Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Start your week smiling with your friends Kathy Zant and Michelle Frichette. It's time to get ready for some weekly motivation with WP motivate.
Happy Thursday, Kathy.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Happy Thursday, Michelle. How are you?
[00:00:18] Speaker A: I'm doing pretty good. How are you?
I have stuff to show you.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm doing fine.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: I have a couple things to show but I have more things to talk about than to show. I just thought of another one too, so I had to write it on my list.
I was thinking today, I've just been going through a bit of a beginning of the year. Everything looks bleak. There's no more Christmas lights, there's no more Christmas music. All that hype and that warmth and everything. And I look out my window, I'm like, it's raining. The snow has even melted. It's just so dismal. And so I was trying to think of we talk about what are things that we enjoy and bring us joy. And I got my nice warm slippers on my feet right now, that kind of stuff. But I got to thinking about things that over time can bring joy. And one of the things that I guess I'm being very cryptic right now, I know that. But my parents both grew up in a time like the post World War II, every dearth of things, right? Like everything was hard to come by. My dad was one of eleven kids. They had hand me down everything. You didn't get new stuff very often. And so I kind of grew up in homes where like, oh, it's free, take it. And so everything was kind of hoarded and collected and that kind of stuff. And that led me on some interesting journeys over the years of collecting things. I know that was a really long lead in for that. Sorry. But I wanted to give the backstory of collecting things.
I told you I was going to tell you a story that's going to make you laugh. When I was in middle school, I thought rainbows were the most beautiful thing ever and I wanted rainbow everything.
I was not rainbow bright, young, like, I was 14, 1314 years old. And suddenly every rainbow I saw in a magazine, I cut it out. I had a wall full of rainbows. I had no idea that it was part of the LGBTQ identity or anything like that. So it had nothing to do with. It was just they were pretty and I've wanted them all overall, so much so that my friends called me Rainbow Junior high.
I don't collect rainbows anymore. I love them. Don't get me wrong, but I don't have like a collection of, I don't have a rainbow wall anymore.
But over the years I've collected different things. In high school and college, I collected things with sheep on them. Like if it had a sheep on it, I wanted it. So I even had a bumper sticker that said, I break for lost sheep. I mean, it was.
People didn't call me sheep, though. I don't want to start that, but I've got some collections as an adult too. But I want to ask you if you've had collections. I know you said you were gathering some to show me before we started recording.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah, vinyl. Vinyl albums. Oh, yeah, I collected them and then I've moved like 1000 times since I was a kid, but they always came with me. I remember I got into a fight with my mom and I'm like, I'm moving in with my friend, packed up all my vinyls, they went with me for the 24 hours that I was mad at my mom and basically stayed overnight at Laura's house.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Leave those albums home, you got to take them with you.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yes, they all came with me because I was that bad. I packed up my albums, but my kids like, vinyl is a thing again. And so I'm like, here's the vintage.
I think my son, he got the best going through the collection of the good ones. He knew which ones were good and which ones weren't, and let Claire have the ones that he knew she would like, like David Bowie albums she kept. And there's a few other ones. He got the Pink Floyd, the wall, the original one from nice when I was a kid, all that kind of stuff. So those I've kept, I've always kept all my music. I still have cassette tapes and cds and all of that stuff, and they're all in really good shape.
Rocks, Shasta, when I lived in, you know, there's all the crystals and the crystal stores and everything from all the hippies and the new agers and everything. Well, one of my friends, he was my neighbor, and he and I would just sit on the front porch and chat and chat and chat, and he would go anywhere.
He wasn't scared of bears or mountain lions or anything. He would go hunting for rocks and he would find just amazing things. So if he'd find something and he couldn't sell it or maybe, and I think that was the thing, it's like, can't sell this one, I'll just give it to cat. I moved from Mount Shasta with boxes and boxes and boxes of rocks. So I have like, this is. Oh, that's a hefty piece of black tourmaline, and I got to know the names of everything, too.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: So this is Shasta serpentine. I've got tons of pieces like this.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Oh, that's gorgeous. Is it green for some cash?
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Yeah, it's green.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: It looks green. Yeah.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: And it has to get treated otherwise. Apparently, it's got asbestos in it and stuff. So he treated it and sealed it. And then I've got one that he made, and he put a little fairy on it.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: I see it. Oh, that's really cool.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: So I've got tons of rocks that he would just find, like rose quartz. And I don't know what this green one is, but it's pretty.
I don't know what this one is, but it's.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Oh, that's hematite.
Is it? That's hematite. Yeah. It's probably magnetic as well.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: It's very heavy. I don't know if it's magnetic.
Yeah, it's not sticking to anything metal over here, but, yeah, there's tons. In the bedroom. I've got big pieces, little pieces, black obsidian. This stuff is so sharp, you could slice things with it. So I've got my rock collection because they were all, like, gifts. Sometimes I'd find stuff. I have a few pieces because it's volcanic. Right. So I would go down to the lake with my dog, and the water would be coming and filling up the lake, and so I'd go, like, rock hunting and see what the creek had brought down.
If something was interesting or pretty, then I would just bring it home. So I have a ton that I found, like, and every one of them has a little bit of meaning to it. So, yeah, I collect rocks.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Well, marsha, I love that. I think that's awesome. You have to sometimes be careful when you tell somebody what your collection is, because then you will get so many gifts of that collection that you're inundated, and you don't know where to put everything. There's a woman on TikTok who's the Oz historian, and she has entire rooms of her house. Even the floor is covered with all the wizard of Oz stuff that she has.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: I don't have any collections that are anywhere near that, just to say. But I do get gifted a lot of Wonder Woman memorabilia, because I do enjoy the concept of Wonder Woman. I'm not a comic. Like, I do watch the movies, but I think just two comic books that are Wonder Woman that somebody gave me. It's more about the idea of who Wonder Woman is. That I really like. But I have this right here, and you push the button, it says you're a champion.
That kind of stuff. I have a bunch of my favorite are the funko pops.
I've got a bunch of funko pops. I have one that's even just Christmas and that stays in with my Christmas stuff, that kind of thing. But the collection that I want to tell you about that will also, I think as a mom, you'll understand this. As much as it was exciting as it is heartbreaking as it is, there's a story coming. So when my daughter was first born, she was just a couple of months old, and I had to go to central Pennsylvania for my great great grandmother. I don't know great grandmother. My daughter's great great grand. So we went down there. My great great aunt Ethel was still alive in her ninety s and got to hold Lydia. So we had this, like, fourth generation kind of thing going on, which is pretty cool. But I decided that I wanted to start a collection for her at three months old that then could grow with her and that she'd have this amazing collection. But I wanted it also to be something that didn't take up a ton of space. So I started collecting thimbles for her. So, like, her first thimble was from Pennsylvania, and then people would learn that she collected thimbles. And my dad used to travel a lot all over the world, so she has thimbles from Thailand and thimbles from, I don't know, Peru, and literally thimbles from all over. And then I used to subscribe to a catalog that was gimbal and sons. I don't even think it exists anymore. And they had so many thimbles in there, and I would order special thimbles for Christmas, and I'd look on eBay to complete all of these different things. And so I bought thimble shelves, which are these special shelf. It's really shallow and you put them on the wall or you can get shadow boxes and things like that. So I've got a ton of that stuff for her over the years.
And I always displayed it. I actually don't have it up right now.
There's a story to that too. But anyway, I always displayed it wherever we live, that kind of thing. So then she moves at 22, she moves to buffalo, and she's out on her own. And I said, oh, do you want to take your thimbles? Do you want to pack them up with you? She goes, nah, I don't want them. You can have them mom, that was the heartbreak of all these years and money, of collecting these for you. And then she said something that really, she said, I think it was more for you than it was for me. I think they're your memories, not mine. And I was like, you know what? She's right. Because she was so little, she didn't give care about it. Right. And she thinks they're fun. And when I have had them up in other houses, she loves to come and look at them and remember when I got this one, I remember that one. But it's not something she wants to hang in her own house. It's a memory she wants to continue with me.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: That's so sweet.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: They're still in a box. I've been here three years, but I know it. While they're going on, I can't do it by myself. And I have to have somebody who wants to spend a couple of hours with me because there's close to 500 thimbles in the collection. And so it's a real effort to figure out where to put them and then unwrap them and put them up. And they have to go in a certain order, because if they're similar, I have ones that like coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, and that kind of stuff. Those all have to go together. There's a nativity scene. Those have to go together. You can't just willy nilly throw them on the wall.
Yeah. So that's the one story that's like, yeah, I guess she's right. I really did it more for me than for. I mean, I thought I was doing it for her, right. But I was doing it to build those memories. And she doesn't hate it. She just wants to share them with me here as opposed to take them with her. And, like, I tell her, she's the only kid. I'm not married. Everything in this condo is hers. Someday, like it or a little bit, it's all going to be hers again anyway.
Yeah.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: You know, she'll have those way into the future. She'll keep those because of the memories.
Mean, it's just such anchor there of.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Yep. Exactly. Exactly. So that's kind of funny. And then, of course, I do Lego sets. I have a lot of Legos. And I wouldn't say I'm a Lego collector as much as I'm a Lego builder. And when you're a Lego builder, you become a Lego collector. And so you can see Lego head over my shoulder right now in the background.
I have. You can't see them because they're in front of me. But I've got legos all over the place, and it's something fun to do on a nasty weekend. I don't want to go out or do anything else. Is put on a movie and sit and do some sets. So or so. I got about four kids. Four kids to do. Still.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Fun.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So do your kids collect anything?
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Clara used to collect, like, lots of horse stuff, but now that she's a teenager, her room stuff just comes downstairs. And then I have to kind of go through. I'm like, what, these?
She's grown up and things aren't horse toys. She wants the horse, not the horse toys.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: So things change as I want the actual black beauty.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Not the little plastic figurine. Exactly.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: Yes.
My husband is such a pack rat, and obviously the stuff isn't as important to him anymore. So I have to go through things and there's bins and bins and bins of stuff. He just never unpacked. And so it's interesting to see. I know he went to Russia, but.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: He never showed me all this stuff.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: He got in Russia. It just ended up in this bin. And it's like, kind of cool.
Got. I can't really see it, but the little Russian nesting.
Cool.
His stuff's becoming my stuff. Like t shirts from Petersburg, like the soccer club. This is kind of a cool shirt. And he never showed me, like, we were together when he went to Russia. It wasn't like.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: But it's.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Isn't that funny?
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Like, weird stuff. I'm like, wonder what else. What other things happened in Russia that he didn't tell me about?
Who knows? I'll just have to guess at all the rest of it. But, yeah, there's all this stuff, like, weird stuff.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: The Russia stuff has just been popping up lately. It's so funny because Claire and I have been going to the gym together. And so I make joke. I'm like, I'm feeling strong like bull. And she's like, strong like russian bear. They used to call my husband the american bear because he's like a bigger guy, right? So they would call him the american bear.
It's kind of funny.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: That is funny. I think it's interesting. I wonder if it's generational, too. I wonder if, as generations pass down, if collecting things is less important or more important. But, I mean, I follow some TikTokers who are in their twenty s and thirty s who are like pin collectors for Disney. Like the Disney pins and things like that. So I think there are still collectors in the world. I just wonder if.
I don't know, I wonder what makes.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: Somebody want to collect photo albums.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Like, who would ever have a photo album again? I mean, I still have mine. When I was a kid in high school and college and stuff. I've got actual photos that I even developed myself in photography.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Me too.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: But my phone.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: And even when I get a new phone, it's like all the photos from.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: The last six, seven years are still there. And I still have hard drives full of photos, but I'm never going to have a photo, like, physical album. Like, oh, here's Claire's new boyfriend. Let's sit down and look at all.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: The pictures of her. Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Never going to happen.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Exactly. Although you can, there are some things online, like Shutterfly and some of those other ones where you can make books out of your photos on your phone and have actual physical books and things like that. And I'm like, I keep thinking about that. You see all the pictures behind me on my nature photography. I could make a coffee table book of my own photography, but it feels narcissistic on the one hand.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: And it's not like I'm going to sell it, because who's going to buy it? You know what I mean? But on the other hand, it kind of be fun. I don't know. We'll see.
Yeah.
And I asked you this before we started recording, too.
I'm trying to be better about this. I don't buy them as often anymore, but it's really hard in our industry not to collect domain names because as soon as you think of something really good and it's available, like, you buy it, but then you continue to pay for it year after year.
I've dumped a lot of them. I put them right back out into the world. But there's one that I refuse to let go of. And I even talked about it before, and I have people that are willing to work with me on it, but I haven't had time to actually implement it. But wpwiki.org, I own that domain, and I've owned it for like, ten years, which means I spent over $200 on name renewals on that domain alone that I haven't developed.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Cloudflare. Transfer your domains to Cloudflare. It's like $9 a domain. They don't mark them up. And, oh, my gosh, everything. I'm just trying to move everything over to Cloudflare because it's just so much cheaper. But, yeah, my husband, same thing. And I'm scared to, like, he's never going to use some of these domains. I remember I was sitting at that breakfast table when you came up with this idea, but I'm still just like, it's so hard to let go of them.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: And then I don't even know what's linked in.
I think I've got all the hosting figured. I ran most of his stuff, but oh my gosh. And he used to do products like dvds and stuff like that. And so every product he would do, he would buy a domain name for it. And I'm like, why don't you just put them all under your domain and just have, what is it? Just like a page underneath that landing page and sell it from there. And then you have, oh yeah, that sounds like it's a lot easier than buying domains. I'm just like 75 domains later. So many. I don't have that many. The one that I wish I had copped is I had an online journal in the late ninety s and it was like my playground for HTML and stuff. And like, oh wow, look at this new Css stuff. I'm going to try it. And I let that domain go long ago and was just like, yeah, I'm not doing this anymore. And somebody bought it and they've wanted $2,000 for it back and I'm not going to pay that for my old journal now. Somebody's going to go look for it. Go ahead, find it. I dare you.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: No, but you yourself could go on the wayback machine and still pull all the stuff that was on it if you wanted.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. Me bitching about politics. I was really heated about politics at the awesome. We'll just say bush the younger was not my favorite person.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: A lot of bush bashing.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: I look back at it and I'm just like, what? Yeah, just spitting into the pool there.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: When I was, gosh, how old was I? Twelve. I think when I got my first diary, it was a birthday present. I got a diary as a birthday gift. I could still picture the COVID on it.
And I am not a good journalist. After like three or four days, I think maybe that entire diary in the course of a year, I wrote ten or 15 times in, but I remember one entry and I don't have this book anymore. So why this sticks with me, I don't know. But talk about angsty teenager, right? Like preteen. I wrote in there, something about Charlie was my cat. I said, I love Charlie. I think Charlie is the only thing in the whole world that understands me.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: It was a cat oh, my gosh.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember feeling that about cats.
Yeah. I wish I could be an angsty teenager some days.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Maybe I still am my inner angsty teenager. I'll just make peace with her. There she is.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: She's still there. Oh, my goodness.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: The funny thing is, when I got rid of all because I had stacks of paper journals that I was carrying around from state to state, moving, and Shasta, I'm like, started looking at them, and I'm like, I don't want my kids to ever find this crap. I'm just like, so much angsty BS. So I put them all into the wood stove, but as I was burning them, I was reading them, and some of them were just like, oh, my gosh. And, I mean, I was journaling pretty young, but I journaled about politics. I wrote this big, long thing about Alan Greenspan. I'm like, what was wrong with me? Like, seriously, why was I writing about Alan Greenspan?
[00:20:35] Speaker A: There's something.
Oh, that is, you know, I mean.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: There was stupid stuff in there about this to be all the typical teenage drama, but I was very concerned about this new person coming into the fed that Ronald Reagan had just put in.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: You could honestly say there's a whole subreddit on Reddit about called I'm not like other girls, but they're exactly like other girls. But you could at that point say, I'm not like other girls. And it was like, I was probably like, oh, my gosh, Johnny Depp is so dreamy. And you're like, that Greenspan's got to go.
Yeah.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: I don't know.
I really thank the Internet for saving me from becoming a DC policy wonk, because that's where I was headed if I had not found the Internet. And then I was looking for something, like when I first met my husband, like, 20 years ago, and I was deep into coding and all this stuff at that point. And I had actually journaled the online journal that I was journaling about security vulnerabilities that I was finding in online application.
I am not normal.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Yeah, normal is overrated. I've never been normal.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Well, here's the thing. You know what? Don't try to be something you're not like. Be that unique bizarreness that you are. Because the things you collect, the things that are important to you, the things you write down, the things you remember, it all just really lets you know who you really are. And there's no competition for that.
There's nothing anybody can take away from you when you own that this is my therapy for the day. I'm owning my weirdness.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: I'm going to do that, too. I'm taking up the cause right after you. I'll own mine also.
I pretty much own it on the daily because whatever. But it's also as we get older, it's easier to do that. Right. Because I don't conform to peer pressure like I used to. You don't either.
I think I very early on did not conform to peer pressure in my life. But the older you get, the less you care about how other people perceive you, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
To be young again and to know that at age 20, I tell you what, I'd live a lot of things differently. But guess what? I get to decide that now. And so do you and so does everybody listening.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: That's right. Absolutely. So if you are listening and you've made it this far, we want to know what you collect. Tell us, is it spoons? Is it World War II memorabilia?
Is it rocks? Is it thimbles? I don't know. Whatever it is, whatever you collect, we want to know all about it. So even reply with some photos. We want to see your collections, too. When I'm in the office next, I'll take a picture of my Wonder Woman wall and I'll share that. I usually share my wapu pins. Oh, that's the other thing. I have like well over 400 wapoo pins. I forgot about that in word camp t shirts.
I actually never take the t shirts. They never have my size, so I always give away my shirts. Yeah, that's okay. But I keep the pins, the wapoo pins. And if you have a wapoo pin and it needs a home, just dm me and I'll give you my address because it'll go up my bulletin board.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Anyway, well, thanks for being with us so far. I have ideas for next week. I'll talk to Kathy about some things that popped in my head. You never know what we're going to talk about next, but we'll see you next week on WP motivate. Thanks.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: Bye bye.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: This has been WP motivate with Kathy Zant and Michelle freshette. To learn more or to sponsor us, go to wpmotivate.com.
