a disappointment... and a good day

Another example of life's vicissitudes...

The other day I received notification from SpecialistAuctions.com that someone had bought a clock 

and a barometer

 from me. I got all excited - £900 of sale is a nice bonus....

Sadly, after much to-ing and fro-ing of emails it seems that the 'buyer' was a con-man, so there will be no PayPal credit to transfer. :-(  Luckily I had not given him any account information or dispatched the goods so I am not out of pocket, only disappointed! Now I just have to get the final Valuation Fees refunded and the items back up for sale.


On the other hand, I did have a good day at the Antiques Fair I attend most months in Woodstock (it runs for the Saturday and Sunday of the weekend with the second Sunday of the month), which made up to an extent for that disappointment. I have a lot of old Chinese mother-of-pearl gaming counters

 which I have been trying to sell for a while with very little luck. Over the last month I turned a few of them into earrings and necklaces and all of a sudden I sold £60-worth of the counters to people who liked the idea and wanted to copy it. (I would have liked to sell the 'value-added' items, but no matter - I still have them as examples for next month!)
Then there were the customers bringing me repair jobs and/or collecting items I had repaired. I guess it is a case of swings and roundabouts - as with so many things in this life.
As a bonus I now have someone else who is very interested in the clock which I thought I had sold, so maybe I will have some of that cash in due course after all! (cue Life of Brian's 'Always look on the bright side of life'...)

What a week!

Never mind days, this has been one of those weeks when I should not have got out of bed!
Over the last week I have definitely moved backwards.
A carriage clock which I thought was repaired and just in need of regulating (by addition of some timing washers) needs a new balance staff, an Atmos clock in which I had fitted a new suspension needs it taking out and another one fitted because it was wrongly manufactured, and my car has broken down, so a trip to London customers on Tuesday, which started at 5 am, and should have ended about 5 pm, finally ended (courtesy of the RAC) at 7.30pm. I did not get to the last of the customers on the list and the one before wasn't at home and had made no attempt to contact me.
A trip to the garage (Monday) to get a new sender for the car alarm resulted in a one-hour wait while they discovered they had the wrong one and that the right one is unavailable. They then said that another garage ~ 10 miles away from them had some second hand ones, but when I got there the boss was out. I arranged to return that afternoon but when I did he told me he needed far more time than the employee had thought and he was not able to do it before closing.
Because of the car breaking down, I did not get to a blood donating session, I did not get to an evening meeting and I am not gong to be able to get to the antiques fair in Woodstock where I should have a stall tomorrow! I was supposed to be having today off with GoodInParts, but that has gone down the pan as well.....
We (my friendly mechanic & I) <i>think</i> we have found the problem - a crank-shaft sensor - but it needs replacing and we won't be able to get the part till Monday and since GoodInParts probably can't get me back here on Sunday evening or Monday morning it looks like I will be suck here for the weekend.

All I can say is Thank God you only get this sort of week very occasionally!