Jeffrey Worley (Same guy?)

Diamonds and German cars are excellent peacemakers, and from what I've read on this list, the monthly payments may be lower for some collectors than their monthly eBay expenditures. ;-) Kidding, of course... Truthfully, my collection is quite modest by anyone's standards, and my wife gives me a lot of latitude. When I don't get latitude, I've usually broken one or both of the following simple rules (made by observation, not declaration): (1) out of site, out of mind--I keep my stuff put away and well organized, and I make a concerted effort not to let it spread outside of a contained area (and never refer to the living room as the "receiving dock"); (2) pace yourself--getting a big box every day, three or four days in a row, starts the "what is all this stuff" conversation. Those are the big ones, but there are a couple of "survival skills" I think also apply to any hobby. First and foremost, practice good relationship management. For example, ask yourself when you last spent as much time thinking about a spontaneous gift or event for your spouse/partner/S.O./kids/family as you do in digging up rusty Vaxen--holidays and birthdays DO NOT count. Has (s)he been asking you for months to do something around the house, and you never have time for it, but you've had bottomless time to repair that <whatever>? That's just asking for trouble. Second, don't not spend more than you can afford. This seems obvious, but on more than one occasion I've been surprised at the end of a month by how much I had spent on eBay and thrift shops. Third, give yourself an honest evaluation as to why you are collecting--if the motivation is bragging rights, nobody will care but you, and someone else always has more, so you're wasting your time, money, energy, and probably looking pretty foolish to those around you. In fact, you may be distracting yourself from what really does matter to you. I think real collectors collect for themselves, and for the love of the things they collect, and the challenge of finding certain things and preserving their history. And if it's really about the love, then choose a focus and stick to it for a long while, just like collectors of other things generally do. For me, having one or two really great pieces is much better than having boxes full of so-so stuff. On a recent visit to my house, Sellam declared me a "hobbyist", because my collection is only about a dozen machines and a bunch of add-in boards and peripherals. Yet at the same time, I was able to pull something out of a box that seemed to get him pretty excited (original, boxed, AIM-65 expansion unit and a Rockwell 256K bubble memory board for it). In any case, I think he made an accurate assessment. I only have two machines that I lovingly care for and coo over, keep in their original boxes, take them out to show someone and but them right back, and rarely power up (annually if that). The rest see power and daylight regularly and often, they don't just sit, and they don't not work (at least not for long), and this is probably another reason I don't get much static from my wife about my hobby. My 2p. --Patrick P.S. On a related note for the folks who like to collect things just to have them: my parents were avid "collectors" of Persian and Oriental rugs. They had a few of them around the house, but most of what they had collected was still rolled up and in the shipping material it arrived in, stacked roll upon roll in the garage, and in the nooks, crannies and bottoms of various closets. At times, it seemed like they bought them faster than they could be shipped in. And still they bought more, thinking "some day we're going to do something with these." What they did with them was watch them all burn up with their home in the Oakland Hills Fire, having never once been displayed or even looked at after the day they were purchased. The loss they felt was for all the things they truly loved, like one-of-a-kind pictures and family heirlooms, and they only felt foolish and wasteful about the rugs. My parents' mind-set now is that they are not willing to have (let alone "collect") anything in their house that they are not going to display, use, or otherwise draw regular and immediate enjoyment from. Lesson I took away: use and enjoy what you have, don't have more than you *can* use and enjoy, and certainly don't have more than you're willing to lose. And if its something reproducible like pictures (or programs, data, disk images, etc.), make sure someone else has a copy, because having only a copy rather than the original may be tragic, but that pales when compared to not having anything. (I'll call that 3 more pennies for an even nickel now.) P.P.S. That same fire burned my original North Star Horizon, ADM-3A, and 8K Commodore PET with 4040 floppy, long in storage after I had left the nest. Sigh. Fortunately, my KIM-1 was at the time hanging as a novelty wall-decoration for my cube at work, if you can imagine. --P