceramics that were already on the shelves.  Now begins the impatient wait for the new shipment to arrive – six weeks to go until we can restock the shelves.

There is still framing to be done of the vintage French magazine covers and advertisements, plus buffing to be done of the big French keys, the enormous tailors’ shears, and the French Art Nouveau carving knives we’ve brought back.  We’ve got lots of French stuff – and in fact did our best buying ever at the Porte de Vanves markets.  And seeing how we brought back all that lovely French ticking, we really need to get our act together and get that French child’s sleigh bed sorted and into the shop.  So there are lots of things to do, in addition to all the preparation that goes into description and price tags for the new stock.  We’ll be busy, but it’s hardly overwhelming stuff, which is good because there is plenty of landcare that needs to be done at our place.

In keeping with our rule that something new must come into the shop every day, today we have two French magazine advertisements, and a copper ship’s lamp.  The lamp is from a trawler, and somewhat smaller (also somewhat cheaper) than the ones we’ve had in the past, and we’ve had it electrified for modern use so it will look lovely in the window.  The advertisements are really striking and one of them – advertising the 1924 Paris Airshow – has taken almost four years to hunt down.  It’s very satisfying to know that something exists and hunt and hunt and finally find it. 

Meanwhile, at LAST I have got my hands on the DVDs of Series 1 of The Game of Thrones, which is the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s series The Song of Ice & Fire (one of my favourite book series).  The Game of Thrones is Book 1.  The series was shown in America last year and it’s taken a year for the DVDs to become available.  Amazingly, they were significantly cheaper to buy locally than off the HBO website, so we settled in for a GoT-a-thon at our house this week. 

I was very happy with what they had done to adapt the book to television – though I knew a bit of what was coming by looking at the website – but I was surprised at the amount of sex.  Sex and violence feature throughout these books, but boy there’s a lot in the TV series.  I did wonder how they would transfer a character’s internal narrative – or just plain writer’s narrative – that of course features in books as characters rationalise their own behaviour to themselves.  And there’s a lot of narrative – internal and otherwise – in these books in particular.  In the TV series they seem have to decided that characters will instead speak out loud (rather than to themselves in their heads) when rationalising their actions, and how best to do that than via a sex scene?  Naturally.  There was one scene of lesbian antics that most definitely isn’t in the book, and the gels are having fun in the background as one of the characters explains his behaviour.  And when the scene finished I said to Doug, So now you know where’s he’s coming from, and Doug said What?  He didn’t hear a single thing being said.  So much for effective narrative.

So this is the shortest Blog I’ve ever done, I think.  But there’s not much to report this week except that we’re back, we’re through the jetlag phase, and we’re selling heaps of things.  The friends who help style the window are back in action with me, and this week we’ve gone all Bling for Mother’s Day.  Vintage French jewellery is pretty hard to walk by (and I should know), but this time I also have a number of excellent American pieces by Trifari and Sphinx in particular, so the vintage jewellery collectors should be happy with my haul this time.