I plan for days to visit thrift stores, looking for odd bits of hardware, handles, tins, toys - just about any thing that I might use to further develop surfaces and visual content in my work.  I enjoy the patina of use on handles and knobs.  I even loved the look when I was a kid - my grandmother's attic was full of beautiful things that shared their stories on the surfaces.

I tend to also collect odd items.  Not sure what they were for, but interesting nonetheless.  One day after walking my son to school, I noticed several white cards in the street (renegades from the trash collectors).  As I picked them up, I discovered they were from an old board game.  They had 1960's monochrome graphics of baseball players.  As I got closer to home, I found little plastic blue and red game pieces of baseball players strewn about. Hmmm...not a bad day.