Whine over. Feeling better. Let's talk about jewelry & collectibles!

I felt a lot better after I whined ad nauseum earlier today about my motor vehicle difficulties. Sometimes we just have to let a good whine take over, get it out, get over it. Done. Hope you take it as it was intended - all in good fun. Because truthfully, it's really been pretty funny and my friends and I have gotten a bunch of good laughs out of it. Well, except for that one person who said I was stupid to not buy a brand new $30,000 vehicle "because of all the incentives". Yeah. Great incentives. Do you want to make that monthly car payment for me? I did not think so.

Even though I've had vehicle difficulties I managed to get around to a few interesting sales this past week. One of them I attended with my friend, Bob - who's been driving me about since I sold my vehicle. We were supposed to go to an auction, were running late and he informed me that I'd failed to mention to him that one of our favorite local estate liquidators had a good sale going.

We allotted ourselves about 10 minutes and rushed over to the sale. Walked in, first thing I found were these two gorgeous channel-set crystal necklaces. One in pink and one all clear crystals:

This iconic style of necklace was made popular in the 1980s by Chanel when her house bought a boot-load of Swarovski crystal necklaces in various colors and styles (some with alternating rectangular and round channel-sets) in the longer lengths so you can wrap them around and around. The Chanel necklaces bear a tiny little golden, round hang tag on the back with her logo, a copyright symbol and the date of 1981. They authentic Chanel ones are highly sought after by Chanel collectors - for good reason. They are gorgeous. But, you can also get the same look by picking up the unsigned, similar ones such as those shown above.

Side note on those Chanel necklaces: Be wary of any that do not have a nice, bright gold, perfectly smooth, perfectly round Chanel tag on them. There are tons of them out there with a phony Chanel tag that is somewhat rough, almost an antique gold and not quite round at about 1 o'clock. These phonies are found frequently on a certain auction site. If you are wanting an authentic Chanel version of this necklace please learn how to identify the phony tag from the real one so you do not get ripped off by the fakes. There are tons of them out there and many people seem to be completely clueless that they have been taken in by a phony - because they seem to be giving positive feedback for their phony necklace purchases..

Whoops, I digressed again. Back to the estate sale story.

I ran through all of the bedrooms, grabbing this and that and wishing I had more time to shop. There were a lot of interesting things. I found a vintage unlined Pendleton jacket hanging in one of the closets on a Christian Dior hanger. Have NO idea what came on the Dior hanger and had no where near enough time to go through the four closets full of clothes to find out. DARN!

Passed on the linens, a vintage alligator bag with a damaged corner on the bottom. Sad.

I then headed over to the south wall of the back bedroom to a big pile of handbags. Most were fairly decent, all leather, medium quality bags. Nothing exciting. Then I saw a small black buttery leather one hiding under a big straw. BINGO! A 1999 Coach Martini Flap: it had my name all over it! The perfect small bag and in almost perfect condition! Time to get out the small wallet to use with that great find!

My friend was standing at the check-out station twiddling his thumbs when I roared out of the hallway back into the living room. His look: Decidedly impatient. I told him I needed to make a fast fly-through to the dining room and kitchen. On the dining room table was a big pile of silver plate and this one little piece of Sterling - a nip cup by Mark J. Scearce:

And, it's dated to Nixon's second very short term in the White House so that's GREAT - a short run on that particular date mark. A gorgeous piece of Sterling! If one is collecting nip cups from each and every presidential term of office since FDR, and you've been missing out on a Tricky Dick II, here you go!

After checking out on the estate sale, we roared on over to the auction site. Bob found a great cabinet that was a good "blend" to the rest he has in one area of his house displaying his rather extensive collection of top-marked restaurant china. He had another appointment to meet someone about buying another collection of something else he collects across town so he left me to bid on the cabinet for him. And I snagged it for a great bargain price. The joy of country auctions in mid-week!

After he returned from his appointment we decided with regret that we were not going to have time to bid on any of the other treasures that were all over the place in various boxes in the back yard, loaded up his cabinet in another friend's pick-up, got it in the house, sat and visited for a while and then set off on our trip to go buy That Darned Bug!

Hopefully in another couple of days I will once again be singing the praises of the fun-to-drive Beetle and be over my whiney rant from it having the audacity to fail me before it even got to it's new home.

Take a peek at the links above to see the other goodies I've recently listed on Bonanzle.

Time to go eat the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that are cooling in my kitchen. How do you think I get Bob to drive me all of the places I want to go?

Speed dial, he answers, I announce, "Fresh baked cookies". Basically he's "twist my arm that's enough" when it comes to home-baked soft and chewy cc's with special dark chips.

When I do not eat them all before he can get over here, that is.