Things I've collected through the years

• Comic books
  The collection that I was probably happiest about.  Took decent care of them - every one bagged and boarded - but certainly loved the collection enough not to let the comics sit untouched.  Nothing was worth a ton of money, and none of them were in near mint condition but they were certainly in very good.  Plus, it got my parents to take me on a ton of trips to Great Escape.  My favorites - from a distant memory since I sent the full collection off to the Action Auction a decade ago - Batman #339...#400...Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans...Action #583...Superman #423...Teen Titans annual #3
• Teddy bears
  This one was a collection that was collected for me.  The maternal grandparents got me teddy bears - Humphrey Beargart, for example - and I did, admittedly, enjoy them as a kid.  There's still one or two of them in the guest room here at The Homestead.  Most of the collection got donated to Goodwill or somewhere from time to time.
• Patches
  When I was a kid, I bought a patch from every place I went.  I was going to sew them on a backpack and carry a record of all my trips with me.  'Cause it was going to be cool.  I swear, inside my head, so cool...
• Pint glasses
  When The Girl and I got our house, we tried collecting pint glasses on each of our vacations - "Who's on First" from the Baseball Hall of Fame, Elvis from Graceland - that didn't last long because the cabinets got too crowded too quickly and our adult life didn't need quite as many pint glasses as her college life did.
• Inaction figures
  This one was pretty solid for a while as I'd grabbed the first three sets and variants of Kevin Smith's inaction figures.  The Kevin Smith ardor, however, has faded and I moved these along to Katydid a couple of months ago.  Sort of a repeating patterns to most of my collections.
• Tick figures
  When we were in college, The Girl was a big fan of The Tick cartoon series on Fox, like a big, big fan.  At one point, I thought that introducing her to the comics and maybe the action figures would somehow be kinda cool, so I ordered a few toys, a few comic books, a steel box.  She thought they were neat - maybe because she's all polite and stuff, maybe because she really enjoyed having the toys.  So I bought more - pretty much all of the action figures they ever made.  This collection is still around but kinda stuck in the downstairs coffee table, only coming out when kids come over and find them.
• South Park figures
  'Bout the same as The Tick figures.  Bought initially as gifts for The Girl, still hanging around on top of the cabinet in our current dining room.
• South Park DVDs
  All thirteen seasons plus the movie...that's like $375 worth of Dvds which we admittedly loved the hell out of but pretty much don't ever watch a second time.  At this point in the post, I'm starting to wonder if these are solid financial choices.
• Neil Young cds
  I come from a completist when it comes to music.  If you like an artists - a lot - you get all their music.  I swear that my mom has over 150 Bob Dylan cd's - obviously not all of which are official releases.  At one point I owned every Neil Young cd and was on the search for the missing six.  Since that point, however, I've sold or given off about a third of the Neil Young collection, keeping only the albums that I still really enjoy.  John Mellencamp is also in this category.  Queen came close.  The switch to digital just might save me from this physical collecting urge.  Of course, I did download two of the five parts of the absolutely complete U2 recently, so maybe the urge still exists even if its not for the physical products.
• Fiestaware
  The Girl and I got started on Fiestaware when we were registering for our wedding gifts at Macy's.  The saleswoman gave us a few minutes to wander around while she set up our registration info, and we settled on Fiestaware.  It's a classic, simple line.  We both loved it.  When the saleswoman asked us what color we wanted, we said we wanted one place setting of each, something that the woman found...um...interesting.  Since then, we'd been picking up a piece or two of every new color release.  Somewhere along the way we realized that we had enough serving bowls and large platters for the two of us who don't do a whole lot of entertaining 'round The Homestead.  So we don't have anything in chocolate, ivory, or lemongrass (and no lilac or sapphire either, of course), but we have some awesome dinnerware that we use every day.  We just don't need to keep collecting it.
• Baseball cards
  This was a very sporadic collection.  Whenever dad would visit Kaiser's tobacco - where he loved getting his cigars - I would get a pack of baseball cards, gum and all.  All I cared about was getting the full Reds team for that year.  Then I got enough money - allowances primarily - to buy a full set...and the binder and card pages to hold them.  And I was suddenly a collector.  Then I got a couple more full sets - the '88 Donruss, the '89 Upper Deck - and I was a full-fledged collector.  In all honesty, I have absolutely no clue whatever where those sets went.  I might've sold them, might've given them away, might've just lost them in a closet somewhere.
• Beaker figures
  It all started with a Gift-of-the-Magi Valentines Day in which The Girl got me a Mega Beaker and I got her a Sam the Eagle figure (she was working at a school whose colors were blue and whose mascot was the Eagles).  From there I got a couple of Muppet Labs, a Bunsen Honeydew, even a Phil Van Neuter because he came with plastic glassware.  For a while, my students would take Beaker various places on their vacations - as would I.  Now, however, that seems to have drifted to the wayside.  Th figures are still around, however, in my classroom.

I think that's about it...I'm all good with not having other big lists of things I've collected.