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22 Mar 2007
Well, I had a chance to pick up some Japanese Quo cards, a diabolically hard set to complete. I have two of the set, but which two? I needed to check.
I managed to clear a path to the wardrobe where I store all my albums, but when I opened it, found to my horror that the shelves were sagging dangerously. I reckon they weren't designed to carry the weight of innumerable ables full of dangerously addictive mathoms.
It was time to clean, rethink, and reorganize The Shrine.
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19 Feb 2007
Ebay has announced a new Hidden Bidder ID enhancement.
You may have noticed recently when you bid on an item that the other bidders come up listed as Bidder 1, Bidder 2, Bidder 3, and so on. The IDs of your competitors are now shielded, and no longer appear,
What was Ebay thinking of?!!!!
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Conall from the Irish rock band Mike Got Spiked provides film footage and commentary on his visit to the Springlering LOTR Shrine. If you listen carefully, in the background you can hear the rest of the band playing on the Japanese Pachinko machine.
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We started on Ebay back in 1997. Ten years. Wow! Our tenth year anniversary. What a milestone-you'd think I'd be excited.
We began collecting Olympic pins after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. That first year of trading was tedious at best. Write to other collectors, snail-mail photocopies of what pins you had available to a collector in Sweden or Australia, hope they responded, and that you each still had the pin the other wanted. I tell you, it was a heartwarming experience to finally complete a trade.....two or three months down the line.
Then a lot of the collectors discovered email, and began exchanging lists, then moved on to setting up simple webpages with pictures of traders. Things were getting easier. AOL was our friend in those days.
Then, suddenly, Ebay kind of exploded into our collective collecting conciousness.
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So, here I am, on New Year's Day, following through on my resolution, to bring some order to the chaos that is my Lord of the Rings collection.
I've been busily photographing stuff to (eventually) put on my spread sheet. Doug the Wonder Husband built me an idiot proof spreadsheet, complete with boxes to put photo links to each item in my collection. Of course I am hundreds, possibly thousands of items behind, but that's another resolution for another year......at least it's all photographed and waiting to be ditigally organized.
It occurs to me, I am a really awful photographer. We're talking six year old with a camera. I know this for a fact because, when my daughter was the afterschool assistant last year, she used to turn six year olds loose on the playground with her digital camera just to see what they'd come up with. They were good. I am not. Boy, some of the pictures those kids took were amazing. She'd print out the best ones and give them to the kids, too.
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Well, after my Ebay Fee Hike protest, several people contacted me regarding my experience setting up a website. This is my experience, from the point of view of a rank amateur with little or no HTLM knowledge. I can surf the net like a champ, but the thought of building my own site overwhelmed me.
When Ebay announced its massive fee hike for August, 2006, I took a deep breath and decided to build a website. I'd been considering it for some time, after eyeballing a collectors' site created by a Star Wars fan. This was just exactly the pointed push out the door I'd needed. But, where to start?
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You know, there is a very interesting thread on the Ebay discussion boards right now, regarding how Ebay has affected the collectibles market, and it's kinda gotten me to thinking.
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5 Dec 2006
People ask me how I found some of the stuff in my collection.
When I first started collecting, I literally sat down for about eight hours a day, at work and in the evenings, and went through every single LOTR auction that was listed on Ebay. In four languages. By the time I did my presentation on LOTR collecting at the second RingCon, I had estimated that I had looked at something in the range of 7 million auctions. And that was three years ago. So I found a lot of unusual stuff but it was very much a full time job just looking.
After looking at that many auctions, you begin to develop a sixth sense. My best example of that was looking at the Spanish Ebay one evening, and there was yet another auction for yet another sword. Yawwwwn!!!!!
But even though the auction simply read Lord of the Rings Sword, something told me to open it up for a better look, and even though the picture was darn near indecipherable, I decided to bid on it, with no earthly reason to do so.
The day it came in the mail I opened the package, and poor Doug thought I had gone bonkers. My mystery sword was a Spanish promo Sting sword, with the Spanish movie name, in Elvish-style looking letters, where the real Elvish lettering would be. I have a picture of it up on the Museum/Press page. I've even sent pictures to the movie swordsmith, who was familiar with the promo versions, and he says it's news to him. But it's got all the proper NLP markings on it, and it's clearly the real deal.
Back in the "early days" of collecting, there were several of us that stayed in touch, and we used to have a certain protocol we just kind of fell into. The first person to bid on an auction had rights. The others wouldn't bid on it, out of courtesy. So, it was like a dog marking a hydrant. We used to be in a frenzy to be the first to bid, but if someone else wanted it really badly, they would email, and you'd step aside. Or if you saw an auction for something you knew someone else needed, you’d forward the listing to them, and might even put in a bid to "hold" their place, lol! That lasted for about a year or so, and then so many new collectors came in, it just kind of fizzled out. But it was an awful nice group of people, and most of them still collect. We used to stay in touch on a collectors forum, and did a bit of trading amongst ourselves via that forum, but it got hacked and completely erased twice, and we lost a lot of great threads on where to find stuff, which was a darn shame.
I was soooo relieved when I figured out how to save "favorite" searches. I managed to create and save a very elaborate search that searched all three movie titles at once, whilst still culling the stuff I didn't care to look at (Toybiz figures and such). You can't do that any more. They eliminated that after they introduced Ebay 2.0 a couple of years ago, but my saved search stayed saved, thank heavens.
Some of the things in my collection were just serendipity, some just fell into my lap, literally. My nephew brought me a set of Two Towers bookmarks. The librarian had given them out to the "good" students, at school. (What happened there, buddy? Just kidding! Really!)
One day I came home to find a heavy poster tube on my front porch. No return label. Inside was one of every single licensed poster printed by Funky. I never found out who sent that to me, but, in case you are reading this, THANK YOU!!!!!!
I bought something minor from some lady, who turned out to have a friend of a friend who had connections. After reading my "About Me" page, she sent me an entire set of very rare promo bookmarks. Said she’d sent my Me page to her friend, and the friend wanted me to have them.
Another time, I emailed the British company that did the baked beans, and asked if it was possible to get any ad material on the beans. The lady that answered the email was so entertained at the thought someone in the USA wanted baked beans for their label, she sent me a four-pack, still in the original cardboard wrapper. I bet I have the only one of those still around!
Another time I bought something I wasn’t quite sure about. Darned if it didn’t come via Fed Ex, with a return label for New Line Cinema’s offices in LA. So I guess that put to rest any questions about authenticity!
And then there were all the marvelous trades, with friends from Hawaii to Taiwan, Belgium to Britain, and everywhere in between.
It has certainly been an adventure. I have met the nicest people along the way
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16 Nov 2006
Sometimes strange things happen. There is a small group of us Lord of the Rings movie collectors that got to know each other fairly well..
Being conscientious types, we try to recycle peanuts, boxes, bubble envelopes, etc. I didn't realize how conscientious we were til a couple of years ago, when I received a heavily taped box. This box was the pearl of boxes. Pearls have a little speck inside, and layers of nacre on them, right? Well, this package had a little speck of box inside, and layers upon layers of tape. This sucker was literally irridescent with all the layers of tape.
Just for kicks, I decided to peel back the layers of tape. It turned out to be like an archeology project. Top label was from Kathy in NJ to me.
Next layer was from Krystyna in London to Kathy. Under that was a label from an Australian friend to Krysytna. Underneath that was a label from another friend to the Australian friend. And the final label? All the way down was a label from me to Kathy. So that box had (literally) circled the entire globe, only to wind up back in my closet, where it was dutifully recycled yet again. I promptly sent it back to Kathy.
Too bad it didn't bring frequent flyer points home to mama.....
It always amazes me when people leave feedback complaining about receiving items in "used" packing materials. I haven't seen that too much with Lord of the Rings collectibles, but boy, some of the other feedbacks I've read for others, people get pretty bent about it. There's a lot to be said for an Entish point of view.
Speaking of things going around and coming back......I will never forget sitting at a dinner with a bunch of LOTR fans. We were discussing various people we knew in common from Ebay, when one particular woman's name came up. I was raving and raving about this very nice woman, and how I was going to room with her at RingCon, and I mentioned she was in Berlin. At that, the lady I had been speaking with got a really odd look on her face. "Would that be Julie D?" She asked. "Why yes! Do you know her?" "Yeah, she's my sister." I nearly fell out of my chair at that point, and instantly did the obligatory quick mental review of everything I'd said. Whew! It was all good. And it was. We had a ball at RingCon. Two very nice ladies. Julie still collects, and is well known to Lord of the Rings movie collectors as the fabulous American collector/seller out of Germany.
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In the Beginning...
15 Nov 2006
Well, I'm going to try my hand at a blog.
I just can't think of anything to say. Yeah, I know. Anyone who has ever been victim of my interminable, never ending emails is snickering right about now.
I'm going to start at the beginning of my obsession with Lord of the Rings movie collectibles.......
So, it's been nearly five years now? Wow, that was fast! I saw Fellowship of the Rings right after it was released. Hated it. Didn't get it. Was humoring my husband, who wanted to go to movie and a dinner with friends. I hate movies. Who can sit still that long? Besides, I'm not social, and have to be pried out of my Lazyboy with a crowbar. I was quite happy with my steel needle crochet, thankyaverymuch.
So here I am, forced to watch this admittedly visually ravishing movie that makes NO sense whatsoever to me. Thank God that was over......
But, Katie daughter-child wanted to see the Elf again. Uh Oh. Usually the husband would do it, knowing my aversion to theatres, but he was unavailable that weekend, so griping and moaning, I took her back again. Hey, what's this?........it was much better the second time around. But what happened to Frodo? So, I got the book. Devoured it in about two days. Literally read nonstop, and then started over again. Geez, I remember crying my eyes with relief out when Gandalf came back. That was so unexpected. My first venture into fantasy (outside Brothers Grimm, and Lang, too). Cool.
I got my first action figure on January 4, 2002, on the way to Florida. On the drive home to Atlanta, we stopped at every Burger King on I-75. By the time we hit Macon, we (at that time it was "we", because Katie was all into it, too) had assembled a complete set of BK figures, and a friendly manager had given us a wall display. Oh Joy! The faint stirrings of an obsession had begun tickling at my brain.
A week or two later, I had discovered Ebay, and had received my first movie poster in the mail. Uh Oh. My bank balance has never been the same since then.
By November, I was attending RingCon in Bonn, with Martina and Vampy (*waves*....Hi, Ya'll!), and we had a great time, and by the following February, I was in LA at the TORN Two Towers Oscar Party with Kathy, where we met up with the always delightful Brian, Sideshow collector extraordinaire. And other conventions and events popped up. Along the way, it has been my absolute pleasure to break bread with Lou, Adele, Julie and her sister Diana, Birgit, Peter, Pippnluvr Kathy, Switz, Krystyna, Andre, and others. And so many lovely email friends.
By the next year, I had developed a personal relationship wth my maillady, and my husband had laid down the law. Something had to go, either LOTR or Drum Corps. So I packed up my Sabians and sold my concert marimba (on Ebay, natch). LOTR had won the day. Thumbed my nose at the caption head. If they'd provided parts.....but that's another rant for another blog altogether. BTW, drum line members never thumb their noses. That's a eupehmism for something really rude. I miss those guys. Even the balletic Faw. It is a sad, sad day, when you call yourself missing a Faw of any, err, form.
Moving right along, I have well over 5,000 Lord of the Rings movie collectibles in my personal collection, which takes up our extra bedroom. It literally covers every square inch of wall space, including two towering bookcases that sit in the middle of the room. It is something akin to sitting in a cave. I can relate to Gollum, both in acquisitiveness, and choice of living quarters.. There are photos posted at my Springlering Lord of the Rings Virtual Museum and Shop at www.springlering.com
I have also managed to collect several thousand newspaper and magazine clippings in a number of languages, much of it with the great and patient help of Brian and Susie Reeves down in NZ. Lovely people, New Zealanders, and I mean that in sincerity- they seem very much like the US was back in the 50's- genuine and nice and unspoiled.
Hey, blogging seems rather cool. I could get a head trip from this.
Next: Chapter 2.....The Saga of the Box
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May, 2008