Flooded Lizard Kingdom

Yesterday, I realized that I have a box collection.

Let me explain why this scares me.

When my parents lived in Colorado, they had a basement. This meant *lots* of storage space. An entire extra floor of a large house that was empty of furniture. So my father kept boxes. Lots of boxes. Every box that he received from buying stuff online - books, mostly, from Amazon - and almost every empty box that resulted from our cross-country move several years before.

Yesterday, I was cleaning up my closet and cleaning out my pantry...and I realized that a significant portion of both areas is devoted to packing and mailing supplies. Significant is probably 15%-20% in this case.

I have friends all over the country. I mail them things. Small things. Things that fit into padded envelopes, mostly. Rarely do I send them things that require boxes, or that require padding in addition to their packaging. Yet I am saving almost all the boxes I have received since I moved into this apartment in May 2003. And the boxes from all the shoes I've purchased. And some boxes I took out of the hallway at work because the lawyers across the hall were throwing them away and they were a good size.

Will nature and nurture combine to force me into running 12 PCs and 5 printers in my home office so I can have every software package I've ever used installed and operating somewhere, like my father does? Keeping every issue of PC Magazine from now until I die in my closet, neatly shelved in chronological order? Moving 10 boxes of paperback books I read once 15 years ago and didn't ever like across the country multiple times?

No wonder I'm not sleeping well.