I Thought I Killed The Pack Rat In Me
It’s amazing how much cruft I accumulated and stuffed in to only 120 square feet.
I’ve done two complete house moves in four years. I’ve made too many runs to the dump to recall, one of which overloaded my pickup, leaving me stranded. I’ve gotten rid of refigerators, books, desks, bookshelfs, magazines, computers, cables, college papers, pens, clothing, kitchen electronics, and just about anything else I could find.
I’ve worked hard to not store stuff. Yet, it just keeps stacking up.
Now, I’m moving again - sort of. Brought on, in part, by the need to replace the carpets as a result of the leaky roof, this time, I’m just moving my office, flipping rooms with my wife, so I get the larger office, and she gets the office with the view (damn, I’m going to miss that). But it’s a good trade.
Today, I talked the chore of boxing up my office, shutting down the desktop computer, and moving everything out of the office. Once again, I threw out a bunch of old stuff. For instance, seeing as none of my computers has a floppy drive, the box of 100+ floppies (mostly Windows NT 3.0 installation floppies - 25 to a set - remember those?) went into the recycling bin. Also, the 4-inch thick binder containing the stock paperwork for the Raza Foundries/Auroranetics/Cisco stock deal. The stack of Digikey catalogs (I haven’t ordered from them in 4 years, yet they still send me a 3-inch catalog once a quarter).
When I move into the new office, I’ll have to do another purge. Biggest thing to go will be cables. I mean, how many scsi-1 cables does a guy really need. Or serial cables.
Of course, one of the bigest problems is that this house has an amazing lack of storage. There’s a single 5′ x 3′x closet for each of the two rooms we use as offices. And there’s a nice 10′ x 10′ walk-in closet in the master bedroom. But that’s it. No entryway closet. No linen closet. No pantry.
I thought I had killed the pack rat in me, but this house is showing me my problems. I’ll have to work harder at killing this beast!