I’ve got a friend that’s the same way. He’s constantly telling me about various strains and the like and I just nod and smile because he’s the expert and I’m a complete noob.
Probably threads, fabrics, patterns, buttons, things like that.
Yeah… I kinda have the same problem. BtY gave me his giant Kirby to sew up. It’s still sitting on the floor of my room.
As soon as you said she had it all organized in Tupperware, I knew that she was far from lazy. My organizational skills are abysmal. Hubby has the same mystification when it comes to me getting things done.
Hubby has a shelf full of 2e modules (and that’s with us selling quite a bit when we moved). He’s been gaming since the mid-80s and has various game systems, boxes, modules, notebooks full of game and character ideas, etc down to one book case.
As for a hoard of dice, I’d show you my hoard but I haven’t figured out how to post images yet because I’m still lost in the past.
When I mentioned to Hubby what I’d put in the OP, he said he was surprised that I hadn’t named the two things he would have - books and board games. I have well over 1500 books that are just mine and Hubby’s (I really need to finish putting them all in my app), not counting any that my kids have (BtY has a tendency to grab the biggest books in the “free to good home” bin at our local UBS. We have books on oncology, microeconomics, finance… and yes, he does read through them.) For board games, I’d say we probably have close to 1000, counting various card games. What can I say? We like to read and play games…
My dad still has his TRS-80 Model 1 in his closet. It was the computer I learned to code on. I know I shouldn’t, but I’ll probably keep it after he’s gone just for the memories.
If I were to list my hoard I could go on for days – the basement is full! But one thing that comes to mind occurred when one of the grocery chains was offering excellent Royal Doulton chinaware at rock-bottom prices, but you were only allowed to buy a certain amount in proportion to your grocery expenditures. It was really tasteful, lovely stuff, pure white with a delicate raised pattern. I went nuts and bought all I could.
I still love it to this day, but the thing is, I rarely use more than a small subset of it, and only for more upscale dinners. Elegant serving dishes, a beautiful teapot, cups, gravy boat, lots of extra dishes and many other matched items have been carefully packed away in the basement for years! It would be bad enough if it was only on display in a china cabinet, but most of it is in boxes down in the basement and not even visible!
I suppose I might dig it out if, say, King Charles announces that he’s dropping by for dinner, but so far he’s not indicated any interest in doing so.
Well I’m emptying my kitchen currently to prepare for the complete redo starting Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m planning to park the fridge in a corner of the Living room for the duration.
It will be going almost directly above a cold water pipe and it turned out I have a Fridge/Dehumidifier tube and valve kit still sealed so I don’t have to run out and get one. Score. We’ll have almost no interruption in ice and filtered water.
Back during the web commerce wars of the late 1990s, Staples had paperclips on sale for a penny a box, so I decided to add $5 worth of those to an order. They came in two shipping boxes of 250 boxes each. More than 20 years later, I probably still have around 490 boxes of them stored away.
And that reminds me, a place where I once worked was throwing away a large box of hot glue sticks similar to this. I don’t even have a hot glue gun, but I kept the box instead of tossing it in the dumpster.
LEGO sets. They’re everywhere around my house. Can’t even get any more because I don’t have anywhere to put them. I’ve got the Simpsons house, the Saturn V Rocket, Voltron, a ton of Star Wars stuff, flowers, castles, spaceships, cars, aircraft, boats, and other stuff that’s still in the boxes that I haven’t even gotten to yet.
Back in '91-94 I owned a small business with ~30 employees, all office / clerical types. We had relatively lots of computers to do the real work, but lots of routine admin stuff was still 100% paper-based.
When we suddenly had to shut down due to problems beyond our control or expectation we had the usual supply cabinet full of a few month’s consumption of supplies for 30 workers. I kept a bunch of that stuff.
Last year (2022) in my latest household move I threw away the last few boxes of pens, staples, hanging folders, etc. Despite my late first wife running a solo law practice for the next 25+ years off that hoard plus me doing WFH many years plus me doing household admin off it for 30 years, there was still plenty of everything left over. Just nuts.
Between cutting back from 30 people to just two then just one and the exponential decay of paper / pen / etc. consumption over time as both our office worlds became ever more e-centric, that stuff just never got used up.
I also got rid of the last 4-drawer filing cabinet at the same time. Totally unneeded now and just shy of 30 years since that business went down.
Rocks, fossils, ivory netsuke, gemstones and native american artifacts. I love me some stone age.
And I got more great pictures/paintings than I have walls. Don’t know where I am going to put all the stuff my mom is using now when she passes away. And lamps, people are always are impressed by my lamps, even the ones collecting dust in the basement.
Yeah about the pictures. My Wife and I decided that for our anniversary we would buy a piece of art together. Well… Worked well, but. Married 26 years. Can’t do that anymore. Was a good idea at the time.
Also both my folks where art majors in college. Um… Got a lot of their stuff as well. And my best friends dad was an accomplished artist. I have a few of his pieces.
All of this work are pieces of our heart. Not some nick knack.
Computers. Old computers. My basement is like a no-kill shelter of unwanted PC hardware. I have a huge cross-section of the history of personal computers going back onto the mid-1970s.
There’s not enough room. There’s really not enough electricity to power them all at once, and there’s not enough time in my life to power them up and use them once in a while, just so that they don’t die of neglect.
I can’t even bring myself to part with the truly dead ones, because “maybe I can fix it.”
Speaking of toys, I shudder to think of how much of my family’s money was spent on those for me. Hard to imagine a Star Wars, Transformers, GI Joe, He-Man, MASK, or Dungeons and Dragons toy that I didn’t have. As a late teenager I sold a few but gave most away. And of course as a rational adult I want most of them back.
I’ve started a “collection” of old computer books that no one else would probably be interested in. I mean books that were details about then current, state-of-the-art computers and how magnificent they are. It’s scary how limited they are compared to anything from this century.
This also is a seriously cool collection, vintage lamps
My strange hoard left me sad, so I pitched it. I would keep my hair, the cut off ponytails every five years. Born blonde turned to shades of auburn as an adult. Why
I was proud thought it’d want to save it to remember.
The great pandemic purge arrived, jettisoned along with 3 bookcases of books, and the bookcases and a bunch of other stuff that no longer brought joy.
I do have rock and mins hoard come to think of it. And seashells which I sometimes want to return to the sea.
Books. We got rid of tons of them before our last move, but I think they multiply at night. At least we no longer have LPs, but we do still have all the CDs, even though they’ve all been burned. A lot of art, both shelf-type and hanging type, and not enough walls to hang it on.
Fountain pen inks. I do sell those that I know very well I won’t ever use (dislike the color, too light, too boring, too dry, too wet, gunks up the pen …) but I still have, lessee … 62, at present. They are all different.They are from Japan, France, Germany, Australia, the US, the Netherlands, UK… I keep four pens inked in complementary colors which reflect the seasons or my state of mind. I don’t have a collector mentality, and I get rid of stuff I don’t use, as a continual process. But I use all those inks! Okay, maybe not, but many of them anyway.
