Boom!

That's a weird way to wake up in the morning. I know it's weird, because it's how I woke up yesterday morning. Our nearest transformer blew a fuse.

No power. No internets.

No coffee. I tried making it in the French press with hot water from the faucet. Ugh. Eventually the R.C. came back from her morning walk and said the power across the street was on, so I walked over to Starbucks. On the way back, I had to fight off a caffeine-deprived couple in our parking lot. They were disappointed I hadn't brought enough for everyone.

This experience taught me things. Things of little moment, but things.

#1 - The alarm clock in my bedroom needs a new battery if I really want to be able to rely on the "battery back-up" feature.

#2 - A bathroom without a window is dark, even at 8:00 in the morning. My habit of keeping a candle in there for those once-in-three-years blackouts is a good one.

#3 - Given coffee, I'm perfectly happy to survive without power for a few hours in the morning. I'd have been a bit happier if the living room fan had been working (lovely, cool morning outside but no way to draw the air inside) but I curled up in the bright morning light and read a book and life was fine.

Don't let me mislead you. The power outage only lasted for about an hour, so my willingness to live without Mod Cons wasn't severely tested.

After that, I accomplished significant things yesterday. I finished the inventory of the coin collection, pulled out and sorted the postcards with old stamps on them, and started the inventory of the "miscellaneous" box o'stuff. I got the notes written for all of the things I'm planning to ship to people. I got a couple of the boxes out of the floor and actually shipped. I gassed up my car, did three loads of laundry, and carried out a huge box o'trash.

Then, having tripped over the amazon.com website late last week and accidentally ordered five new books, I settled in to read for a while.

This morning? No boom! So far.

All I've done is drink coffee and surf the net.

Babble about the sorting of Mom's boxes and whatnot behind the cut, since I doubt any of you are that interested.

Random babble about boxes

The R.C. called the estate Valuator Guy and chatted with him. He suggested that some things I'd dismissed as being of little value might prove otherwise. Postcards, he reminded us, can have valuable stamps. I sorted through 200 postcards to find the ones with stamps on them, sorted those by stamp, then stacked them by date. I have zero expectation that any of the stamps are of value.

The VG informed us that Hummels are a drug on the market these days and we should be excited and grateful if, in the end, they produce anything close to 25% of their "book" value.

The VG also suggested that we could be in possession of some small item of large value, all unknowing.

The R.C. is excited because she has a weird faith that a mass-produced, and heavily used, house-shaped tealight candle-holder is going to wind up being of value. I roll my eyes but allow her to leave it, and the ugly little mass-produced ceramic "ring holder" in the box o'stuff. Also, the huge armload of cheap plastic bead necklaces.

Most of me is embarrassed to picture myself trotting these things out in front of an expert, but whatever. We're paying him $200 to value the stuff. If we choose to ask him to value trash, that's our business.

Also, I'm the one who decided to leave those watches in there, and I know most of them are trash. (Some of them are Timex watches. Hardly rare.) (Not all of them are trash. There are two old pocket watches, at least one of a beautifulness that guarantees age since it speaks of the era of superior craftsmanship and pride in production, that may or may not be of value, depending upon whether or not they actually work.)

I have no idea about the stuff from Dad's war career, but I think I'm safe in assuming that there's no hidden value. That stuff is all going to my brother, along with other items I selected for him--things I thought he might be interested in having.

The VG also, to no one's surprise, is available to auction the stuff for us. You hear that auctioneers take a percentage of the sales. What no one tells you is that they take 50% of the sales.

So, you know, my rough estimate of the value of the entire pile o'stuff of "around $5500" (an estimate already invalidated by the news about the Hummels) boils down to, "if you get $1k in the end, be very, very grateful."

Seriously, though, I do think we should have the coins* valued separately. Now that I have them all sorted and inventoried, I may just pop them into my car and drive them down to Rocky Mountain Coin. Because the news that we're not sitting on anything particularly valuable means that the entertainment value of messing around with all of it is about all there is, and I might as well maximize the entertainment value. Right?

The problem with "antiques" is that people only want "old stuff" if it's new. I mean, people only want antiques that look like no one has ever touched them.

Thus, the tattered wedding doll, the old drafting tool sets, and the antique lighters (some of them so old it took me a while to figure out what they were), are not 1/10th as attractive as if, say, someone in the height of the depression had found the money for a new watch and then stored it away in the box for eighty years. Or, you know, had gotten a pocketful of money on payday and laid it tenderly in a drawer, protected from the elements and time by sheets of immaculate tissue paper or even layers of airtight glass.

Also, I remain bitter, to a certain degree, about the haste of Mom's siblings to move her things out of her trailer and their offspring in. While not "antiques" in any sense, things like those handmade quilts and her "good" china had a certain value.

Still. It's not really about the money, so I'm not holding an endless grudge or anything. If they want to use the stuff, if they value it themselves, that's good enough for me.

_________________

* Neither I, nor the R.C. have forgotten that the coins were left to her, not as part of the estate. Had they proven to be of any major value, she was planning to split that among all four kids. Now it seems that whatever it will cost us to have them valued is probably going to equal the worth of all them together.

Shrug. Works for me--I'm the one who got hours of free entertainment out of them, so I wound up to the good.