Thanks, Oli…  Turns out I’m an idiot.  I’ve refactored this code several times, and at some point, I apparently started storing function references instead of eval strings in my ‘funcs’ object.  
I’m 99% sure that’s what’s causing this, so I’ll be refactoring AGAIN to either start storing strings again or find some other way to recover the net data.  I’ll let you know how that turns out… 
Thanks for the suggestion to export with another method.  I just used open() and wrote self.items() to file to check things out and saw immediately what I’d done.
–Sam H.