Yesterday was another back breaking and knee hurting day of getting ready for the move. This time the target was the Video/DVD/CD shelf and the book shelves. I went through the videos and DVDs and put the ones that belonged to me and I wanted to keep in one place, the ones that belonged to me that I didn’t want to keep in the garbage, and the rest in semi-categorized piles for Vicki to sort out. The biggest problem was the stuff oriented to little kids. The real crap like “Babysitters Club” and like was tossed, and the quality and semi-quality stuff like Disney movies was kept. The second biggest problem was the pile of about 15 unlabelled tapes. Most of them have been kicking around unlabelled since I moved in here 9 years ago, and Vicki has been saying for the past 9 years “I’m going to watch them and label them”, but of course nobody ever gets around to it. And since our VCR is currently doing this weird “flash of death” thing, we can’t watch them now. So they’re stored away where they’ll go another 9 years without anybody looking at them. Oh well, such is life.
After all the fun of the video collection, I moved onto the rest of the book shelves. It’s amazing what crap gets tucked into our bookshelves and forgotten. I found a girl’s swimsuit in a plastic bag with original price tags on it. I found plates and knives and forks. I found old board games that nobody has played in 10 years. Lest anybody think I’m picking on everybody else, I also found about a dozen print outs of manuals and installation instructions for computer programs that I’d obviously meant to get back to later and never did, all tucked in random parts of the bookshelf. I found school binders full of blank paper. I kept a stack about two feet high of various types of blank paper, but threw out a shocking amount. I found one of our missing copies of “Pronounced Cathouse.org” (sorry, I don’t have the actual title in front of me – I think it was a take off of a Lynryd Skyrnd album cover), which is a priceless treasure.
All in all, I think I filled up about 6 or 7 garbage bags. I also threw out a gigantic Sun workstation monitor that I borrowed from work (if anybody asks for it, I’ll claim I dropped it when moving it, which I came close to at least twice) a Mac LC-III and two old SCSI drives, and two bird gyms. And we moved a van load of boxes and two computers to the new place.
Vicki, besides doing the incredibly angst-full job of sorting videos, also worked hard up in Stevie’s room. I believe that the last time Stevie’s room was cleaned up, it was done by a chap named “Hercules”. I wouldn’t have taken on that job for any price.