Here's another one where our friend is going to mention the barf bag, and the reality show haters will join in. There is a new series on A&E called Hoarders. It is about people who cannot get rid of stuff and are on the verge of being evicted from their homes, losing their children as unfit parents, and incurring fines from the cities where they live.

One 60-year-old lady in Milwaukee hoards food because she can remember when she was so poor her food choices were limited. Now, whenever she sees food on sale she feels like she must buy plenty and have it on hand. Even if it isn't on sale she feels she must stock up because she has the money now. She brings it home to a god-awful mess where she can't even find a lid for a frying pan so pulls a brand-new pan and lid from somewhere in the clutter and uses that lid.

She is an articulate intelligent-seeming woman, but she is irrational about that food. Her landlord is threatening to evict her so help comes in the form of a psychologist and an organization expert/stuff remover, with emphasis on the removal side of it.

Now, you would think if your house just reeked from all the rotting produce that she set down and forgot she had, and the oozing packages in her not-so-functional freezers and refrigerators, you would be able to agree to someone coming in with trashbags and carting it off. They had to negotiate every little thing with her and try to convince her that anything past its expiration date is probably dangerous to eat. She had eggs in her refrigerator that were more than a year old. She didn't plan to eat them, just look at them because they were so pretty.

Her attitude is that something like sour cream never expires: "What's it going to do?" she asks "get more sour?" and as long as the package isn't 'puffy' the food is probably still good, according to her. She held up a totally blue-moldy sphere and said "Cabbage is really forgiving. You can peel off these outer leaves and look, there's still some good inside there. See?"

Probably the worst thing/best example of the problem was this thing that we had to pause the TV to try to figure out what it was. It looked kind of like some dinner rolls smashed and getting moldy. Turned out it was a pumpkin that she thought was especially attractive when she brought it home many months ago, and now it is liquifying on the hardwood floor in the living room. When they scooped it up with a snow shovel she picked through the slime for seeds so she could try to plant them and grow more unique pumpkins like that one. At that point I really was thinking about where is my own barf bag.

The reason I mention the banana peel is that I can see how any of us (meaning mostly me) can lose perspective about something and become just as irrational about it. If it's not the need to have lots of food on hand, it could be hanging onto stuff of questionable merit because it might have a use or a value some day. In our previous home we had a lot of stuff that might have been worth something in the future, such as old Tupperware catalogs. Yes, I know it sounds dumb, but 80 years from now ... Before you scoff, how many of you have heard someone bemoaning the time their mother threw out their old baseball cards or sold their original Barbie at a garage sale? There was a time when those too looked like extraneous junk.

But I really am going to spend some time in my garage and get rid of some of the things I have brought home from auctions, like partial bottles of dog shampoo for white dogs (we don't have a dog). This will leave more room around here for the two (two!) Olivetti manual typewriters that were my father's; he had one here and one at his condo in Arizona in case you wonder why two. I can't work up to getting rid of even one of them because they are more than typewriters to me, they represent memories of how he organized his life and spent a lot of his time. If I ever decide one or both has to go, I might have to call in a shrink to talk me through it.