"aemeijers" wrote in message

stuff snipped

Drove my Grandma nuts for 50+
years with all the crap he dragged home from wherever. Took us over a
week to empty out his basement when the time came, and we found good
homes for almost all of it. I finally put the dregs out by the street,
and most was gone by morning. He had a good excuse- having to flee a
upper-middle-class professional existence with just the clothes on their
backs, and one small suitcase each, and move halfway around the world,
does tend to make you paranoid that hard times will come again.

Exactly! My father had the trash-picker gene from the Great Depression,
which my OCD neat-freak mom hated. She, however, would not waste an iota of
food. Milk going bad? Pudding time. Bananas getting mushy? Banana bread
day. She did, however, send my off to my SATs after feeding me bacon and
eggs and I had the worst stomach cramps ever! When I got home, for some
reason I was looking through the garbage and found some very green bacon.
She had cut away the parts that looked good and fed them to me, not
realizing that when the left side of the bacon is green, the right side is
probably almost as bad, but the bacteria had not fully bloomed yet.

There's nothing like having to flee a place where you had a good job, a
house and lots of things with only a suitcase to color your life view in
serious ways. Those were my grandparents. Couple their pathology to my Mom
and Dad having lived through the Great Depression and you get those sorts of
hoard/don't waste a single thing behaviors.

Good for you finding homes for things and repairing simple-to-fix items
that would have added to our overflowing trash dumps. Our current society
is geared exactly opposite. Only the latest is good enough, everything else
gets trashed. As our automakers discovered, when push comes to shove people
can keep those hoopties running long enough in a pinch to nearly collapse
the industry, which *depends* on people wanting the latest and greatest,
damn the rest. The problem is that manufacturers now build on this
principle and less and less stuff is repairable without replacing entire
assemblies that often cost more than the original item!

--
Bobby G.