In the movie The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park, something called a High Hide is prominently featured. Because I recall the book by Michael Crichton better than the movie, I’ll describe what I remember from it, not the movie … but if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s this tall platform that animal researchers can use to observe dangerous predators, like lions, in their natural habitats without danger to themselves. They were not designed for dinosaur observation and thus we have forward momentum of the plot.

But at any rate, the term has been on my mind for the last several weeks, as Tras completes his array of high hides in the garage.

Not that we have any predators to observe. We just have a garage with a high ceiling, a vast open space that screams “potential storage area” to my handyman (and pack-rat) husband.

Ok that, wasn’t exactly fair. Yes, he is a pack-rat, but he’s not the only one. When you combine households, as we did six years ago, you get a lot of duplication (and triplication: at one point we had three sets of washers and dryers). That duplication also comes in the form of stuff — he and I both had boxes and boxes of college textbooks, files, and the various flotsam and jetsam of life we couldn’t part with, not to mention  all the paraphernalia, equipment, toys and clutter associated with the children I had then so far produced.

So this was his solution: affix to the high ceiling, and walls, various shelving units which could store all the things that probably would be best off out of the attic (fragile, melty stuff among them) and leave up in the attic what could be stored there (bunk beds, other furniture, suitcases).

It’s an exciting project for me because, in order to affix these various high hides to the garage ceiling,  they had to be bolted to the floor above … a space otherwise known as the attic. And to accomplish the delicate task of finding the right stud to mount [stop: this is a G-rated blog] the bracket to, the attic had to be cleared of most of the things previously stored therein.

So we’ve had some boxes sitting around for a while while this project unfolded. And soon, they will go back into storage. But in the meantime let us celebrate: Tras was justifiably proud of his handiwork, once finished, and couldn’t resist demonstrating its cargo-lifting capabilities with young Trasimond, who enjoyed his trip into the high hide thoroughly. So much so that he couldn’t resist a goofy expression or two.

So now, should any prehistoric creatures threaten, we know we’ve got built-in safety measures already in place. I guess all that storage it can provide was just incidental.

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