inluminent

This week, I noticed one thing that shows a difference between my daddy and me. (I noticed these things while getting my belongings ready for a move from one house to another).

My dad collected things, and I collect things, but we collect different things…

I have a room full of computer stuff. I collect USB cables, Ethernet cards, RAM chips, Ethernet cables, Firewire cables, and power cords. I have drawers full of these things. I collect power adapters, little bitty screws for mounting hard-drives, old computers and monitors. I have a little collection of old PDAs: a Palm IIIx, a Palm Pilot, and a Newton Message Pad 120. I have a few hard drives sitting in a box, a few empty boxes to assorted hardware that I don’t even have any more and lots of special cables to convert things like Serial ports to ADB ports. I collect computer stuff.

My dad collected stuff that you could build material things out of. He had an old room full of things like soldering tools, hammers, wrenches, and wood-working tools. He had drawers full of odd screws and nails, and a few little jars full of nuts and bolts. He had a shelf stacked with odd-sizes of scraps of wood and half-full cans of paint (every color you could imagine). The room had a few milk gallons full of oil-fuel mix for each tool he used. He had a bunch of old power-tools and a few hand-tools that would get the job done. He collected manual stuff.

Then again, now that I think about it, we aren’t all that different. Each of us collected stuff that enabled us to do things… In that I guess we are quite alike.