the best laid plans...gang oft agley

today not much is happening.  I opened my laptop determined to be productive only to while away an hour surfin the net.  while surfing, however, I came upon this page:

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/msc/ToMsC900/MsC870/thompsontravel.html

not sure how I found it, though I am doing google searches on african masks.  I'm trying to sell a mask mama bought from save the children in westport twelve years ago that for some reason she now thinks is worth ten times what she paid.  mama has always fancied herself an amateur collector and still has dreams of opening a shop on ebay, with me to help her/do all the work.  throughout the 90s she nearly bought out the whole department 56 dickens village collection at hallmark.  the collector's value of victoria station, hard to break because of its size and therefore one of my favorite pieces, has actually gone down since then from $110 (the purchase price) to about $90.  the real value, otherwise known as what you can get on ebay, is about $25.

getting back to the point.  that webpage displays the thompson collection, hundreds of trinkets from all over the world.  dr. thompson and his wife would vacation every year to some crazy country and return with shrunken heads, carved bowls, brooches, nutcrackers, and more, which they would then travel about lecturing on.  where did they keep all this stuff at home, is what I want to know.  the thompsons, states the site, didn't necessarily buy valuable pieces abroad; they bought the most interesting and common/representative-of-that-place things.  that way they were able to talk generally about the country's customs and beliefs as represented by fertility carvings or ceremonial knives.  in an interesting note on a piece, it says the couple visited the same zulu village twice, and upon the second visit 5 years later learned the leader had named his daughter 'california,' after the thompsons' home state.

seeing their collection not only made me want to build an intricate shelving system but ignited my own collecting ambitions.  it also shamed me into running to the bathroom mirror to see how good I look today, and if I could go to the p.o. for a passport pic.  one of my greatest fears is having a bad photo taken, and you know postal workers will have no time or patience for my best-out-of-three pleas.  I just can't bear ten years of awkward phony smile or worse.  I'm passable on my nj driver's license, though only because I was having a good hair day.  they told me to look at the birdie and I hadn't heard that in so long I actually believed there might be a birdie (whatever a birdie is).  up went my eyebrows, open went my mouth: "where??"  snap.  no best out of three.

since my eyebrows need some work, the post office can wait.  getting this african mask sold means I can finance my entire passport application--expedited!  first things first, I suppose.