Amateur Entomologist
This post is in: Classic Cars - Garage - Motorcycles
I guess I need to confess that I have acquired a pesky little hobby as of late. If you knew me personally you would sooner or later realize I am a collector. Some women who had been in my life would probably express it in different terms. In the more feminine term of endearment, I have been called a pack rat. I mentioned those ladies in the past tense, so I am not a relentless collector. I do let some things go. But this is not about women or relationships; it is just about me. Selfish I know.
I like to collect things, pocket knives for example. I have a section of my office wall dedicated to display cases of these items. Plus some counter space covered with a few more cases I haven’t found the room on the walls to hang yet. (To hang them I would need to rearrange my collection of motorcycle memorabilia and pictures.) Then there are the storage containers in the basement, which have all the original pocket knife boxes, and the little advertising and instruction papers that came in those original boxes. This doesn’t even mention the non-folding knives that range from field to culinary.
Speaking of culinary, I also seem to have taken up collecting pots and cookware. This I successfully pass off as professional equipment, you know, tools of the trade. You can’t rightfully call that collecting. One must be prepared for the expansion of one’s business. Once they workout that human cloning thing, I will have enough gear to have clones doing shows in multiple cities at the same time. That would solve the problem of three events wanting me on the same day, and nobody wanting to book the following weekend. Besides, while the clones are working, I could be out riding. But I digress, collectors do that often, but it is called branching out.
Ok, so lets regress to the original subject of my recently acquired pesky little hobby. The other evening I went into my basement garage, to check out the battery on one of my antique Lincolns. I have two of them, so it is officially a collection. Before I was divorced it had been three, but now it is only two. I did however see another antique Lincoln just two days ago, that I would have loved to acquire. See, I was branching out my collections again. So I will try to stay on the original topic. I was pretty sure that the battery was dead beyond hope of charging; even with careful care batteries do eventually die. This I know because one of the bike batteries died recently costing me over a hundred bucks for a new maintenance free one. Ouch!
If you are a sharp reader, you noticed I collect bikes too. There are two of them now, had been four before the aforementioned divorce. Funny how I lost eight wheels on that one – well without another word I will stop digressing. Because of all my collecting I need to move a lot of stuff around in the basement garage to get at anything in one of my various collections. So I went to the basement garage with the intent of getting one of the Lincolns out for some summertime pleasure driving. Problem being that the one parked behind it, which needs to be moved first, has a known dead battery. So if I had a good one in the other Lincoln, I could move batteries around and then move antique cars around so I could drive the one I wanted to. From the price of the recently purchased motorcycle battery, I wasn’t keen on buying a honking huge car battery. I can only drive one antique at a time so one battery and charger is enough – don’t ask if I had more chargers before – only I get to digress here.
As fate would have it, that battery was dead too. So I needed to get the tools out and pull both batteries and go get one that would work in either antique. In order to do this I had to make some room to work. This involved moving some boxes containing various collections as my basement garage is pretty much filled to the gills. I needed to move the bikes outside just to be sure I did not damage them. I would also need to move the Mustang outside too (just one, still can’t find the right vintage one to start that collection.) I gathered all the keys and as I looked at my assembled toys I realized that I had developed a pesky little hobby as of late – Amateur Entomology. The front of every running toy was encrusted in bugs, now I was stymied – should I wash them off or buy display cases?
Copyright Bill Hufnagle 2017.
