I’m a natural packrat, though I’m trying to get a bit better about it. That said, I do have a few boats that will probably only continue to grow.
Craft Supplies : I have a bin in my closet with yarn, a small loom, cross stitch kits, crochet hooks, knitting needles and who knows what else. And that’s just the fiber crafts. I also have mod podge, chalkboard paint, cork, scrapbook paper, various writing implements, stickers, stencils… yeah. Craft supplies are up there.
Office supplies: I love buying new supplies. I have pens (Frixion, naturally), highlighters, markers, colored pencils, sticky notes, To Do list pads, binder clips, magnets for my dry erase board, specialty paper… I can’t help it. I see cool supplies I didn’t have before and I’m compelled to buy.
Dice: I’ve been a gamer for a long time. Dice are a necessity. That said, I have a large compartmented bag where I separate dice by type and the bag is bursting at the seams. I haven’t bought any in a bit, but I do very badly want to. And I can’t right now. sigh
A doctor and my state’s health department agree that marijuana is right for me. I’m like a kid in the candy store when I visit the dispensary. Even though I have plenty, when I get an email telling me about scrumptious strains that are on sale, I just can’t seem to say no.
I threw all that shit out when new wife and I moved to smaller quarters. I own almost nothing older than 1 year right now.
Wife was a sew-er, though no other crafts, and still hopes to return to it. One closet is full of an astonishingly large collection of carefully curated matching tupperware-like boxes full of … whatever the hell sewing hobbyists like to own.
As she put it, collecting and organizing [whatever hobby] equipment is a separate hobby from the [whatever hobby] itself.
By those lights her hobbies are collecting sewing stuff, collecting cooking gizmos, collecting herbs & spices, and collecting matching coordinated containers for everything. To her credit she does use the two kitchen collections a lot and I get to eat the wonderful results. OTOH I gave her a shirt to mend a small unravel in a seam a year ago. Still sitting there, along with a neatly folded pile of her own mending.
Although yesterday an actual paper sewing pattern arrived from Etsy; first one she’s bought since we’re together. It’ll be interesting to see whether something gets made from it or it disappears into the pattern library with the other 6+ shelf-feet of neatly organized and tupper-ed paper patterns.
I don’t mean to imply she’s lazy; she’s got 10x the get-shit-doneness than I do. It’s just sometimes mystifying the things she chooses to direct her prodigious and restless energy towards. Did I mention she’s hot?
I know nothing of these things, but as a plant product I’d assume the stuff dries out over time. Like herbs or cigars do. So do you have a MJ humidor, or what? Or am I just clueless?
Genuine question, not trying to be sneakily critical of your hobbies. Besides, I’m going to retire soon and may have the first partake of my lifetime at some point not long thereafter. So more knowledge is a wonderful thing.
Kinda, yeah. Airtight glass jars with Boveda packs that maintain precise humidity. Some people use their own DIY things, like a small piece of potato in with their herb.
The Boveda people offer products for cigar, cannabis, and musical instrument care.
I guess D&D in general and miniatures specifically. Going all the way back to lead figures and a now huge collection of plastic ones. So when my best friend passed, I ended up with most of his minis, doubling my collection effectively. We have a lot of repaints and DIY 3d prints. Meanwhile I have a lot of 1e manuals, modules, most of the MERP books to support D&D in Middle Earth. Loads of dice, not sure what would qualify as a hoard though. Wooden and foam castle pieces I made. Just a ridiculous amount of role playing stuff.
My tool & hardware collection is fairly complete, especially for woodworking. Though I got rid of some stuff when I moved.
Thanks to Mrs. solost, nothing really these days. She is super neat and organized, and I have the hoarder gene, so I thank my lucky stars I married her. If I had stayed single, or worse yet, married a fellow possessor of the hoarder gene, by now I’d be walking narrow tunnels to living room / kitchen / bedroom through stuff piled to the ceiling.
I’m not really being hyperbolic- clinically diagnosed OCD runs in my family. My Grandma on my dad’s side was a bona fide hoarder. My dad had the ‘super organized’ version of OCD, but unfortunately I got the hoarder version (not that I’ve ever had full-blown OCD myself, but I know it’s latent and I fight it). When I sold my house so the future Mrs. solost and I could move in together, she helped me clean and move, and she was astounded at what she found in my house (and I wasn’t even very hoardery then): multiple identical containers of dry goods, each with an inch or two of stuff left (like 5 or 6 identical containers of rice), a lower cupboard area where I had stashed plastic grocery bags, that was so packed full she pulled out a cube of bags molded to the shape of the cupboard; lots of papers and magazines I couldn’t bring myself to recycle; stuff like that. I hadn’t even realized I was doing a lot of it.
No matter how many plastic plant pots I hoard (and there are probably 500+), there never seem to be enough in the critical 4" and 6" diameter sizes. It must be like socks at the laundromat - they vanish in mysterious ways.
I’ve got plenty more high-top humidity domes than I need. They just keep coming out with better ones that are hard to resist.
When I moved, more than half of my moving boxes were exclusively full of books. The movers were annoyed and incredulous. I told them I’m a librarian and that seemed to mollify them a little.
I’m not sure why I hoard food the way I do. I didn’t endure any particular scarcity or deprivation growing up, I always had more than enough to eat. But I’m always nervous about running out. I make excessive portions when I cook, too - I always cooked for four when I was cooking for two, and I haven’t adjusted now that I cook for one. Fortunately, I’m pretty good about using leftovers.
I’m jealous of both! Do you have any minis you’re particularly fond of, especially any unusual or uncommon old lead ones?
The lead figures I had collected while still in school. 6th-12th grade. I don’t think any are in great shape except for a few dragons maybe. I didn’t start on the painted plastic minis until the 2003-2005 time period. I did a lot of bargain shopping and we also mined the cheap superhero minis and modded and repainted a lot of them. My late friends part of the hoard was done as an actually collector so most of his stuff is technically better than mine.
I’m proud of the wooden castle I built when the kids were still little. Also a lot of the minis I printed that my daughter then painted. It is a weird collection in the end.
I have several thousand informative images on my computer that I continuously cycle as my desktop background, ever 1 minute. The images contain things like Ukrainian weapons in use against Russia right now, or material to pass the Scrum Master exam, or information about LASIK, etc.
I think “random crap” mainly, and they’re gonna need a big-arse barrow, let me tell you
Random aside I wonder if there are any grave goods, where the archeologists have just gone “Well he was clearly just buried with a bunch of random crap.” I’m guessing not as having piles of “random crap” is actually a luxury of a industrial society, prior to that it would have all been pretty valuable.
I live in the land of my own historic computer equipment. I hardly ever throw away old peripherals because you never know when you’re gonna need to read info off an old 44 MB SyQuest, or mount an internal SCSI drive from somebody’s IIci to get their WriteNow essays and convert them to Word with those old MacLink Plus converters.
Includes the active computer museum that surrounds me even as I type.
I had a ridiculous hoard of books. Over a 10 year period I’ve whittled it down to a manageable amount. but I think we were approaching 5000 books in the house. entire walls floor to ceiling of books and then more.
I’m reminded of a cartoon from Mad Magazine back in the day. One of the regular Mad characters is speaking with his CPA who’s looking over his tax return. The dialog goes about like this:
CPA: I’m sorry Mr. Gaines, the IRS will not allow your deduction for $5,000 for restaurant meals as a medical expense. Mr. Gaines: But if I don’t eat, I get sick!!
Sounds about right. Cheers!
@What_Exit. Good god man, your possessions must outweigh mine by a factor of a thousand or more, despite us being of similar age and SES!
My late first wife and I’s book collection topped out at a couple thousand hardbacks back around the year 2000. Four moves and one wife change later I presently own seven (7) books, each of which is destined for read-and-donate. If I wasn’t so busy Doping every day, I could probably almost zero that pile in 2 weeks. Although one of them is a pretty thick college-level text that might take me a month or two to process.
My e-book checkout histories at my libraries are pretty big, but weigh almost nothing.
It’s amazing what having a large house with a large basement and moving rarely can enable. Not a criticism, just an observation of two very different roads each being happily traveled.
I’ve been married over 30 year now and we are only on our 3rd house. We spent 20 in the last one. I spent a year getting rid of stuff before the move to our smaller home.
I’m really glad I started on the books a lot earlier. They also would not have fit in this house. We dropped about 700sq’ plus about the same in basement space and went from 2 acres down to less than a quarter of an acre.
Since I was a kid, my parents ingrained in me the habit of looking for lost balls. No - I don’t hold up play to do so, I just walk along the edges of the ponds and overgrowth as I head to my ball and pick up any that are easy to grab. I don’t carry an extendable retriever, figuring I’ll let anyone else have the ones that are more than a club-length away. And I leave any balls that are not top of the line brand and condition on the course for someone else to pick up.
I am far from a great golfer, but I just don’t lose many balls. And golf balls don’t slice and scuff up like they used to. I’ll often play the same ball for 18-27 holes before deciding it has a slight scuff such that I’ll play another. Meanwhile, it is an unusual round that I don’t find at least 2-3 perfect condition balls - some days I’ll find 10-20 or more. I don’t care about the brand/model of most top-line balls I play, tho I use high spin rather than distance balls.
I have sacks and sacks of balls. It has been decades since I last bought a golf ball. I give them away by the dozens, leave bags of them at my local course, and in the past hit them at driving ranges. But still have probably 50 in my bag and another 100 in my garage. And the season is just about starting up here in Chicago…
