I ran into a streak of work the last half of January, and realized I’d have some extra money.

Not a whole lot, as Charley Varrick once said, but more than I was expecting to have. A windfall, you might call it. Of course, I had to work for it, the emails and phone calls just came in a sudden torrent for the work.

The work ranged from replacing the valves on an old (and difficult) shower body on the Upper West Side to changing lightbulbs and setting up an Amazon firestick down in the Village. Along with five non-consecutive days of plastering and painting in SoHo, I was looking at some disposable cash. Of course, the bulk of it I planned to set aside for the next mechanical crisis our ancient secondhand car is going to throw at us. But I knew I’d have a little spending money left over.

There were some things I’ve been meaning to buy but was reluctant to spend money on, like an airbrush. I intend to actually build some of the model airplane kits gathering dust in my closet,

And I’ve been toying with the idea of creating actual art with an airbrush. So that was the first thing that came to mind.

I’ve also been wanting to get myself a pair of Thursday Boots Chelsea boots. They cost $200, and never on sale according to their website. But it’s a nice-looking boot, and I wouldn’t be wearing Blundstones like everyone else. When I sold shoes many years ago, Jimmy Breslin came into the store. Actually, he’d been dragged in by his wife Ronnie, who was paying for the shoes.

He asked how much the shoes were. He was trying on a pair of Allen Edmonds shoes, which ran about $100 in the mid-nineties.

“This style is $95.” I told him. Then he said, “Xavier, I pay $20 for a pair of shoes. Tell me why my wife wants to pay $95 for these?” Well, I could have told him that his $20 shoes probably didn’t make it to the end of the year, or that I really didn’t believe him knowing what he wrote about shoes in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. I just explained to him he wasn’t going to find a quality pair of shoes for less than $75. He actually wrote about it in his Newsday column that week.

But back to my windfall and the toys I bought with it.

After working every day in one capacity or another for 2 straight weeks I finally had the day off last Friday. I had some of the money, but I didn’t even have time to spend it. But by Friday I had all my spending money. I wanted the airbrush badly, but I didn’t want to get price gouged at Blick. Besides, they didn’t have the one I wanted in stock.

I went to The Complete Sculptor’s website and they only had the Iwata airbrush, reasonably priced but after reading the reviews I saw it isn’t the one that would be good for my purposes. Time to order the airbrush online.

But I couldn’t leave The Complete Sculptor empty handed! I’d waited two weeks for some gratification. I was proud of myself that I hadn’t spent every night on Amazon clicking away like some demented old man watching HSN. But enough was enough and I needed to have something to hold, the airbrush would be on its way but not tangible yet.

I got, in no particular order, a mini hacksaw. A wire brush for my Dremel. Superglue accelerant. A glue dispenser for the styrene glue.

Well, now I needed the styrene glue to go with that! Luckily Blick art supplies has a store not 2 blocks from The Complete Sculptor, so I dropped by them for that. And a pair of detail scissors. And a new cutting mat. It all came to about fifty bucks.

Feeling good about not going crazy, when I got home, I ordered a knife sharpening set from Amazon. I’ve been meaning to do that since Danusia complained about how dull our kitchen knives are, so no guilt there. The knife sharpening kit reminded me of my days at Yorke Dynamold shoes in Queens, where I famously sharpened an expensive pair of Wiss scissors on the grinder and ruined them. I didn’t know you only sharpened the cutting blade, not the backside blade, and I sharpened both.

I know a bit more about sharpening now, and our knives cut right through the tomatoes I bought for the test.

But I’m going to wait till my next billing cycle before ordering those boots.