Oh boy, don't EVEN talk to my husband, he keeps going on about growing morels in our basement...
Thats Luck of the Irish. You are lucky he doesnt find out about the Garden Giant "King Stropharia". Imagine you garden taken over by 2ft tall 40" round Mushrooms.....
On a serious note, I am surprised that nobody mentioned collecting weird gross lingerie that fell out of peoples ceilings (like the one on Ebay recently)
This is an interesting thread for me since I have never been a collector. I would be interested in speculation about the difference between collecting and non-collecting personalities. In the thirty years that I played guitar I never had more than two guitars at a time, my main one and a backup. I have a bunch of whistles now but only because I'm a relatively new whistler and I am still sorting out what kind of whistle sound I like. Part of the reason I am not a collector is that I am a bit of a miser. I can't bring myself to buy things that I have no practical use for. Eventually I will give away all the cheap whistles I have that I never play.
So why do you collect or why do you not collect?
Mike
I'm not a collector by nature either. I'd bought so many whistles because they were cheap and because I was looking for ones I like and experimenting. I sold two of my guitars since I didn't need that many, so I will get rid of things I no longer use and that I can find a good home for. Now that I have some whistles I love, I won't be buying them nearly as often. As for the other instruments, I do play when I get time. I only have one mando and one octave mando. The Native American flute was more art as I can smell the cedar, love to look at it, and it was handmade, and that's the only one I have. The tutorials are along the same lines, looking for the right one(s) for me. Whistles and tutorials are mostly mail ordered, so I don't have the chance to try them before I buy.
So I don't really have a collector personality as such; I just get interested in something and try different things out. I have the personality that can't stick to just one instrument or book, I like different qualities in them, such as whistle sounds and have them in many keys as well.
I guess I have the personality that will amass some instruments, try them out, then pare down the stock. Don't know if there's a name for that.
Oh boy, don't EVEN talk to my husband, he keeps going on about growing morels in our basement...
Thats Luck of the Irish. You are lucky he doesnt find out about the Garden Giant "King Stropharia". Imagine you garden taken over by 2ft tall 40" round Mushrooms.....
On a serious note, I am surprised that nobody mentioned collecting weird gross lingerie that fell out of peoples ceilings (like the one on Ebay recently)
I'm not intimately familiar with this Ebay story but it reminds me of an apartment we lived in once. There was a hole in the ceiling where we could see straight up into the upstairs apartments kitchen. These people generated some pretty rank odors up there, not just from food, so we stuffed some of my hubby's old underwear up the hole. This fixed the problem, but I wonder if it was ever discovered by subsequent tenants!!!
spittin_in_the_wind wrote:We have an impressive collection of wine corks after 14 years of weekly steak and wine dinners with the spouse....14 years minus nine months for each of the kids, approximately, makes about 650 corks! We're starting to run out of room so I've had to start throwing them away. Someday we'll figure out a use for them!
Robin
If you're at all handy with wood, one great use for wine corks is trivets. We have some my father-in-law (the family wine collector) has made...they're basically six-inch square wooden trays with the corks inlaid in a pattern on the top to make a heat-resistant surface. They're pretty, and great conversation pieces.
Redwolf
...agus déanfaidh mé do mholadh ar an gcruit a Dhia, a Dhia liom!
Tell us something.: Well dang, I just want to change my password. looking for that correct page! Thank you! Ohh good grief, I get it, you have to be careful who you let in because of spammers, but sigh.... I'm in a hurry, can we move this along please. :)
I am a collector of hummingbirds. Not the live ones, although I do feed them all summer while they are here. I even had a friend's father carve walnut hummingbird sound holes for my Hammered Dulcimer.
I collect them because they are pretty and it makes me happy to look at them.
I also collect music boxes. I lost my 1st collection 12 years ago when our house burned down so it isn't a very large collecion now. Most of the new ones I have gotten are hummingbird music boxes.
My husband collects O gauge trains and books about the civil war.
We had an exchange student from Germany who couldn't understand what this collecting thing was all about. She said that they only keep family heirlooms. But she did sneek home a shell from a very large snapping turtle in her luggage when she left. I guess that was more like a souvenier than a collectable.
Cheers,
Kathy
~*~Creativity is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift to God~*~
To be honest, I've never really thought of myself as a collector either. With books, the reason I have so many is, well, I read. A lot. And I don't like to get rid of them (unless I've got one that's really cheesy) because I know I'll want to read them again. Years ago, when we first moved from Pacific Grove to Durham, I gave away huge bags full of paperback books, reasoning that, if I wanted to read them again, I could just pick up new copies or get them at the library. Unfortunately, I found that many of the books I wanted to re-read were out of print (which was most of them, at one time or another), and not available at our local library (and, in those days before Amazon.com, the odds of finding a copy of an obscure out-of-print paperback were pretty slim...even with haunting used bookstores , there were many I never was able to replace. In some cases, I couldn't even remember the title...only the plot and maybe a bit about the cover...which made replacing them even harder). Now, if I read a book and enjoy it, I just keep it. It means my study gets awfully cluttered, and I periodically have to take everything off the shelves and reorganize so I can find things, but on the upside, I never lack for something to read! All I have to do is browse the backs of my shelves, and I'm sure to find something I haven't read in a couple of years that sounds like fun again.
Redwolf
Last edited by Redwolf on Mon Sep 08, 2003 10:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
...agus déanfaidh mé do mholadh ar an gcruit a Dhia, a Dhia liom!
Tell us something.: This is the first sentence. This is the second of the recommended sentences intended to thwart spam its. This is a third, bonus sentence!
As with many of you, my wife and I have books. Thousands, literally. We hired movers for our last move, and when they saw all the boxes full of books, they got surly: "They're so damned heavy!" But since we don't specialize in a particular kind of literature or multiple editions of works by a single author, I guess that's not really a collection.
When on vacation, we keep lists of wildlife seen, especially birds.
But for *real* collections: I have lots of aerophones. Didges, whistles, flutes, eastern European and Asian wind instruments, Native American flutes, on and on. I used to play orchestral brass professionally (horn, trombone, tuba), and seem to take to wind instruments in general fairly easily.
I also have a lot -- my wife would say Way Too Much -- of juggling equipment. Dozens of juggling balls, many clubs, spinning plates, diabolos, devil sticks, shaker cups, yo-yos, balls for spinning on your finger, cigar boxes . . . just about anything that can be manipulated to neat effect. I have perfectly round, colorful, almost perfectly bouncy custom silicon juggling balls that cost over $60 each. We now have several boxes, a closet, and an entire wardrobe-thingy full of juggling toys, plus dozens of juggling-related videos and DVDs. I have a couple dozen fine kites, too, and used to be a sponsored flier (a maker or company would give me free products and support to compete or perform in various events at kite festivals), but I rarely fly anymore.
Gardening: I have a modest bonsai collection on which I spend a couple hours a week, and we have about twenty orchid plants of various types.
I am otherwise a fine, upstanding member of society. I think.
My wife: lanterns and candles, belly-dancing materials, and middle-eastern paraphernalia (she grew up in Saudi Arabia, so loves that music and decor).
I have a small instrument collection - largely aerophones, but in particular, whistles, flutes and harmonicas. I also collect art and drafting supplies, pens (fountain pens, especially), and slide rules. Except for the instruments, most of my collections are family heirlooms. I hang on to them because they remind me of someone.
Most of my collections are small, though... I'm not allowed to collect big things
