I Have Many Boxes. SO. MANY. BOXES

No, the title of this post is not a clever metaphor:



Why do I have so many boxes, you may ask? I'll tell you.

In ordinary years, my parents and my four brothers with their wives and kids all gather at my house for holidays and family get-togethers because it's bigger than my parents' tiny one-bathroom house. I moved into my house a few weeks before Thanksgiving in 2016 (my first year as a full-time professor¹). Since I had been living as a student for the preceding decade, I had hardly any furniture, but I did have a lot of books. After I finished unpacking my stuff, I was too tired to want to break down all those cardboard boxes and find a big recycling dumpster to put them in.

Then it hit me: I have four brothers and a bunch of nieces and nephews. I decided to keep the boxes in my big empty² family room in the basement and let my nieflings play with them.

When my extended family is not sleeping in the big empty room in the basement, we use boxes to build forts, and we have Nerf wars. After that first Thanksgiving, my nieflings emphatically forbade me from ever getting rid of my pile of boxes or ever putting any furniture³ in that room. Of course, some boxes are inevitably destroyed by the ravages of our Nerf wars, but the supply gets replenished because online shopping is a thing.

Anyway. There was a pandemic. My family hasn't been able to gather for more than a year now, so we haven't had any Nerf wars. Plus I've been shopping online more than in physical stores for the past twelve months, because pandemic.

And that is why I have a ridiculous amount of cardboard boxes in my basement.

I'm really looking forward to getting vaccinated so I can get together with my family again. I'm sure there will be Nerf wars.

¹ Having a real job with a salary that pays enough to get a house is super cool. I'm very privileged to be able to buy a house; my parents weren't able to get into a home of their own until my dad was nearly 60, and the house they bought is about 1/3 the size of mine and many decades older.

² Well, mostly empty basement room. It used to be completely empty other than the boxes, but my LEGO hobby has started to overflow from my home office into the big family room. You can see a tiny bit of a card table with a LEGO project on the left and one corner of my LEGO parts shelves on the right of the photo above. Plus, we ran out of bookshelves for all the books, so my roommate put some of her books in the window sill. There's also a slackline and some exercise balls on the other end of the room, but you can't see them in this photo.

³ Apparently my nieflings think they are the boss of me. I was able to negotiate, though: some portable furniture is allowed (notice the LEGO parts shelves are on wheels), and maybe someday I can put a home entertainment system down there, but not anytime soon. I'm not in a hurry; I have a mortgage to pay, and those things are expensive!