Confession: I am a packrat

2010 - 02

Well, okay, I'm kind of a pack rat. When it comes to my books, my comics, my CDs, and anything horror related...yeah, I'll admit it. I hoard.

But then there's The Wife. The Wife's hoarding knows no bounds...I gotta say, she's getting better, but my God, when we were first together (over two decades back now) she put hoarding into a new class. Olympic calibre, she is.

Before our first house purchase, we lived in a two-bedroom apartment. It was a good sized apartment, but still, it was an apartment. We were moving into a three-bedroom house with a basement that was half-finished, half storage. I mean, geez, we'd need to buy more stuff to fill it, right?

Wrong.

We did a lot of purging prior to the move (primarily because we'd moved something like four times in two years and I didn't want to move the same damned boxes for a fifth time), so we should have even had less stuff.

It was a fascinating experience for me, some of that purging, as I had no real experience with a women with a shoe and purse fetish before. When we pulled out all the purses, they literally covered our entire livingroom floor. And the fascinating thing? There were a couple of occasions where I pulled a purse out of a box (sometimes with the price tag still dangling from it, which shows you how much it was actually utilized) only to think, Geez, this looks familiar, then look around until I'd found its clone. Yes, The Wife had purchased so many purses then put them away, that she actually purchased the same damn purse again. As a man, this never fails to flabbergast me.

Don't get me wrong, I do know the power of purchasing duplicates. Hey, I'll think, I really like these jeans. So I'll buy a couple of pair. But purses? Not so much.

But I digress. I was talking about how much space we were going to have in the new house.

I think I could write a scientific paper on how, when you move all your stuff from a smaller living area to a larger living area, it actually expands in size (I'm guessing approximately 10 - 15% larger). When you're trying manouvre it through a doorway, or up a flight of stairs, or into an elevator, it swells in size (again as a rough guess, 25 - 50%) only to come back down to a reasonable size only when you've finally got it past the tight passage.

(As a side note, I could also dispute the fact that articles can gain and lose mass without the side-effect of using or expelling energy. Try resting a couch for a moment only to have it compress your knuckles flat against the wall...see? It gained mass!)

So yeah, we moved into the bigger house, and, while we weren't cramped, we were definitely cozy.

And yes, even though I said we didn't need to buy more stuff to fill those non-existant empty spaces, The Wife went ahead and did it anyway. And because we didn't have extra room, guess what she did?

Put the old stuff in storage. Don't want it, don't want to throw it away.

I love my wife. Really I do.