April 28, 2010

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.

5 comments:

Ame said...

You forgot a few childhood collections... Star Wars figures for a bit and Garbage Pail Kids stick out the most. Both were for fairly short times. Not sure you could call Legos a collection, but you always wanted more.

Additionally you should have hung onto some of those bears. I sold one in HS for $95. It was a lesser one too. The rest of the collection (bears not the dolls that are really worth bank) went in the auction and brought in just over a thsouand. Turns out the crazy grandma knew what she was buying us.

coachsullivan said...

I think you have more collections, but the few I have I'm pretty obsessive about. I don't want to think about how much of my paychecks from my two stints at Borders got handed right back over to feed into my book and DVD collections. And, of course, I've criss-crossed the state of Indiana with cards to roughly 50 libraries to work for years on the music collection, which grows by 50-100 songs weekly right up to today. It's a sickness, really...

Anonymous said...

You definitely are the reason I collected comic books and still read trade paperbacks today; even collecting Essential X-Men and X-Factor series, plus DC crossover trades in the present.

I also believe that Legos for you was a collection. Putting them together and then displaying makes them collection. I don't remember ever playing with them.

As for me, I too did baseball cards, John Mellencamp, and U2. Away from your influence, I collected Magic the Gathering and D&D Miniatures. I have a ton of D&D books, but I'm not sure I woud call it a collection since I did buy every one available, but I'd say I do have a hankering for adventure modules (which I bought all of yours in junior high and still own them). I have the Harry Potter books and movies, which I haven't read/watched a second time, either. I think that's it. I've learned to stay away from anything labeled collectible these days as my addiction/obsession is too easy. Of course, I can't wait for the daughters to be old enough for Pokemon or Yugioh or whatever the current fad will be.

PHSChemGuy said...

Ame - Yeah, the bears just got handed along through the years - to Goodwill, to a few kids I knew who enjoyed 'em more than I. And I'd forgotten about the Star Wars and Garbage Pail Kids. Those were good uses of my time.

Coach Sullivan - What is the goal with the music collection at this point? Is it still to have a copy of every top 40 song ever?

Gamer - Were you not a comic book reader before we met? With the D&D stuff, my thought is that unless you went around at least casually hunting them out, I'd say not a collection - just sort of a bunch of stuff dropped right into your lap.

Anonymous said...

I had bought and read a few Marvel comics before you introduced me to DC, but the passion wasn't ignited until you let me read the Crisis and also your parents giving us a ride over to the Great Escape helped quite a bit. Good days!

By the way, did you get a package in the mail that contained a certain bacony item I thought you would like?