Reading the comments on my post on junk I was surprised to see the extent to which people's relation to rarely used possessions varies.

Some people forget rarely used possessions, and get minimal benefit from having them stored. When they need something, they don't know whether they already have it, and the effort to maintain an index [1] wouldn't be worth it. Ben writes:

In many disasters sheltering in place can make a lot of sense, but what about fire? As someone who lives in one of the densest municipalities in the country, with 3-story wooden buildings packed close together, is fire likely enough to rule out any kind of "stay put" approach? After having Claude do some rough calculations I think probably not.

Occasionally people will get excited about a minimalism fad, where you figure out which of your possessions you need and keep only those. As someone who generally doesn't like getting rid of things, I've been thinking some about why, and the main thing I keep coming back to is that random objects can be helpful in unpredictable ways. Here are some things that I kept without a specific use in mind, but that ended up being useful. You could say they saved time or money, but often the biggest gain was from being able to do a project in one go with what I already had on hand:

When I first started playing dance weekends I would fly Friday and Monday, and I quickly realized that if I took two vacation days for each I'd run out of vacation. [1] The typical dance weekend schedule, however, is Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday until early afternoon: if you live near an airport with a lot of direct flights, it's possible to do this without missing any work!

The pattern I've used for most dance weekends is:

• Fly Thursday evening, after work.
• Work remotely Friday.
• Play the weekend Friday-Sunday.
• Fly home Sunday night.

This approach does depend on a few things:

In an ideal world the incentives on phone manufacturers would be to optimize useful lifetime, but instead people buy phones based on their as-new performance. Which means phones charge to 100% even though that's bad for the battery.

Every time I get a new phone it feels a bit like magic: I no longer need to think at all about battery life. This lasts for a few years, and then at some point my phone doesn't always make it through the day. Some amount of this is normal, but some of it is just bad battery management: new phones should come set not to charge past 80%.

Charging a lithium-ion battery to 100% wears it out much faster than stopping at 80%, and when a phone is new 80% of the battery is usually plenty. With past phones I've just grumped about it, but Pixels now have a setting: battery and charging > charging optimization > limit to 80%:

Assembling a tour in an unfamiliar area is hard work as a contra dance band (or caller). You need to figure out when the dances are, whether the schedules align, who the bookers are, how far out they like to book, and probably other things I'm forgetting. This is enough work that many tours that would be great just don't happen.

One thing I've been on the receiving end of a few times is bookers offering a tour. This is so great, and I wish more series would give it a try! It's generally much easier for organizers to offer than for bands to put it together: you often know your fellow organizers and can put together a single block of dates to offer. If the band says no, you can offer it to another.