12 June 2020

Collections

We're going all light-hearted (that should be hyphenated, right?) and frothy today.  Sometimes I am asked if I have any hobbies.  My usual response is that I don't have hobbies, I have serial obsessions, i.e., I take a fancy to something and do it to furious excess and then drop it and move onto something else.  (I would ask those of you who will be tempted to make a wise crack at this point to kindly refrain--you know who you are.)  I'll collect a certain type of toy car and try to get all of them in a series, same with die-cast aircraft and so many other things.  Good news is such things are usually small and easily stored (just like my men).  I learned one way of curbing this habit it to collect things the entire set of which amounts to a small number, e.g., replicas of medieval bishop chess pieces, of which there are only three as near as I can tell:
 

or versions of the USS Enterprise (yes, I know there's one ship in the photo of a different class and Enterprise E is not pictured):


Then there are the royal ducks, which I first encountered at service stops on the Autobahn:

l to r: Mozart, Washington, Louis XVI, Ghost of Christmas Past (whom I've renamed The Great & Powerful Duck Goddess), Marie Antoinette, Ben Franklin, Elizabeth II, Emperor Franz Josef.  I also encountered a (Mad) King Ludwig II which I sent to the much-beloved Spo.

Of particular note are a series of figures which I've come to call a set of role models from various times in my life:

l to r: a good, kind, & magical fairy; Daffy Duck; Cardinal Richelieu; St. Michael the Archangel; St. Benedict; Louis XIV.

Make of all this what you will.

4 comments:

  1. interesting collections! I know spo's someone collects rubber duckies. spouse and I collect shot glasses from our travels. I think we have over 300 of them.

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  2. Glad to know I am small and easily stored.

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  3. I like to collect plants. At one point prototype 2 told me it was embarrassing to have friends over, due to the large collection of house plants. Luckily she has moved out to make more room for plants...
    Of course, sometimes plants transition to compost, so storage seems to have a natural balance.

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    1. Ah, the wonders of nature! You should have threatened to get some specimens that eat those who insult them, sorta like an overly large Venus Flytrap, which would lure in its prey by displaying an Instagram message for them inside its flower.

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