The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that one of the descriptors I assign myself up there at the top of this page is “pack rat.” As long as I can remember, I’ve had an almost existential dread of throwing away anything that might later prove to have some sentimental or historical value. That’s why I still have a comic book my dad bought for me when I was six years old.
In addition to this natural tendency toward hoarding, I also picked up a collecting hobby in college. Tracking down, acquiring, and owning all manner of pop-culture memorabilia has proven to be immensely gratifying, for a number of reasons. But there’s a big downside to being a collector, and that’s the difficulty of storing and protecting all your possessions. This point was driven home rather forcefully a little over a year ago, when I experienced an event I like to think of as The Great Water-Filter Containment Failure and Basement Flood of 2006. Briefly, if you don’t recall and/or don’t want to follow the link, my water filter developed a major leak in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke up and noticed it, I had several inches of water throughout the entire basement. This would’ve been disastrous enough if the only possessions down there were my own, but I was also storing a lot of stuff my parents left behind when they built their new house. And most of that was sitting in stacks and heaps right there on the floor, right in the water.
