A Long, Lonely Journey

One of my latest obsessions has been vintage bakelite.  Buttons, jewelry, housewares - just name it, I'm all over it.  It comes in a limited range of colours, but they look fabulous all jumbled together.  Though I'm getting fairly good at recognising it by look and feel, one sure fire test is the Simichrome test.  By taking the teeniest amount of Simichrome polishing paste on the tip of a q-tip, wiping it onto the article in question, then wiping it off with the other end of the swab, you'll get a deep yellow smudge.  There are a few other products (like Formula 409) that will have the same effect, but Simichrome is far and away the easiest to control since it comes in a paste, and at approximately $10 US a tube, it seemed to me like a small investment for something that should last quite a long time.  Last Autumn I started looking on-line for a supplier in Canada.  Unfortunately, the only one I could find was Amazon.ca and they wanted more than $25 a tube, plus shipping.  Well, really! 

So instead, I bought a tube off a seller on eBay for $10 US, plus about $2 shipping - that's still half the price amazon wanted, and then I waited.  It was posted by the seller on October 24th with a tracking number, which I followed on-line all the way to Windsor, ON, where it fell off the grid, I

thought, forever...

But then...it arrived, just like that, yesterday.

I'm not sure, what kind of strange, lonely adventure the parcels that travel through Canada Post have, but I like to imagine it's gone exploring Iceland in a wooly sweater like this: