Not all of it though. Just the cool stuff. The weird or rare stuff. The thing that has a really neat story attached. Maybe it’s something you wouldn’t expect to find in a home, but that scrawny, ancient vendor in that bazaar (y’know the guy, he had just the one good eye) just won ya over with the tale of the curse or whatever.
I have a dentist chair. Not the one pictured in the link, that’s just an example so there isn’t any confusion about what I mean by “dentist chair”. Anyway, I have one, and it’s fully functional. It reclines far enough to become a decline. It elevates high enough that a dentist could work standing up. It’s pretty comfortable to sit in and watch an episode or two of something, but I’m not sure I’d want to sleep in it. It’s neat and I got it as a tip/gift from a customer, and how many people can say they have a dentist chair as everyday furniture in their home?
When a decent sized meteor hits the earth, things get all whammo all at once. The impact melts and deforms stone and earth while the detritus flies into the air. Some of the super hot molten rock gets splashed like water when a rock is dropped in a pond but unlike water, the remains form differently depending on where and when the rock solidifies.
I have a bitty piece of every sort of tektites/moldaviates formed from the AZ meteorite as well as a thumb sized piece of the meteorite. You can hold them in the palm of one hand. You also can’t collect such things anymore because the monument is now Federally protected. Maybe I shouldn’t discuss this anymore.
Years ago, I was dating a girl from Panama. We had been fighting and weren’t speaking to each other at the time. But, I had to drop by her apartment to pick something up (I forget what). We spoke very briefly. Then, she covered something with her hands and put it in my jacket pocket. She told me not to look at it until I reached home. When I got home, I opened the pocket and found a two inch tall jar. Inside the jar, floating in preservative was a dead bat. (Pictures will be forthcoming).
I knew in that instant our fight would pass, and things would be okay. True story.
Over 200 year old handwritten in quill pen Arithmatik book. With hand drawn pictures at each chapter, some color others black and white. Many sections on navigation with several types of sail ships illustrated. Section on solar system does not contain all the planets. The last section is a log of a sailing journey.
Some of the word problems are interesting in the way they are set in the time. A geography section.
It was written in England. Found it’s way to the U.S. There is a note affixed inside. Found after a fire on the Detroit docks, This is also ages ago. There is some slight fire damage to the last pages of the book.
The front cover has come off. Front and back covers are thick hard tooled leather. I think it may have been rebound long ago.
My mother received it as a gift from a guy who lived a vagabond life on his small sailboat. I did a few trips on it when I was a teen.
I own a small prop from the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles”. On the show it was on a shelf behind the bartender, just a bit of set dressing. It is very vaguely bird-shaped, and my late spouse bought it in the early 1970’s at an early Con. As science fiction, my spouse, and birds have all been very important parts of my life it now has multiple layers of sentimental value for me.
I own an antique baby carriage from the 1890s. It has swans on the sides. When I was a kid, my dad had it in the front lawn and planted geraniums in it. I grow orchids in it.
I also have an antique Singer sewing machine with a treadle. It belonged to my maternal grandmother.
I also have two pieces of lava (a’a and pahoehoe) that I picked up from Kilauea volcano in 1991. It’s supposed to be very bad luck to remove lava from Hawaii, but I was young and reckless back then.
On a different note… we have an actual pet cemetery in our back yard. My family moved here in 1958, and always had dogs, cats and/or birds. They’re all buried back there, mostly in unmarked graves. Someday a future owner of this house is in for some surprises when they start digging back there.
I have a gold record for the band Squirrel Nut Zippers. The plaque on the front says it’s for the town of Pittsboro, NC but they were mad at Pittsboro for some reason (one or two of the band members lived there) so they gave it to me, as I was friends with them at the time.
I also have an antique cricket bat signed by Adrian Edmondson which absolutely no one will find special but me.
I was friends with a member of the production staff (a senior member of the setbuilding team) on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. During each season of those shows, the production staff made these very nice plaques (made from wood and lucite) to commemorate the season’s production, which they gave to people who worked on the show – each season’s plaque looked a little different, but they all featured a picture of the Enterprise/Voyager, the name of the show, and the season number.
My friend gave me several of these plaques, from the last three seasons of TNG, and the entire seven-season run of Voyager. I had them hanging on the wall of my home office for years, but they are now packed up in a box, as I’d taken them down when some remodeling work was being done.
Hah! I have a Ritter Dentist chair, from ~1900. Its hydraulics are fully functional and it looks basically like this, but with a headrest.
My son loves it. It is a joke between us that he will inherit the chair when I die and his joy will totally obliterate any sadness over his loss of a father.
I have a velvet painting of this Molly Hatchet album cover. My sister won it at a carnival when we were kids. She had it in her place all the rest of her life and when I was cleaning out her apartment after she died, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I told my wife that I wanted to hang it over the fireplace at our new house and she said okay, but it has to be in a big gaudy golden fram, the kind of frame that would be around a Rembrandt.
Yesterday, I went to my framing guy and explained the situation and he came back with this wonderfully baroque strip of frame and said, “this material has been waiting for this picture.” I pick it up next week.
Two Heathkit models GR-64 – one works, one doesn’t. I had a GR-54 back in high school, originally built by my dad and I got it working again.
Two Panasonic models SE-2010M, also called Model 30. One of which has been in the family since around 1976; Dad brought it home from an auction.
One Realistic DX-440 – a previous DX-440 was my alarm clock for a long time, until I came home from work one day and discovered it evidently got fried by a power surge.
Being in a condo, we don’t have room for a proper shortwave antenna.
It really is a cookbook. It was written by George Scithers (under the pen name Karl Wurf) and published by Owlswick Press. He gave me a copy when I worked for him as an assistant editor at Weird Tales one summer. I asked him to autograph it. He did and wrote “Actually, unsigned copies are rarer.”
