No prints for us

Mildly frustrating day. Today was the first day of the Cape Dorset print sale that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. While we had gone down to look at the prints in previous years, we'd never gone down to buy one, so we didn't quite know how it worked. But to be on the safe side we went down before it opened at 1 p.m. There were only four of us there, including Cathy, so I thought we might have caught a break.

Nope, no such luck. The way it works is that if you want to buy a print, you get a ticket from the curator. Then your name is entered into a lottery for the available prints. While there are signed and numbered lots of 50 for each print, the museum only has one copy. The rest are sent to galleries across North America and Europe. The draw for the prints took place about 45 minutes after the doors opened, so there wasn't too much of a wait.

I also thought the odds would be reasonably good. A quick glance before the draw happened showed about 25 people interested in buying prints. Cathy and I each had a ticket and there were two prints we were interested in. We weren't going to get both, but we figured we had decent odds of getting one of them.

The first four tickets drawn went for other prints. So we were beginning to have some hope. Then the fifth ticket drawn took the print Cathy wanted. The sixth ticket took the one I wanted. So that was that. I was fairly crooked for the next hour or so. I understand there is demand for the prints and this is probably a fair way to go about doing things. Still, it was a bit frustrating to see the prints we wanted to just up and vanish. Especially since the woman who selected the one I wanted kind of just went "Oh, is that one taken? No? OK, I'll take that one, I guess."

All that was going through my head was "Oh for fuck's sake..."

I guess the positive way to look at it is we saved $1,000, even though we had the money budgeted to buy it. And hey, I got to chat with Kate Nova for a little bit as well. In person, as opposed to online. So that was nice.

sigh At least I had my first bit of time on the ice curling today. Believe it or not, it put me in a pretty good mood. By the time I got home around 5, I was not longer ready to kill the people who took "our" prints. Plus, it's not like I can't find a use for the money...I'm buying a new laptop on Friday.

And on a purely unrelated note, I'm happy to welcome my good friend Craig Westcott to the wide world of blogging with The Public Ledger. Craig is a shit disturbing journalist in the best sense of the word and I look forward to reading what he has to write. Too often I find my favourite blogs drift away or fall silent. So it's always nice to see a new one start up that I know will be educational and entertaining.