Do you have any collections?
I’m one of those “stuff” people. I like stuff. I have tacky knick knacks lining my bookshelves. I’ve always been that way. So it’s not surprising that I like to collect things, or at least I did. I used to have a pretty sizable collection of snow globes. I loved the cheap, plastic ones that had the name of places on them that you would get for $3.00 at a rest stop off the highway. I had a TON of them. Family would get them for me when they would travel. My sister even had one of her co-workers bring me back one when she went to Australia. My favorite one was the one I got at a gas station in Intercourse, Pennsylvania when my husband and I passed through on a trip one time. My humor is that of a teenager, so the fact that the snow globe said “I love Intercourse” with PA in very small print next to it made it my favorite. Of course, when my mother-in-law would come over I always made sure that one was on the back of the shelf well hidden by other more g-rated snow globes. But then I discovered that those cheap little snow globes eventually lose their water and I was not feeling the idea of filling them all up with a syringe through the tiny little plug on the bottom. So I tossed them in the trash. Now I collect refrigerator magnets.
I do have other collections that are more or less, practical. Sort of. I’m a knitter and crocheter at heart so I have quite a collection of yarn. I have so much that it is considered SABLE. In the knitting world, SABLE stands for Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. That means I have acquired more yarn in my “stash” than I can realistically knit in a lifetime. When I go into a yarn store and the clerk asks me what project I have in mind, I very rarely actually have a project I’m specifically thinking of. I just buy yarn because it’s pretty or soft and might make a nice shawl or sweater one day. I have souvenir yarn like that. If I travel and there’s a yarn store nearby, I tend to make a stop and buy a hank of yarn that’s dyed or spun locally, as a souvenir. I can’t tell you exactly how much yarn I have, but I can say that the closet in my office/craft room is full of bins of yarn.
Also yarn related, I have a collection of little toys that people have made me out of yarn. I have a lot of turtles because they’re my favorite animal. I also have wine corks that have been turned into minions with crocheted pieces to go over the cork. I even have a jumping spider that a student gave me two years ago that a friend of hers made. My students knew how deep my fear of spiders was and that jumping spider was a Christmas gift. Still creepy, still sitting on my shelf with the other stuffies that I have been gifted.
I suppose I could also say that I collect books. Or maybe just that I have a lot of them. Again, I like stuff. My husband does too. I could write a whole post on things he has collected. I’ll just say that it would be the world’s most epic cocktail party based on his collection of liquor/liqeuor bottles. To be fair, my yarn and his bottles are based on our hobbies. When we get into something, we go all in! Thankfully we have a house now. There was a time when we lived in a one-bedroom apartment just barely above 500 square feet. We had these hobbies then, just sayin’.
I do realize that we can’t take this stuff with us when we go, but there’s really no harm in having it all now and enjoying it while we can. Minimalists we are not. And that’s o.k.
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