Over the past week I’ve picked up three new vintage lunch boxes: The Fall Guy, Annie, and the Care Bears. In the picture above, you can see the The Fall Guy and Care Bears lunch boxes stacked in front of some of the others. The cube holding the Annie lunch box is three boxes deep.

I’m really good at collecting things. What I’m not really good at is limiting my collections. Or, for that matter, paring them down.

When I first moved those upper shelves out into the hallway, I only had a handful of lunch boxes — four or five at most. Completely by chance, each shelf is exactly the width of four lunch boxes with a Thermos in between for spacing, which means they’ll hold exactly twenty lunch boxes. That was the limit I set for myself. “I’ll collect twenty lunch boxes,” I proclaimed. “No more, no less.”

I currently own thirty-seven.

The set of white cubes were a hand-me-down from Mason, who no longer wanted them in his room. That gave me room for nine more, for a total of twenty-nine.

Again — thirty-seven.

Are there a couple I could part with? Sure. I wasn’t a huge fan of “The Real Ghostbusters,” the animated series that followed the movies. And, truth be told, Sigmund the Sea Monster was a little bit before my time.

But the reality is, I’ll never get rid of them. eventually I’ll find another empty wall and add another set of shelves. You can’t see them, but six feet to the left of these shelves are another set of shelves filled with vintage boxed Star Wars toys. There’s another set of shelves the other direction.

They say rules were made to be broken. In the case of the rules I set for my own collections, that definitely seems to be the case.