I'll take a break from my typical pattern of posting to talk about stuff and the accumulation thereof. Everyone has a junk drawer at home. It is almost a human universal in modern life; that box filled with little things that don't fit in any other part of your home organization scheme. As far as I can remember back into my childhood, we had one. And I can remember seeing one at just about everyone else's home that I've spent much time in. I thought about this recently and noticed that the junk in these drawers, this "stuff", seems to have been accumulating at a faster and faster pace. I'm not sure if it is because society in recent years simply produces more random "stuff", or because my kids (8 and 11 years old) are now at the "stuff" inducing age, or both. Whatever it is, we have tons of "stuff". One thing that really struck me about all this "stuff" was realizing that we have purchased none of it. It has all come for free, from local kids events, from behavior or performance rewards at school, from conferences or events that my wife or I have attended, or from various other places. Bouncy balls; slinkies; plastic figurines; cartoon shaped erasers; squishy stress relievers of all shapes; wind-up toys; fidget spinners; no-load carabiners; brain teaser puzzles; bottles of bubble liquid; random other toys; blinking LED lights; slap-wrap bracelets; and a lot, lot, lot more. One of my common thought patterns in observing modern life is to imagine what someone from 10,000+ years ago might have thought. Here I am, with junk drawers that seem to produce "stuff" on their own, as though they would continuously overflow with widgets and doodads if not closed tightly -- these widgets and doodads; each remarkably complex engineering feats in the broader picture of human evolutionary history; made from diverse synthetic substances, many with electro-mechanical parts, all of which resulted from complex manufacturing processes. Any one of them would have been a fascinating marvel, incredibly valuable, a magical object even, to a forager living near Caverna da Pedra Pintada in Brazil 10,000 years ago, or to a neolithic farmer from Ain Ghazal in Jordan. Yet I have a problem with them littering my house. One reason these things accumulate is that I feel bad throwing things away into a landfill. I always convince myself that I'll scavenge parts from them for some practical use. But maybe I should give that dream up. Maybe I will get a schwag shovel at my next conference, that I can use to scoop all this "stuff" into the trash.