hoarding

When Wonder Woman decides she doesn't need something anymore it gets tossed into recycling, or it gets donated. When I decide I don't need something right now, I place it aside because you never know, I might need it later. Therein lies a slight problem. She looks at my stuff with a rapacious gleam in my eye, and from time to time I get a wee bit offended and protective of my stack of eight different sizes of jeans.

One place I can hoard to my heart's content is on my computer. I have stacks of external hard drives full of, well, stuff - movies, music, 25-year-old website archives, multiple backups of photos. I also have accounts in iCloud, Google Drive, One Drive, Box and Dropbox with files on all of them. I have files I created in Microsoft Works, a program that was discontinued 15 years ago.

When it comes to music, of course I have a subscription to one of those all-you-can-eat services, where I can listen to almost everything but the ripped CDs I bought at coffee houses and bars in the far distant past, but I worked hard to download all that music from Napster and I just don't want to let go of it.

I've carried a smartphone around in my pocket since shortly after the iPhone was released. At work, I have always snapped pictures of bar code stickers we used to identify computers, the admin panel on printers, lights on switches and routers and all kinds of serial numbers. I have a career's worth of those photos that I only occasionally cull.

The 2009 iMac I used as a Plex server to watch movies hasn't been plugged in for four years, yet it and all the movies I ripped back in the days when Netflix sent you DVDs in the mail are still located in our family room. When I hear one of my friends talking about their movie streaming setups, I have to stifle the urge to bring them a hard drive to fill up for me. We subscribe to EVERY channel and don't have time to watch what we are already paying for, and here I am thinking of ways to get more.

I went through a collection of articles I'd saved today "to read later". It went back several years, and you could see my learning and interests patterns through different periods. I had dozens of saved YouTube videos on deadlifting and squatting from my power lifting days. There were tons of articles on stupid shit Trump did from 2105-2020 when I was building up my encyclopedic knowledge of his many faults. I had to trash a bunch of NYT and WaPo articles because I'm mad at them and canceled my subscriptions. I had automatically saved the entire blogging content of two of my favorite writers, Matt Birchler and Jarrod Blundy over the course of 2024 and had to eliminate all but the reference material from those prodigious writers.

Of course, I have every tech guy's obligatory box of various cables and connectors. You just never know when you might need a 30-pin iPod cable or s-video adapter. FireWire might even stage a comeback. Stranger things have happened. I think there's even a Windows 7 laptop, sans power cord, around here somewhere that hasn't been booted up in 12 years. We have an extra iPad that I keep trying to think of a use for, and I am still holding on to my last Apple Watch, thinking I might make it my nighttime sleep recorder. I've been thinking about that for quite a while.

Anyway, when Wonder Woman reads this, it may be my last blog post, so if y'all don't hear from me, you'll know she beat me to death for not getting rid of some of my very valuable personal possessions!

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