The weekend was actually much more productive than I had thought it would be, mid-Saturday. I worked late into the night on Saturday, and just finished doing some more today. I didn't get everything done that I wanted to, but overall I am pleased. It's also mentally stimulating work, which is nice, and because it is so different from my day job I find it doesn't really drain me to be working quite steadily. Which is good, because there's still a ways to go!

In other news, the house is now fully re-arranged, and thanks to careful planning appears to work in its new configuration. There are still some difficulties - we don't have enough shelf space, specifically for my movies. I had forgotten how much space VHS tapes and DVDs take up, and we simply don't have the room for them. Which is fine, as we never watch them (if we wanted to watch a film, we would rent it or download it, but rarely do we watch a film we've already seen). But it begs the question of what to do with all the stuff that has been collected up to this point.

An example - while living in Japan, it was cheaper to buy the DVD from the states than to go see it in the theater. So I have dozens of DVDs that I purchased while living there. They have a theoretical value, but they are to me only a nuisance. Obviously they should be sold, but arranging a garage sale will take time, and they are clogging up our living space now. I expect they will go to live in the storage closet until something better can be done with them.

I also threw out a rather extensive collection of tourist maps, tickets, etc. from our time in France. I took photos of most of them, in the hopes that someday a digital scrapbook can be produced, but we'll just have to wait and see whether that happens or not.

One Word: eBay

Perhaps there is a video store to which you could sell your used DVDs for credit toward new ones, around a 3-for-1 or 4-for-1 basis. This could trim your collection nicely while giving you the opportunity to get discs that you really want.

Yeah - I had thought a shop where I could turn them around might be nice. I like ebay, but there's so much work involved - emailing people who ask questions, mailing the sold items off, etc. What I'd really like is for someone to drive to my house and give me money and take the disks, all without me doing anything. But I guess that's unlikely....

Yes, dear. That's what we call a "yard sale"...

I've never had a lot of work to do selling stuff on eBay... not a lot of questions... I've just been lucky. However Sasha's right (as usual): a yard sale. Another possibility: http://www.freecycle.org/