Book hoarding

I know about real hoarding. I’ve seen the TV shows. More personally, I know a woman who deals with real hoarding at her mother’s houses (there are two). The attempts to clear out one house and get it on the market. The citations from the village. One house condemned. Fix it up before the village tears it down. Hoarding spilling into the yard. It’s painful just to hear the stories. They did eventually find the body of the cat they knew had died several years ago. But the struggle never ends, because apparently it’s very difficult to cure hoarding behavior.

Then there’s pet hoarding, which is awful. Our guinea pig rescue group just took in 50 pigs from one such situation. They aren’t well socialized, so they are hard to find homes for.

Hoarding in my family is much more manageable. My mom has 50 or 60 jars of jam in the basement at any given time. Nice, tidy hoarding.

My hoarding centers around books. I finally went around and did a rough count in our house, out of curiosity. I did get rid of a few hundred children’s books last summer, so that helped a little. Plus we have two Little Free Libraries within walking distance, so sometimes I can stick a few books in there. Granted, sometimes I have to bring a new one home, too. It’s only fair.

Starting upstairs, Boo is a minimalist and a big re-reader, so she only has her 50 favorites in her room. Nea is a bit of a hoarder of everything, plus she’s the downstream book-catcher from the older sibling, so no surprise that she has circa 650.

The master bedroom has 175 in a bookshelf, and 130 on the floor/nightstand. Yes, that looks just as well-organized as it sounds.

Ok, so we have a couple book-free rooms. The sunroom and dining room have none. There are only 5 of the most used cookbooks in the kitchen. The other cookbooks are in the living room, with the gardening books and some kid books. Total living room – about 450.

There’s some board and early childhood books I couldn’t bring myself to give away, boxed up in the basement. Let’s say 300.

And that leaves the study. N finished these bookshelves awhile back. There’s books in the cabinets underneath, too, where the board games were supposed to go. Yup. That’s another 1260 or so.

Grand total? Just under 3000 books, roughly. That’s in the realm of normal. Right?

Oddly, I find myself at the library at least weekly.

I did some navel gazing not too long ago and decided that my need to be surrounded by books appeals to my most optimistic and pessimistic hopes and fears.

Best case scenario: I live a life of leisure and have time to read for hours a day!

Worst case scenario: society collapses, and all technology is lost. It’s not safe outside and hurrah! Nothing to do but read all day and wait for the end! See, now where will all you e-book types be then, huh? That’s right. Pillaging the library, fighting over Danielle Steele and Louis L’Amour paperbacks. Ha. Suckers.

Twelve years ago my dad had his first heart attack. When he called and asked me what he should do about his chest pains, I said, "Call 911." Later I found the piece of paper he'd written it down on. I spent the next 20 minutes wandering around my condo, wondering what I needed to bring to the hospital. I ended up bringing a few books.

I have a deep automatic response to the information that someone will be lying around doing nothing for a few days. The response is to supply the affected with reading material. Much of my hoarding behavior is centered around making sure I have just the right reading material at hand for any given scenario. Too tired to continue a novel? Try an aged newspaper! Newspaper too unwieldy in bed? Maybe a nice magazine! etc.

Speaking of magazines, I, like many people, have trouble getting rid of magazines once they are in the house. So glossy! So I've come up with the perfect solution. I check them out of the library. Our library carried all the good leftist rags (Mother Jones, Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening) and as far as I noticed, none of the right. I'm really enjoying trying new ones and returning them after three weeks. Why, it's brilliant, this library idea. Ours also has Wii games. Truly magical.

Hey, look, there's a name for it now

I feel so validated. Apparently, this clean enough thing is a trend.

Hi, Mom!

More hippy dippy every day

So, not too long ago I mentioned our new yogurt maker. It’s been quite a success. I use organic 2% milk, and for about $1.50 I get 6 6-ounce containers of yogurt. You don’t flavor it until it’s done, and the kids love picking what to add! Frozen blueberries and a little honey are the top choice. My only small quibble is that I didn’t realize that you have to boil the milk and let it cool to room temperature before refrigerating and ultimately consuming the yogurt. It adds about an hour to the 10-hour cycle. Not the end of the world, but still a little more involved than I had anticipated.

Speaking of more involved than anticipated, I wanted to be all fancy and make one of those links that show you the product when you hover over the link. You see how well that went. Anyway, that's our yogurt maker. Very basic. I'm using baby food jars from a friend for a spare set. The tall kind.

A household full of household appliances

You’re hanging out, all happy with your small kitchen appliances. You’ve got your coffeemaker, crockpot, bread machine, popcorn popper, Cuisinart food processor, your Kitchen-aid, a toaster. A microwave. A stick blender and a regular blender that you never use because you have a stick blender. A waffle iron. A George Foreman grill that was a hand-me-down and will go into the garage sale this year because you never use it.

None of them are recent acquisitions, except the stick blender, which you bought recently to replace the old stick blender.

La la la. Living your life, not looking for more small kitchen appliances. Suddenly, BAM. There’s a garage sale with a brand new Cuisinart ice cream maker for $15. Oh, the kids would like that. Then you go to the dentist. Seems harmless enough, except he’s a really nice guy who discussed the necessity of rice cookers with you (and your lack thereof) at your last appointment and sets you up with one. Then you get some “reward points” for being helpful at work. Look, you can get a yogurt maker with your points! You’ve always wanted a yogurt maker.

So, within a week, you have three new small kitchen appliances. “How did this happen?” you wonder. “Where will we put them?” you muse. “Will I take my homemade yogurt and put it into the ice cream maker to make frozen yogurt this summer?” you doubtfully frown.






Now, this is where creative writing takes an ugly turn. I could shut up now. The post above: it stands alone. However, I feel compelled to add that David Byrne is clearly doing Bert’s “Doing the Pigeon” dance at 43 seconds in. Compare this video at 1:45 in:



See, and there you have it, folks. Another perfectly coherent blog entry ruined.

Hoarding

For some reason, I am fascinated with hoarders. I recently spent an hour reading about hoarding online. Reading these stories makes me wonder about my tenuous hold on sanity. I mean, I am clearly on the spectrum of full-scale hoarding. Consider the evidence:

• I hold onto newspapers because I plan to read them.
• I have little scraps of paper that are important to me.
• If you ask me where something is in my chaos, I can find it with no problem (ASSUMING NO ONE ELSE MOVED IT).
• I hate it when people mess with my useless bits of stuff, or hassle me about them.

On the other hand, my house is delightful and friendly! You can see the floors in several places! No, we don’t have a basement, why do you ask? What’s that? Our house has outside windows near the ground? No, no, that’s a design flaw. No basement here.

But seriously, the off-site storage industry is growing massively. I don’t understand the appeal of renting extra space indefinitely, but clearly there’s a market. It’s particularly perplexing since the average square footage of American houses is very generous. In 2002, the median square footage for homes occupied by middle income households was 1,700 sq. ft. (cite)

Enjoyable reading on historic hoarding at its most extreme: the Collyer brothers. What a way to go.

If you, too, can’t get enough hoarding info or need actual help:

Squalor Survivors
Children of Hoarders