My Sexy, Sexy 4 Quart Pyrex 664

Until today, my vintage Pyrex collection contained only two pieces in the Old Orchard pattern. This was deliberate, as it is one of my least favorite patterns, and not one I collect on purpose. You're probably thinking, On purpose? How do you end up with something you don't collect by accident?, but there's an obvious answer to that: sometimes the thrift stores around here sell a couple of bowls together as a set whether those bowls go together or not, and you really really need a Primary Colors 401 but the only way to get that 401 is to buy it as a set for three dollars with an ugly Old Orchard 402 but the pair is only three dollars and you can tolerate that Old Orchard for a dollar fifty and you might even throw it in the dishwasher sometimes, like you're not supposed to with vintage Pyrex, because Old Orchard, Amirite?

Anyway, shit happens, and I end up with 50% of an Old Orchard 400 series mixing bowl set but I'm not going to buy any more Old Orchard (on purpose), so that's that.

Except that it's not.

A few days ago my friend Brennan, who was visiting my friend Brooke in Houston, posted a few photos of an antique store with lots of Pyrex on Facebook and tagged me. As I do whenever my friends post a picture with dishware in it, I immediately scoured the photo for possibilities, and there, way down by the bottom, I thought I saw a Pyrex 664.

I don't own a 664.

The Pyrex 664 is a round 4 quart casserole with lid. It was made in a handful of patterns, including one (Polynesian) made in such limited quantity that it sells for a few hundred dollars every time I see one on ebay, and was only available for two years, manufactured from 1974-1976. This wasn't a Polynesian, but instead was Old Orchard. Still, it was a 664. It couldn't hurt to ask how much it cost, right? I asked, and Brennan and Brooke went back to the store, and it was cheap. Really cheap. Worth buying even though it was Old Orchard cheap.

Brennan then carried a ten inch wide, four inch deep glass casserole dish wrapped in packing paper, towels, and a plastic Wal Mart bag aboard a plane and back to Knoxville, and today we met up, and now I own this:



I know you're not that excited, though, right?

Don't worry. Hawkeye is here to help.



Yeah, Hawkeye. Work that bowl.



Show us how much you like that Pyrex. Sit like a female character would on a comic book cover marketed toward teenage boys and middle aged virgins.



Good job, Hawkeye.

I bet everyone is excited about my Pyrex now.

"It's just not very exciting."

An exciting (to me) thing happened today: The Pyrex Early American 404 mixing bowl that I purchased for myself on eBay arrived, and it is beautiful.



The 404 completes not only my stack of 400-series Early American mixing bowls:



but completes my entire Early American set. Except for the ultra-rare test pieces and non-typically colored pieces, which usually sell for a few hundred dollars each if they sell at all, I have all of Early American. I have the round mixing bowls (401-404), the handled mixing bowls (441-444), the divided dishes, the round casseroles, the oval casseroles, the refrigerator dish set... I have all of the Early American. This was my last piece of my favorite vintage Pyrex pattern.

I was so excited about this that I shared photos with many of my friends, almost all of whom reacted positively. One of them decided to hit me with a little bit of honesty, though:

Honesty: I know that you like this stuff but it's just not very exciting. It's a bowl. I like it when you cook stuff, but just looking at the bowl is kind of boring.

Oh.

I mean, I guess you could have said, I'm happy that you're happy, but hey, you chose to go this way instead. That's fine. Maybe I could do something to make it more exciting. Maybe I could dress it up somehow, like they dress up lame prizes on "The Price is Right" by standing a model next to them.

Who would be an appropriate Pyrex model, though? Which of my many action figures would be most likely to get excited about fifty year old kitchenware?



Aunt May. Of course.

Well, Aunt May, now that you're here, maybe could you sexy this up a little bit? Maybe drape yourself suggestively over the bowl or something?



Wait, Aunt May. You're a comic book character. Maybe you could do that pose that ladies do on comic covers all the time where they uncomfortably twist their body to show their face and their butt in the same picture? Could you do that?



Hmmm.

No.

This isn't exciting. It's actually kind of nightmare fuel, but maybe that's because forcing Aunt May to contort herself for the gratification of viewers is demeaning and inappropriate, like The Hawkeye Initiative says it is.

Or maybe the Hawkeye Initiative is actually saying that this would be better with Hawkeye:



Look at that grin! He loves this.



He wants you to love this, too.



If this doesn't convince my friend to love Pyrex as much as I do, nothing will.

All That Pyrex

My friends all know that I collect vintage Pyrex. As I mentioned before, this is often met with amusement, scorn, occasional support (my friends Phyliss and Kristin have proven willing to drive for hours to visit antique stores and flea markets just to look for it), and also often with questions. Here are the three that come up most often:

"What do you do with all that Pyrex?"

I display it and I use it. I don't understand why this is so hard to understand for people, but it is an eternal question, and I think it comes down to snobbery. If I said that I had a set of fancy wedding china, and that I displayed it in a fancy china cabinet and occasionally used it, the response would be more along the lines of, "Oh, yes, of course. This is what one does with fancy wedding china." Since I'm just using and displaying Pyrex, which was sold as everyday dishes and which a lot of people remember (or are still using) from Mom's and Gramma's houses, the response is more along the lines of, "That's so weird." The weirdness factor might also be because I sometimes get overly excited about finding some, but finding it is exciting for me. If it's not exciting for you, just scroll on down.

"Don't you have enough Pyrex?"

This was most recently asked by Mom while they were visiting last week. The simple answer is that no, I don't. I would like to finish my white Town and Country refrigerator dish set, because it is only half completed at the moment. (I don't care about the colored Town and Country refrigerator dish set. I only like the all white with pattern one.) I would like an Early American 404, because it is the only mixing bowl out of the set that I'm missing. I've never seen Brittany Blue in person, ever, at any store, so I haven't been able to decide if I like it and want any or not. (I thought I would like Colonial Mist and Horizon Blue, and when I finally saw them in person I didn't like either one. I didn't think I would like Shenandoah, and when I saw it in person I thought it was pretty and bought it immediately.) I feel like I might want an Orange Fiesta, a Vintage, and maybe a Midnight Bloom, but I won't know until I see them and see what people are charging for them.

Do I need these things? No.

Do I want them? Yes.

"Do you even use all that Pyrex?"

This is kind of like the first question. I was thinking about it this week, at the tail end of my vacation, so I decided to keep track of how much I used while I did some pretty average weekend cooking: I made a mac and cheese, and I'm currently baking a banana bread.

The mac and cheese ended up using five pieces of Pyrex:



Starting just below the cheese:

My beaten egg is in a Pyrex Family Flair creamer. Family Flair dinnerware was introduced in 1957 and continued until about 1960. It was not produced in white, even though my creamer is all white. Instead, someone has dishwashered my creamer to death between 1957 and now, and all the paint came off, so I have no idea what color or pattern it was. Since it was stripped down to the glass and was a couple of dollars at the antique mall, I bought it, and I always use it for adding beaten eggs to something. It holds about four eggs, it has a spout for pouring them out, I can put it in the dishwasher, and using it to beat eggs doesn't dirty a measuring cup, which I will probably need in the same recipe for measuring liquids.

Below the creamer is a one cup Pyrex measuring cup. I have three of these of varying ages. They're not vintage (one might be from the 1980's, so it's arguable?), and they can all go in the dishwasher.

I'm mixing up the mac and cheese in an Amethyst 325 mixing bowl. It's hard to see how purple it is because of my black countertops, but take my word for it, ok? That's a three dollar thrift store purchase, and I've started looking for the clear mixing bowls fairly recently because I can put them in the dishwasher and because I stop using my patterned, milk glass mixing bowls when I complete their sets and put them on display. (Or use them for other purposes. My Hex Signs 404, for example, is on the dresser in my bedroom, because I keep my bow ties in it. Around the kitchen, I throw my change in an Empire Scroll 043, keep my bananas in a pink 503, hold envelopes and notecards in a red Hostess bowl, etc.) I can't have a kitchen without mixing bowls and I've collected most of the patterns that I like, so I need some working bowls.

Just above the mixing bowl you can see a Pyrex lidded butter dish. I have a clear one because it was a dollar at the thrift store, and also because they didn't make the white glass patterned ones in any of the patterns that I like or collect. There's a couple that I would buy if I saw them because I can sell them to someone else in the collectors groups I belong to, but for the most part if I see a Pyrex butter dish at a store I shrug and move on.

That's only four pieces, though. The fifth was the clear glass 221 I baked the mac and cheese in:



I have a stack of 221 dishes. I have a clear and an opal (all white), which can both go in the dishwasher, and a Desert Dawn, a Lime, and a Turquoise, which cannot go in the dishwasher. They're the perfect size for cornbread, a small cake, brownies, mac and cheese, vegetables, etc. and I have so many because sometimes I need more than one at a time.

I guess I could have eaten the mac and cheese on a Pyrex plate, but that would have been excessive. I only use my Pyrex plates when I think they look good with the food.

The banana bread used four pieces of Pyrex:



I mixed up the batter in that Old Orchard 403. I don't collect Old Orchard, but that bowl was three dollars and I mentioned above that I needed some working bowls for my kitchen as my other bowls came out of usage rotation.

I'm also using my other two glass one cup measuring cups. Good thing I have three, right? One of them has the oil, and I'm mashing up the overly ripe bananas in the other. It's good for that because it has a handle and a wide mouth, so it's easy to hold onto while I mash with a wooden spoon.

Like the mac and cheese, the last piece used was the baking dish:



That's an Opal loaf pan. I also have one in brown glass (a gift from Mom many years ago when I moved into my first apartment; it predates me actually collecting Pyrex), and both of them can go in the dishwasher.

And that's pretty much all of the Pyrex I've used this weekend.

Hopefully that answers all of the questions.

The Ava Gardner Museum

Yesterday Kristin and I decided that we should drive an hour or so to nearby Smithfield, North Carolina, so that I could visit their local attraction (other than the outlet malls):



The Ava Gardner Museum.

I've been hearing about this museum from Kristin for several months, starting with a phone call:

"Hey, I was out driving around, and I saw this museum for that old movie star lady you like!"

"Which one?" There's a Bette Davis museum?

"It was a short name... I think it started with an L..."

"Lana Turner?" I'd go to a Lana Turner museum. I started googling while we were still on the phone. "There isn't a Lana Turner museum in North Carolina. I don't think there's a Lana Turner museum at all."

"Are you sure? It was a museum, and they had a sign and everything."

"Where were you?"

"Smithfield."

"Google says there's an Ava Gardner Museum."

"Yes! Ava Gardner! She was a movie star, right?"

"Yes..." Now, I can guarantee that Kristin has never in her life seen an Ava Gardner film, or if she has she has no idea who was in it. "Remember The Aviator? With Leonardo DiCaprio? And that scene where he was all hermit and creepy and peeing in the jars, and he had to go testify, and Kate Beckinsale has to go in and convince him to shave and clean up?"

"Yeah?"

"She's playing Ava Gardner."

I know it's a horrible example, and probably an insult to the long career of Ava Gardner, but it was the most recent example that I could think of. Using examples like that is probably one of the reasons why a few months ago I also had to explain to Kristin that Joan Crawford isn't actually starring in Mommie Dearest. I am part of the problem.

Anyway, we were met with slight disappointment when we reached the museum.



I knew that would happen.

"It's closed?"

"Yes. I told you when we were going to dinner that the museum closed at five."

"Like we listen to everything the other one says when we talk."

She has a point. I've tuned out a number of stories about her job this weekend. We still looked around a little:





We were late to the museum because we spent our day doing other things.

First, before we got on the road to Smithfield, we stopped by the Salvation Army, which we missed during our thrift store tour of town the day before. I don't give money to the Salvation Army due to their abysmal track record on LGBT issues, but I guess I'm willing to buy things from them, because Kristin spotted this:



and it was only three dollars. Shenandoah (released in 1981) isn't normally a Pyrex pattern that I collect, but the 401 is a handy size to have in the kitchen (good for beating a couple of eggs, a single serving of soup, etc.) so I picked it up. Kristin bought a stovetop popcorn popper pan, the fancy kind with the hinged lid and a crank to turn the popcorn inside, and then we got on the road to Smithfield.

Which we detoured off of, because of me.

See, as we were driving along, I saw a billboard for the Selma, North Carolina Antique Mall, "The Largest Antique Mall in the South".

"You want to stop?"

"Yes! Yesyesyesyes!"

So we stopped.

And, oh my God... The Pyrex:



Booth after booth of Pyrex:



So much Pyrex that in some of the booths they organized it by color, shelf after shelf of Pyrex moving through the many shades of the rainbow. And after a few hours at the antique mall, and booth after booth of reasonably priced (in some cases shockingly underpriced) Pyrex, you're probably wondering how much I bought, and if it will all fit in my car.

Well, here's my massive Pyrex haul from the antique mall:



Early American 441, in gold on brown, which means it is the dip bowl from the Early American chip and dip set.

That's it.

They had a lot of Pyrex, but not a lot of any of the things that I was looking for. This is one of the few non-extremely-rare pieces I was still missing from my Early American set. Early American is my jam:



My Pyrex jam:



and now that I have this piece all I'm missing is the 404 mixing bowl (which I could buy online but refuse to pay fifty dollars for), a lid for my 503 refrigerator dish, and the brown on white 963 (I have the gold leaf on brown version in middle of the stack in the second photo above). Everything else in Early American is really, really hard to find and expensive (the 4 quart roaster, the shallow square dish, a gold leaf on brown 443) and will probably never be part of my collection unless there is a magical lucky find somewhere, someday in the wild.

For yesterday, though, I got my six dollar 441, so I was pleased.

We also did a little bit of shopping in downtown Selma, which is pretty much all antique stores:



and I found another treasure:





The Spider-Man rock opera from 1975, on vinyl.

Now I'll have to get a copy of the CD, so I can listen to it.

So, yeah, after we did antiquing and thrifting and outlet shopping and then had a late lunch/early dinner (Did you know that Cracker Barrel has a light menu? If you didn't, you probably don't want to.) the Ava Gardner Museum was, sadly, closed.

Maybe some other time.

The Pyrex Bake-A-Round

I've not been very successful with bread baking in the past. My friends are. My friends make beautiful bread, and post photos of it, and I help to cheer their accomplishments, but inside I am secretly jealous.

Why can't I make bread? I think, gazing longingly at my oven. What's wrong with me?

The obvious answer, that I'm clearly descended from aristocracy rather than bread baking peasant stock and am therefore genetically predisposed to have others make bread for me, offers little comfort as I stare at small, salty, dismal loaves produced and quickly disposed of in my kitchen. I tried to address this problem earlier this year, using a kit, but met with only partial success.

That's why I was so excited the other day to find a happy collision of my Pyrex hobby and my cooking hobby:



The Pyrex Bake-A-Round, produced in the 1970's and possibly into the 1980's. The Bake-A-Round isn't particularly sought after by collectors, and is often found (like mine) in the box, but it was only three dollars, it wasn't broken, and the original instructions were still inside, so I figured it was worth a try. How could my bread possibly get any worse?

I assembled all of my tools and ingredients:



(At this point my friend Heather is looking at that Pyrex bowl and saying, "Old Orchard? You hate Old Orchard." It was a gift.)

The Bake-A-Round instructions said that I could use any bread recipe, so I figured that I would just try the mix again, since it was partially successful. I started activating my yeast in warm faucet water, and then set about greasing the inside of the Bake-A-Round, which is easier said than done:



Fortunately, the instructions said to start at one end and grease toward yourself. They also said not to use oil, which is why I didn't just spray the inside of the tube with cooking spray. I was kind of terrified that if I used spray the glass tube would explode in my oven, so I followed the instructions, and greased the hell out of that thing:



Then I got to work on the bread. The Bake-A-Round instructions said to shape your loaf on waxed paper, so I did:



I then realized that the loaf had to fit inside the Bake-A-Round, and therefore had to be longer and skinnier, rather than rounded, so I had to shape it again. Then, following the instructions, I slid the waxed paper into the tube:



The next step was a minor disaster. The Bake-A-Round instructions say to slide the dough to the middle of the tube, then turn it upside down, and the dough will fall off of the waxed paper, which you then slide out.

The hell it does.

If you ever have a Bake-A-Round of your own, grease the waxed paper, too.

After a lot of shaking and cursing, I extricated the waxed paper from the tube and tried to shake the dough back toward the center:



At this point you cover the ends of the tube with foil, then put it in the holder and leave it somewhere warm to rise. This has been a problem with my bread baking in the past. My apartment doesn't have a spot warm enough, usually. This time, though, I set the oven on "warm" and put the whole thing inside...

AND IT WORKED.



Look how much bigger the bread got! It rose! Never again will hunchbread shame my kitchen!

Excited, I warmed up the oven (which needs cleaning; don't judge) and slide the Bake-A-Round inside for baking:



I ignored it through the entire baking process, although I did keep an ear open for the sound of exploding glass. I didn't get an oven full of glass and bread dough, though.

I got a somewhat attractive loaf of bread:



It's round, and crusty, and soft and airy on the inside:



It's bread.

And I made it.

The Pyrex

On Day 15, halfway through 30 Days of Blogging, I've decided that it's time to talk about the Pyrex.

Several of my friends asked about the Pyrex, some in the serious sense and some in the mocking sense. My friends talk about the Pyrex a lot, because I talk about the Pyrex a lot when I get a new piece or when someone asks me about it. Some of my friends also collect the Pyrex. Some of my friends don't collect the Pyrex, but they look for it for me when they are out and about. And some of my friends crack jokes about the Pyrex and how I will die buried beneath a collapsed hoard of Pyrex, my mummified corpse dried into the carpet beneath a stack of Town and Country or Early American lidded round casserole dishes.

Here's the thing: I was going to write a long, ranting entry about how I don't judge your habits and I don't mock your collections and I don't make fun of the things that make you happy, but that isn't true. I do judge your habits. I judge the hell out of them. If you had a hobby of collecting antique buckets from wishing wells, and every couple weeks there was a new picture of an antique bucket from a wishing well on your Facebook feed along with a two paragraph explanation of how this particular bucket was only available for six months in 1961 and was originally sold with a knotted rope handle and a tin ladle, you can bet your sweet ass I would make fun of you. Even though I'm your friend. Actually, especially because I'm your friend.

So I get it.

Everyone doesn't get the Pyrex.

I didn't always get it, either.

Two of my first three pieces of Pyrex are in this picture:



The green bowl and the yellow bowl (Primary Colors set #403 and 404, respectively, even though green isn't a primary color), along with a duplicate yellow bowl, were inherited from my father's mother. When we packed her up to put her in The Home, a traumatic day in which my uncle wept, I had to carry a bucket of human feces upstairs, my mom had to clean a bucket of human feces, and my dad encouraged me to do a couple of shots of leftover wedding souvenir bottles (my maudlin, useless uncle, who claimed that those bottles represented people's lives, was assured that I would only drink the ones from weddings which had ended in divorce), she told us between puffs of her cigarette to take whatever we wanted from the house. I was a little light on kitchenware, so I took an entire set of engraved barware, some appetizer plates, a few dishtowels and wooden spoons, and the three Pyrex bowls. At the time, I had no idea they were anything special. I just needed some big mixing bowls, and they appeared serviceable.

I used them pretty regularly over the next few years, and then a few years ago my parents came to visit me, and I took them to all of my favorite places in Knoxville, which included a few vintage and antique stores. At one of them, my mom noticed a small Pyrex dish that she thought might interest her friend Cheryl. When she got home she told Cheryl about it, and Cheryl was interested, but Mom didn't buy the dish and couldn't show it to her. Mom called me and had me go back for it, and then gave it to Cheryl for Christmas.

"By the way," Mom said casually. "If you see another one, I might like one, too."

And so I started looking for another. Each time I went thrifting or antiquing, I would look for Pyrex, to see if they had another dish like the one we got for Cheryl. Every once in a while, I picked a random dish up for myself, a round open baking dish here, a covered hostess dish there, with no real thought behind it. Then I got curious. I started reading online about patterns, prices, and rarity. Cheryl invited Mom and I to a Facebook group for collectors, and I invited my friend Heather, who collects much more than I do. People talked about Pyrex, and posted photos of their finds and their collections, and I started to look at my dishes and think, "Well, I have two pieces of that set. Maybe I could get the rest."

There were two finds that really pushed me from casual to somewhat deliberate collecting.

The first was the "ugly brown dishes":



My friend and I were at an estate sale, and one of the ladies working the sale was trying to sell me the yellow, red, and green bowls from the set up at the beginning of the entry as a group for sixty dollars. Since I already had two yellows and a green, I really wasn't interested, and asked what other dishware was in the house.

"There's a set of ugly brown dishes in the kitchen, and some other stuff."

My friend, who collects certain china patterns, and I headed into the kitchen, and I immediately stopped and gaped.

"Those are Terra. An entire set."

I flagged down a worker immediately and had her mark the set as sold, without hesitation. That set has 14 coffee cups. Right now, a set of 4 of those is selling at an antique store down the street for twenty five dollars. There are five 13 inch chop plates, which normally sell for eight to ten dollars each. I paid eight dollars for one a couple months ago to make this set have an even number. The big mixing bowl is a 403, which goes for ten to twenty dollars by itself. I picked up the entire set for thirty five dollars, and started thinking about how I needed to finish it.

The second piece that pushed me all the way into collecting was the Golden Hearts Casserole:



In addition to patterned sets, Pyrex made dozens of promotional pieces over the years, bowls and casseroles that had a unique pattern or color and were only offered for a limited time. The people in the Pyrex group were forever posting about finding all these unique and exciting pieces dirt cheap, and all I ever seemed to find was parts of sets. Sure, sets are exciting, but promotional pieces were special, and I didn't have any until I found that casserole dish on my way back from Nashville, and it was only five dollars.

And that was it.

I became a Pyrex collector.

I have limits, though. I only collect certain patterns, and I've never paid more than twenty dollars for a single dish. There are a few dishes in one of my closets, waiting to be displayed someday, a few on the top of the fridge, a few in my cabinets because I use them every day, and a few displayed on top of my cabinets:



Those are my full (or almost full) sets. From left to right:

Early American Cinderella mixing bowls - Cinderella bowls have a handle on each side, one of which is designed to also be a spout. The smallest bowl in that set, the 441, is with my parents, because I found it at a store while I was home for Christmas this year and was afraid it would get broken on the plane. They'll bring it in a few weeks when they drive down.

Early American round mixing bowls - I'm missing the largest one, the 404. The last one I saw on Etsy was fifty dollars.

Verde round mixing bowls - The greens are so pretty.

Tally Ho Cinderella bowl and Delphite 401 - There are no other sized Cinderella bowls in Tally Ho, and I don't anticipate ever finding any other Delphite bowls at a reasonable price, so those two are just sitting together.

Pink round mixing bowls - A yard sale find. You know who else used Pink Pyrex? Julia Child.

Terra round mixing bowls - Terra, for unknown reasons, doesn't include a 402 size, so my set has a weird gap in it even though it is complete.

Primary Colors round mixing bowls - Recently completed due to a gift of the red 402 from my friend Heather.

Next to those, I have an empty space. It's being held for a complete round Butterfly Gold set, which my Aunt Geri gave me for Christmas and which my parents are bringing down when they come.

So there. That's the Pyrex.

Now you tell me all about your antique buckets.

The Loss

On this, Day 9 of 30 Days of Blogging, I have to discuss... The Loss.

No, no one died.

And no, this isn't about that episode of Star Trek where Counselor Troi loses her powers and turns out to be kind of a bad counselor without them and then has the unmitigated gall to blame Dr. Crusher for not responding fast enough when Troi was only reporting a headache and Dr. Crusher was busy helping people with more traumatic injuries according to the rules of triage that all doctors follow in emergencies, although I clearly also have opinions about that and may return to the topic later in the month if we run out of things to talk about.

No, instead there was a loss in my household last night, and when I complained about it to my friends Liz and Falke, Liz made a suggestion that I'm using for tonight's topic:

Blog about it

I had a long day yesterday, and I decided that I wanted comfort food for dinner, so I was making mac and cheese from a box. I do that sometimes instead of cooking from scratch. I add real cheese to it, though, so I guess I'm dressing it up a little. Regardless, while the pasta was boiling, I went to the cabinet to the right of the stove to get the strainer. I keep a lot of things in that cabinet that I use often, like graters, bread loaf pans, several pieces of Pyrex, measuring cups, small cutting boards, etc. When I went to get the strainer out, I noticed that the handle was stuck behind my Pyrex Early American 475 lidded Cinderella round casserole dish, and I thought, "I should move that rather than just jerk the strainer out, because the handle might scratch the bowl or something," so I reached in, picked up the bowl which also had the lid on it, and then this happened:



My 475 is gone.

I felt like the Rock Biter in "The Neverending Story", talking about how they looked like such big, strong, hands, and how the nothing tore away his little friends right out of them. I had my 475 in my hands, and then... nothing.

I guess we're going thrifting this weekend.

"So, did you take November off from blogging or something?"

I went out both days this weekend, Saturday and Sunday. Both days I made a plan, got up, and mostly stuck to it. This is important because it really didn't happen at all for the rest of the month. Most weekends in November, except for going to work at football games, I have come home on Friday afternoon, closed my door, and ventured no further than the dumpster or the laundry room until Monday morning. I'm going to be honest, because it explains why I haven't had anything to blog about:

I've been having some trouble with myself.

Don't freak out. I'm not depressed, or suicidal, or in need of intervention. I DON'T NEED A PHONECALL TO CHECK ON MY MENTAL WELL BEING. I've actually talked to a therapist about this before a few years ago, when I was seeing one more often, so I know what's wrong. I've just had a little trouble shaking it off. I've written before about my introvert streak, and how that usually just translates into me doing stuff by myself a lot, but I've never mentioned that in the fall it tends to get a little worse for a while. After a few weeks of adjustment I come back around to normal equilibrium and everything's fine. This is my yearly cycle, and I'm aware of it, but this year has been worse than usual because I changed my fall schedule without stopping to think about what impact that might have and how I should plan for and address it.

Every year I travel in October, which I did this year, going to New Orleans and Providence, and then in November I go back to New York to see my family for Thanksgiving. This year I decided that I haven't done Christmas at home in forever, and it might be nice to have a change, but that meant that right at the time when I don't want to be around anyone but am forced to be because I am with my parents and have no car, so someone is in proximity twenty four hours a day for a week or so at a time, I was by myself for the first time in years. Unfortunately, most weekends it meant that I couldn't convince myself to leave my apartment. I'd get up, take a shower, shave, and then find the idea of going out and being around people too overwhelming to contemplate. All that traffic, all those cars, all those people I might have to talk to or be bumped by or just look at, it was all just too much to think about, and it was easier to just close the door and stay inside in my safe place.

I've known for a couple weeks that I really needed to shake it off, but was still having trouble. I still haven't seen the "Thor" sequel because both weekends that I wanted to the idea of going to the mall and having to sit near people made me anxious, but fortunately last weekend my friend Melissa invited me to see "Catching Fire" on Sunday, so I had to actually get up and leave the house or else I would disappoint someone else. This weekend, I drew up a plan for Saturday, and actually followed it, all by myself. After a month of not doing so, this feels like a tremendous achievement to me. I didn't draw up a plan for today, but a plan came together anyway.

See, yesterday was Small Business Saturday, and I decided that I needed to go out and support small businesses by going to the comic store and by looking for ties, thrift shop clothes, and vintage Pyrex. I've not shared my Pyrex collection here, really, mostly because I don't have a nice display space to show the entire thing, but since I started collecting a little more deliberately and less haphazardly I've done a lot of searching and reading on the internet. Friday night I even spent 45 minutes or so reviewing patterns and ebay listings so that I'd be able to recognize rarities and know if prices were fair. I was having an ok day, having spent more on ties than on Pyrex, when I saw this:



That wasn't anywhere in any pattern reference that I reviewed. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if maybe someone had taken a bowl that the color faded off of (this happens when you put vintage Pyrex in the dishwasher; a bowl and lid that I picked up at an estate sale for a couple dollars are so far gone that I just keep putting them in the dishwasher myself) and painted it themselves. People make weird art projects out of other things, so it could be possible, but I looked closer and saw that the design was fired on.

"Maybe it's Glassbake. Or Fire King. It can't be Pyrex or I would recognize it."

Intrigued, I picked it up and turned it over, and sure enough, it's Pyrex, but I had no idea what it was.

For the first time ever in my life, I wanted a smart phone that connected to the internet.

Instead of just buying it anyway, I put it back, rationalizing that it might be a newer, non-vintage piece, not putting together in my head until I got home that the Pyrex logo on the bottom had a crown on it, and none of the other dishes in my collection do. It has a crown because it's British. That piece is from the "Tally Ho" pattern, which was given out in the United Kingdom in the 1960's as a promotion for a tea company, and was manufactured there as well. I have no idea what it's doing in East Tennessee, but I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and people on Facebook encouraged me to go get it, so today I got up, got ready, and went back to the store.

According to the Pyrex Facebook group that I'm in, I beat another shopper who was on the way to get it by twenty minutes.

I'm counting it as destiny. If I had stalled, or delayed, or not gone directly to the store according to my plan, then the bowl would have been gone when I got there. Instead, now it's mine.

I left the apartment two days in a row, and I had a good weekend.

I will be ok.

To Nashville and Back

This morning I got up early to drive to Nashville for the Nashville Comic Expo. Both of the friends that I asked to go with me earlier in the week ended up backing out (for totally legitimate reasons), but I really wanted to go since I haven't been to a large scale comic convention in a while and I haven't gotten out of town in a while. Even though it is about three hours one way to Nashville, I decided to go for it. I am a grown adult, and capable of going places by myself.

After I spent a half hour choosing an outfit.

And no, it wasn't a choice of which costume to wear.

My goal for this convention wasn't to see any of the guests, or to participate in the speed dating (what?), or even the "spoken nerd" poetry slam (again, what?). My only goal was to see vendors, which meant that I needed to be ready to haggle. This also meant that I had to plan my outfit carefully, and not wear anything comic-related. This might seem counter-productive, since the goal of a comic fandom expo is to celebrate being a fan, but revealing yourself as a fan of something in particular can also put you at a disadvantage when it comes time to haggle. If I'm wearing a Legion of Superheroes t-shirt (I have four; doesn't everybody?) the message I am sending to the other attendees is "Long Live the Legion", but the message I am sending to a dealer is "Weak spot! I will probably buy your Legion crap anyway unless I already own it, so by all means please don't bother giving me a real deal". I also didn't want to wear anything university-affiliated, since Nashville is Vandy territory, so most of the reason it took so long to find a shirt was that almost all of my t-shirts reference comics or work.

Other people clearly took longer to choose an outfit:





(cute, but none of those outfits are in canon)



and I love that the last guy is dressed as a Dr. Fate action figure, rather than as Dr. Fate.

(I say that because, in the comics, the helmet and all of the other non-blue pieces are always colored the same, a shiny golden yellow or yellowish gold. While the "Super Powers" Dr. Fate maintained this color scheme, casting the helmet in yellow plastic and painting the rest of the yellow parts to match, most other Dr. Fate figures have given the helmet a metallic look while leaving the other pieces flat yellow.)

I didn't so much love this:



as I find the Bronies movement a little odd but also because I found it offputting to see so many parents let a random adult who is completely unknown to them hug their children just because said adult is dressed as a stuffed animal. This isn't a mall Santa or anything. It's some guy who bought, created, or rented a My Little Pony costume and now has his hands on your child, and under that mask he could be anybody. Shouldn't that bother a parent? Then again, I saw a mom dressed as female Freddy Krueger and her two kids wearing t-shirts that said "Freddy's Victim", which, given the history between Freddy and his child victims, sends the message that she's dressing up as someone who molested her own kids. Maybe parents aren't nearly as weirded out by things as I think they should be, or maybe I've already established that I spent way too much time thinking about the message that outfits send and couldn't get my mind out of that rut.

No, actually, I think the Bronies hugging children is creepy and I'm not apologizing.

Anyway, my first interaction in the vendor area:



did not go well. I was walking past a table, looking at the titles written on the long boxes, when the vendor yelled at me.

"Hey! Don't just look at the boxes! You have to look at the wall, first, where the good stuff is. Then if you see stuff on the wall you like, you know that there's probably something in the boxes you like."

"That makes sense," I said neutrally, even though I was thinking, "Or you could properly label your boxes, and I would know if there's something in them I might like, but hey. You started talking to me. I'll talk back and see what happens."

"Is there anything in particular that you're looking for?"

"Why yes, actually. Do you have any copies of 'Superman's Girlfriend: Lois Lane'?"

"Yeah! Come over here!"

He had seven issues, and they were all priced between $40 and $65 an issue.

"How firm are you on these prices?"

"Well, these are what the priceguides list as."

Not only is that not an answer to the question that I asked, but that also reveals the problem with issues of "Lois Lane". Issues before #100, and especially before #50, tend to be priced high in the guides because they are older and rarer, and it just seems like they should be valuable because they are comics from the 1960's starring iconic characters. However, the pool of collectors out there who will actually buy an issue of Lois Lane is rather small, and with almost 140 issues to track down many of us are not willing to pay those kinds of prices. Since there are so few of us and we are so stingy, comic sellers who are not willing to move on the price of the issues are going to end up sitting on them. If you're not willing to lower your $65 tag to something manageable, you and Lois are going to grow old together, something that probably happens in an issue of "Superman's Girlfriend: Lois Lane".

"So you're asking $65 for this issue, and not willing to move on the price at all?"

"That's a very important issue."

Mister, I already own that issue, and I didn't pay anywhere close to that for it. I don't carry a priceguide around with me, so my only way of evaluating your prices is by benchmarking against something I already own, and that leads me to believe that I should not shop with you.

"Well, I'll think about it."

"Don't think too long! Someone will snap these right up!"

Liar.

The next table was much more promising, with a number of signs saying "Silver Age Comics 50% Off Marked Price". I decided to give him a try.

"All of the comics in these boxes are half off?"

"As a starting point. I don't want to take any of them home."

"Maybe I can help. Do you have any Lois Lanes in there?"

He grinned, and reached under the table.

"I have a whole box of them. You're looking for them?"

"I am, but that guy over there just tried to sell me some for sixty-five dollars EACH."

Laughter from the vendor. "Wow. Well, look through, and see what you're interested in."

"You don't want to take any of these home, right? I have a proposal."

"Oh?"

"I have fifty dollars. Why don't I start pulling issues, and when you feel like I've hit fifty dollars worth, let's see what we think."

"OK."

See? A vendor was willing to work with me, and we both walked away happy:



That's not even all of the haul. After some dickering back and forth, I ended up with 24 issues, but I couldn't get him to put the one where Lois runs for Senator on an anti-Superman platform (issue #62) back into the pile without losing too many of the cheaper ones after #100, so I had to let it go.

It was a good day, though, but I was saddened to realize on leaving that I'd only stayed an hour. At $20 for entry and $10 for parking, that's fifty cents a minute without even considering the six hours of driving time and the tank of gas. I don't know if I would call the trip a failure, because my God, that pile of Lois Lanes, but it feels like I should have stayed longer or gotten more out of it. I didn't find any of the figures I wanted, and that's actually what I was hoping to get.

Surprisingly, though, the Lois Lanes weren't the only fantastic bargain of the day. Since I left Nashville close to lunchtime to start heading back, it was pretty early in the afternoon when I got close to Crossville, and I decided to stop at the flea market there, which I've never been to.



I was pleasantly surprised, as it looks more like the outdoor flea markets I remember from when I was little:



although at the back it had a lot of empty (and apparently abandoned) booths:



I wasn't expecting much, and was really mostly looking for a drink and maybe a snack for the last part of my drive, but then this happened:



I never told you that I have a small collection of vintage Pyrex, have I? I don't buy every piece I see, as I think some of the patterns are fugly (looking at you, Forest Fancies), but I'm ok with that pattern, Golden Hearts. It was only produced on one dish, and for less than a year (late 1958 and early 1959), and the only other time I've seen one it was in the antique store down the street, where they have it priced at $55.

And then this happened:

"Sir, this tag says 'Lid - $5'. How much do you want for the bowl, too?"

"That tag means that the bowl comes with the lid. The pair is five dollars."

"Five dollars?"

"I think that's a fair price."

"I'LL TAKE IT."

I don't know which purchase I am more excited about, but damn, I had an exciting day.