On my absence from the forum, and a near miss for my collection!

Hello, STS Forum!

It's been a long while since I last posted here. At first I was just avoiding being online much, due to laptop issues - lots of 'blue screen of death' crashing which sometimes took hours to restart from, so I eventually gave in and bought a new laptop. But a few days later, the old laptop exploded and started a house fire, which also destroyed the brand new laptop, so I had no internet access at all - plus a lot of filthy black melted mess to clear up!

Luckily the vast majority of my collection was fine - the fire wasn't in the one room I try to keep them all in, so only the 2024 arrivals were exposed to the heat and smoke. A few Breyer Stablemates need repair or possibly replacement when I get round to it, one's beyond saving as anything other than a custom project, while some horses with nylon or mohair manes got frazzled and will need their hair replacing. Every model (and everything else in the room!) had a coating of fine black sooty filaments, but that wiped off just fine.
And my little flock of mini chickens were involved both the fire AND the firemen giving them a soaking, so there I was on my knees in the charred soggy heap of stuff which used to be a coffee table, picking chicken figures from the black mess and counting them out - every single one was there, and fine!

The only significant damage to a more expensive model was this Breyer Traditional's tail...



Because the worst of the melting and charring is on the non-display side, I decided that rather than replace the model with a brand new one, and demote this original to become a custom body, she'd still look fine on the shelf if I could just cut, carve, and file away all the burnt parts, to leave the white plastic inside as her remaining tail.
So here's a 'before' and 'after' - not a restoration, just cleaning up and making her look as tidy as possible - which is perfectly ok, from a distance!





It's taken me a while to get back into normality, I've replaced the sofa and table and patched the big black hole in the floor (and bought a pretty rug to cover up the carpet hole too!), and it took even longer to sign back in to everything online cos I relied on my old laptop saving all my passwords for me, but now I managed to guess this one, so I'm back :)
I'll update my General Additions thread soon, my camera survived the fire almost unscathed (the lens hood is lightly melted) so I've been able to take photos as models arrived, I just have to catch up with uploading and posting them all now!

The moral of the story is, if you ever have to replace a laptop (or phone, or tablet) which starts acting extremely erratically and doing scary weird things, throw the old one away rather than leaving it in the house!

George, I'm so happy for seeing you back on forum.
It's impressive all the bad things that happened to you just because of that old laptop. I'm glad you are well and your ranimals too.
Certainly it require a huge effort to have everything back to normal since the damage is huge but it's good to see that you are managing everything!

Oh, that must have been awful Fortunately, no one was hurt and your collection is also fine. Welcome back to the forum!

I missed your horsey posts while you were gone but no wonder- you had your hands full!!!

As bad as the fire undoubtedly was I am glad it wasn't worse. And that tail adjustment is simply incredible- wonderful work!

Glad to see you back! Wow that is a crazy story!! I’m so glad you are safe and the majority of your collection survived. That is so scary that happened just from a laptop… I look forward to seeing you on here more!

Oh my... this is my biggest fear I´m sorry you expierenced that but I´m glad you´re ok

Oh my what a shock

Glad that you're fine and your house wasn't damaged that much, as well as your collection.

Welcome back

Happy to hear that you didn't get hurt in the fire and that most of your collection survived. It sounds like a serious fire. Did your laptop explode while it was switched off?

As always, your restoration (or cleaning as you call it) is perfect. Perhaps the tail looks different from before, but if you didn't know, then it looks like a perfect tail. I did wonder whether anything had happened to you - good to see you back.

Good to hear from you George! and glad that your rescue bunny is safe and healthy and you too.
That's crazy that the battery caused that chaos!!
Good save of your horse's tail.

What a terrible story, but I'm glad you're doing so well! I'm glad to see you back here and that your collection hasn't suffered too much. You've done an excellent job restoring it, congratulations!

Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry to hear your awful news but so glad you are OK.
hugs