The Proliferation of Stuff

There is an old saying which dictates that "friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." I believe that the same is true of personal belongings; it just piles up. As someone who is constantly moving from one region to another, this becomes a major annoyance. I have tried to be minimalist in my life, not buying much, not even owning more than the bare essentials of furniture (not even a kitchen table or a couch) this has alleviated much of the problem. When I move to a new area I have to store my belongings somewhere and decide what I will need for the rest of the season. The boy scout motto of "Be Prepared" usually flashes through my mind at this time. Anything that I don't bring, I will automatically need. Anything that I bring, I will largely not need; it is better to have it an not need it than need it an not have it. As a result, when I came out to south Dakota I packed up my enormous green bag, a smaller green suit case, my green back pack, another back pack and a poster tube full of stuff and hauled it 1260 miles from Edmonton, AB to Hot Springs, SD.
In short, I ended up not even using: half of my long sleeve shirts, my corduroy pants, swim trunks, good black shoes, hand lens, cellulose acetate strips, mancalla board (and marbles), half the books I brought, several cd's of software and data, leather jacket, touque, gloves, Tyrrell Staff hat, most photocopies from scientific journals and coloured pencils. There's more to that list but I can't remember off hand what. I also could have lived quite comfortably without my bath robe, dinosaur skull models, posters, hat rack, journal, drawing pencils, art paper, several t-shirts, jazz and swing cd's (I don't have a cd player and the others that do decided that they didn't like my music), rock hammer and dissection kit.
All of this stuff could have gone into storage but didn't. Now that I have to go back to Edmonton, I've accumulated even more stuff. Most of what I accumulate anywhere I go is books. Academia is heavy to lug around. The problem is that if I didn't buy a lot of the books that I wanted here at Mammoth site, then I would not have received my employee discount of 20% and thus would have paid considerably more online. Fight Club, Choke and Lulably I bought and read here because I finally made the time for it and am shipping those back to California (I can't imagine any problem from my siblings trying to read it; my family doesn't exactly read for fun). "Marsh's Dinosaurs" I bought because I found it for $30: much better than I've seen before. There's also the books that my parents and grand parents sent me, and the National Geographics from the 1920's and the copy of Darwin's "The Descent of Man" that I bought at the library book sale.
And then there's the fossils. I'm addicted to those. If I see a deal on an ammonite, or an oreodon skull, I can't pass it up. I bought something like 3 half complete skulls, one nearly complete one, 6 cranial endocasts, a 20 lb ammonite and found a neonate oreodon skull and a paleolagus skull. From a local rancher I bought close to a dozen mosasaur vertebrae, a plesiosaur vertebra, 3 partial didimoceras, a piece of petrified cycad and a dinosaur bone that I can't identify. Most of that I'm shipping to California at great expense. Because of Alberta's strict fossil protection laws, I'm a bit hesitant to take fossils into Canada for fear that I won't be able to take them back out.
I have way too much stuff!