Lots of updates.

It's been 3 months since my last blog post. There are a couple of reasons for my hiatus. First, it's tax season and I've been working 7 days a week. Second, my new house has entered it's 4th month of renovations and has kept me pretty busy. Finally, until March, I hadn't acquired any corkscrews worth mentioning. And I mean nothing. Sure, I had fallen behind on my searches and my fellow collectors probably got some great deals because of it, but I hadn't come across anything that exciting in the past few months. Until now... Finally, I was able to acquire this cream colored version of a Ross pig below. I didn't have any Ross pigs in my collection at the time and when I saw this on a non-Ebay site at a reasonable price, I quickly purchased it. This corkscrew is an American design patented by Howard Ross in 1949. It's heftier than it looks in pictures, is made of celluloid, and can occasionally be found with their original boxes, but good luck. The snouts are often broken...poor design I suppose, but that's ok, it only makes good examples of these harder to find. The only other example I have owned was the black version and the majority of its nose was broken off. These are actually quite rare, yet sell for a fairly reasonable price considering how rarely they turn up ($100-$300). They can be found in 5 colors (red, black, yellow, green, cream), AND THE FABLED BLUE VERSION!!! The blue version is just that, fabled. There are no confirmed examples...as of yet.​

My second purchase of 2019.....was a second Ross pig....and a cream colored one!!! What kind of sick joke had the corkscrew gods played on me? But, oh well, this one turned out to be an even better deal than the first and with the 27th corkscrew auction at https://auction.collectorcorkscrews.com/ starting in a few weeks, the duplicate is sure to find a new home.

Anyway, as of the past 2 days, I have some interesting new corkscrews purchased and in route, but until then, a lot has happened with the house. The iron door for the wine cellar was bought, the fireplace has been gutted, the granite is in, windows are all in....except for one that's backordered. Wood floors have been installed, sanded, hand scraped, stained, sealed, and cleaned repeatedly to no avail and well...pictures tell a thousand words.