![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I believe that, with the addition of a freakin' boat, I can now state definitively that a small flat does not preclude having far too much damn junk. So much for that experiment. This place looks like the Collyer Brothers have taken up extreme sports.
Did you know that real packrats - Neotoma cinerea - make huge tarbally nests (called middens) and abandon them, so that the ancient nests are useful as a handy sample for scientists examining ancient climate. You C14-date the twigs, and easily identify what they look like, and you know that's what was within a few metres of the nest at the time.
I'd better have a tidy-round before the scientists arrive and go through my stuff. I'm pretty sure that a worthy detective, an empath with a Kim and Aggie eye for the build-up of cat hair and fluff and that weird cooking grease, could work out the order of midden-building and the importance of some items. It'd be paleopsychology by proxy.
Packrat signs: Watching Cash in the Attic with a ghoulish fascination, not at the stuff, but at the act of clearing out. Finding a hairy box that contains - ooh, shiny, when did I get that? And of course, never getting rid of stuff that might be useful or that was significant once upon a time or that just hasn't been useful yet. Like that mechanical robot arm, new Moleskine, canopic jar, or, probably, the boat.
Did you know that real packrats - Neotoma cinerea - make huge tarbally nests (called middens) and abandon them, so that the ancient nests are useful as a handy sample for scientists examining ancient climate. You C14-date the twigs, and easily identify what they look like, and you know that's what was within a few metres of the nest at the time.
I'd better have a tidy-round before the scientists arrive and go through my stuff. I'm pretty sure that a worthy detective, an empath with a Kim and Aggie eye for the build-up of cat hair and fluff and that weird cooking grease, could work out the order of midden-building and the importance of some items. It'd be paleopsychology by proxy.
Packrat signs: Watching Cash in the Attic with a ghoulish fascination, not at the stuff, but at the act of clearing out. Finding a hairy box that contains - ooh, shiny, when did I get that? And of course, never getting rid of stuff that might be useful or that was significant once upon a time or that just hasn't been useful yet. Like that mechanical robot arm, new Moleskine, canopic jar, or, probably, the boat.
