An Oddball from an Airport

I finished up the painting a bit early tonight, pretty much admitting defeat to an extent by recognizing my limits on both my energy and interest in household projects.  I did finish, for the most part, but I think I'll give up on buying another case of cards and pay a painter for their time for the next room.  Ugh.  I just suck at it.

With that recognition out of the way, how about a little ditty from the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra? You can't go wrong with Sinatra, and "Come Fly with Me" is appropriate for tonight's post.

Last week Friday, I was in Savannah, Georgia, speaking for a education session for the American Institute of Architects' Georgia chapter about two of their new contractual forms available for construction projects. Since my vocation when I'm not blogging is being a construction lawyer, that was a pretty good speaking engagement for me to get.

I left at lunch time to return home to Atlanta, and, to do so, took the quick 45-minute flight from Savannah. I had a little time to kill at the airport -- as happens frequently these days -- and looked around at the shops there. I was amazed to find an antique store there.  Seriously.

The store was a little bit sparsely populated with items. The shopkeeper apologized to me, saying that he was closing up shop at the airport because there just was not sufficient foot traffic to keep his store in business -- even though it literally is the only antique store in any airport in America. I mean, I know of the great used book store in Milwaukee -- Renaissance Books -- that is in the airport, but an antique store is unique.

I ended up buying two items.  One was a map of the state of Wisconsin from an atlas published in 1898 -- it was just a cool looking map with different colors for each county and showed the different railroad lines at the time that criss-crossed the state.  The other was an item I feel sure that I overpaid for, but it was the oddball-ness and coolness of buying it at an antique store in an airport that talked me into it:

It's a deck of playing cards from the 1992 Atlanta Braves.  The cards were printed by the U.S. Playing Card Company in Cincinnati, which is the manufacturer of all the best playing cards in the U.S. -- Bicycle, Bee, Aviator, and Hoyle, for example.

It's nothing rare, I'm sure, but the oddball factor and the story about where it was bought definitely made this purchase worth the flight.