In which I want to become a collector.

Every day has been the same lately - I sleep until 2-ish, wake up and go to Rachel's place to hold Maddy! Sometimes Rich goes, too, because he loves to hold a nice baby, and sometimes RA goes, because she also likes to get a baby fix.

Maddy is little and warm and her head smells sweet, but here's the thing - there's not much to journalize about! She eats, she poops, she sleeps. Then when everything is happy and quiet and she is napping, I go home so Rachel can sleep, too.

So I haven't been updating, because there is nothing to update about, but this weekend at work I was talking to Q, one of the security guards, and I don't remember how we got onto the subject, but he told me that every year he gives his wife a Holiday Barbie for Christmas!

I was surprised to hear that, because I know that Diana gets a Holiday Barbie for Christmas every year too, but I thought it was just her, I didn't know it was a universal thing! Apparently Barbie collecting is more widespread than I would have imagined.

Then Q said that he didn't get one this year, but he'd still like to, if he can find one, and he missed getting the Barbie one other year, too, back in the 90s. Because he's been giving her a Barbie every Christmas for 20 years! (Diana, how long have you been collecting them? Tell us in the comments!)

So I started looking on the internet for the 2009 Barbie, because that is a fun thing to do, and impresses people who don't make a habit of searching for miscellaneous crap on the internets every day. We found a couple of places to get a 2009 Barbie, but they were a bit more expensive, since Christmas is over, and also, he needs an African-American Barbie, which is a little harder to find.

He couldn't remember the exact year of the other one that is missing from their collection, but we looked at a couple of possible years and he thought his wife had both of those.

So tonight Q is working my shift again, and he said he told his wife we were looking, and he thinks it's the 1993 doll that she needs (because he wasn't really paying attention, so he forgot it as soon as she told him - welcome to my world, honey). So I started looking around on eBay and whatnot, and this is odd, but there are two Holiday Barbies for 1993, one in a white dress and one in a red dress! What is up with that? I think the red dress is the one we want, because it's the one that is most often shown in my searching, but why are there two colors? I wish I knew more about this mysterious business of Holiday Barbies.

I was pretty excited tonight when I found the doll on one of the sites, being sold at a reasonable price! I showed it to Q when he came through my area a while ago, and he is going to call his wife when she gets up this morning and check the year for sure, and if it's right, we'll order it.

It's been fun searching around and looking for just the right item and it kind of makes me wish I collected something! I still have a lot of coffee mugs from when I visited Diana in Utah 20 years ago when Kim was a baby, and we decided to collect mugs. I bought a few on that trip, as we travelled through different states, and over the next few years I collected a few more, like the one I bought at Ted Nugent's World of Bowhunting (!), and the one the kids brought me from Disneyworld, but I've lost the desire to collect more. I don't drink coffee, for one thing, but I use a couple of them for pencil holders - the one from the Ann Arbor Museum of Art, and one from a renaissance fair.

I have a lot of yarn, but it's not so much a collection, although some of the yarn does have a history. I either bought it in a certain place or a certain time, or someone gave it to me, but it's not quite the same thing as having a collection, one that might have gaps that you have the pleasure of filling through clever searching and bidding. Maybe I need to collect art or Barbies. Hmmm.