The theme for this week’s Mute Monday is Collections, which I have a lot of in fact. This time around I decided to take some snapshots of a few of my various collections. And believe me, I never really realized how much stuff I have until I tried to take pictures of it and I found myself running around my room and rounding the items up so that I could get a picture in good lighting. My room is very dark on account of the ceiling light fixture being out. I’m too lazy to replace the mount for it.

I can never be truly mute on these posts I’m afraid, so I’ve grouped the photos together in sets of sorts and commentary follows afterward to explain what is in the image. I really wanted to post more photos of my anime and manga collection but this post got pretty long on it’s own and there are a bunch of pictures already. Oh, and before I forget, the feint of heart might not want to think too hard about the very last image in the post.

To keep this image heavy page from slowing down the index page you gotta click for more.

The first image is a shot of some of my anime boxsets, I think they’re all arranged so that you can see which ones are featured. If any are unclear just let me know. The second image shows the start of my movie collection as well as some of my comic-based cartons, such as X-Men Evolution, Batman the Animated Series, and so forth. There are still some anime dvds there though. Ah, and the third image is nothing but anime and is followed by a shot of the boxsets of some of my favorite television series.

Now you have an idea of what my shelves look like. I was going to take pictures of the stacks and piles of books as well, but this post was already getting image heavy.

My cuddly dragon plushies! The gorgeous red dragon on the left was a gift from Moira, the purple one (set sort of in the back) was a gift from my mother on my 20th birthday, and the pink one I just happened to find at the NMSU bookstore and he moves around when you pull out his tale! The last one is a special Zodiac edition Ty Beanie Baby that came out for the year 2000. I spied him in a giftshop at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on my way to Paris, France and I had to buy him.

Here are a few of my dragon figurines and trinkets. I only took a picture of the stuff that would all fit on the desk at the same time. The second picture is an aerial shot of the first. You can see my dragon pen, incense burner, letter opener, dragon candle, two different dragon candle holders, potpourri burner, and even the dragon bubble clock that I had to replace due to Fed Ex’s mistreatment of it. I even managed to include a few of my statues in the picture too, as well as my cute dragon chest (front center). He’s surprisingly heavy too, if you lift the top there’s a little compartment to store stuff in.

My paperweights! I like paperweights, but specifically I like ones that have insects or arachnids preserved in them like these three here which feature a rather intimidating looking scorpion, a monarch butterfly, and a tarantula.

My specimen collection! I started this little collection back in high school actually. In my anatomy class we got to dissect a fetal pig as the big “last dissection” of the class. If you could get the pig’s brain out whole you got to keep it. As you might have guessed, I got mine out whole and that was the start of this odd little collection. Okay, because they’re in jars and because of the lighting it was hard to take photos of these guys without getting the flash’s glare on the jars and keeping the images clear at the same time. I did my best, I swear it! So, from viewer’s left to right we have: large fiddle back spider, adult sparrow, desert lizard, (top jar) 2 baby desert lizards, (bottom jar) 2 field mice from NMSU, centipede, nino de la terra aka “child of the earth” or “Jerusalem cricket” (bottom jar), a different species of desert lizard found here (top jar), desert toad. Cute aren’t they? Not everything fit in one picture sadly, in the second picture you can see (left to right) an immature sparrow and the fetal pig’s brain I mentioned, still partially encased.

I’m going to have to do another post in the future with more “collection” photos. This was surprisingly fun.