| My house in San Diego was sold, so I had to pack everything in five days. Luckily I had a few crazed friends who could help me.
I was moving my belongings over the Rocky Mountains to Colorado. I have a family of five, and we've collected a huge pile of stuff over the years. I had moved the wife and kids out there already (and used one 20+ foot truck). Now it was time to pack the rest of the house into the largest truck I could rent, a twenty-six footer. I was also towing my car, which meant I could stuff it with stuff.
I wanted to clear out a lot of the computer equipment I had. I am a Retro-Tech, a packrat of ancient technology. I had arranged for an 8-ton garbage bin to be delivered the next day.
We started pitching stuff into the front yard at one o'clock in in the morning. I was tossing the couch and loveseat, so that started the pile off with a bang. Literally. We snapped the couch in half when we hit it with the loveseat. I started lugging out ancient computer parts. Screech, the gent who was helping me that night, had worked all day and was operating on caffeine alone. Small innocuous thing were deemed funny to him. I tossed a 40-meg hard drive onto the pile in the front yard. Screech spent a good 40 minutes beating it against the concrete to peer inside. He gave up before the drive did. I started tossing out monitors... monochromes, CGA, EGA, composite, RGB... all pitched to the top. Screech began to have fun beating them with a lamp. By this time, I had a pile of computer junk on top of the couches that was at my roofline. Screech found a "For Sale" sign and joyously posted it on my gate. He began to laugh hysterically, and noted that it reminded him of a Gumi pile from Japan. People throw out their old stuff, and other people look through it for newer stuff than what they have.
We worked through to the morning. I was working on moving some bureaus to the back door when I heard Screech bellowing with laughter. He kept pointing outside, so I peered through the front curtain. My Vietnamese neighbor was picking through the mountain, which made it a true Gumi pile.
I ended up filling the entire 8-ton bin. I also managed to cram a huge truck with the cream of my crap, the best retro-tech that I could not part with. The Gumi pile was thirty feet long and twelve feet high. I was astounded that all of that shit could fit in a seven-bedroom house.
Thank God I was only going to Colorado to live in a 4 bedroom place. If I were moving back to upstate New York, I wouldn't know what I would have packed. Two truckloads, no doubt, and the stuff inside would have procreated on the trip, this I am sure of. | 
