A Place for My Stuff

Organizing the CD-Rs and DVD-Rs

Over the last month and a half, I've been furiously working on a new book.  No, it's not about "stuff".  But it does have something to do with my two biggest passions in life: music and mathematics.  I've set the end of the month as a deadline for myself to complete it.  That's all I'm going to say about it for now. 

As far as clutter goes, one of my more recent areas of attack were by sticks of burned data CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.  I have these going back at least a dozen years. These days, the CD-R seems to be on its way out.  It's not just audio CDs giving away to mp3 players, but there are lots of other faster, cheaper and sometimes safer ways to store data these days: the exponentially cheaper hard drives and even thumb drives of today, data clouds, bigger webspace, faster internet speeds, etc.  I even read that a 128gb SD card in the works.  Granted, a dual layer DVD-R can store 12 times the amount of data on a standard CD-R, and a Blu-Ray data disc can store eaven more than that.  But I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 10 years, the CD-ROM drive goes the way of the floppy drive.

Regardless, I've still got 10 years worth of data on burned discs, not all of which is doubly backed up on some other source.  Having a 1TB hard drive in the year 2001 was unheard of.  So those files had to go somewhere.  I had a few music mix CDs I burned, too.  It was time to go through these home-made discs and decide which ones to keep, which ones to throw out, and which ones to just extract a thing or two before throwing them out.  Then out of the ones to keep, it was a matter of organizing them.

To help with this, I bought an Atlantic Parade disc holder from K-mart.

It holds 96 discs total in 4 slide-out books, which you can also label in the front.  Obviously this means getting rid of the cases and insert booklets, but since I didn't really have any booklets on my data discs (I typically just wrote the description on the discs themselves with a marker) or anything fancy in the cases, this was fine.  The whole thing is about 7 inches wide.

I've talked before about storing discs in different sorts of holders in order to save space.  I still keep most of my movies in bigger 3-ring binders.  But this is another product I'd recommend if you're not concerned with keeping cases or booklets.

Facing the Wardrobe, 2012

Dealing with clothes is a topic that I've blogged about before.  Well, that was over two years ago, and some things have accumulated since then.

Here were some of the recently found wearable oddities:

• Poor People's Pub shirt, 2000-2001.  This is easily one of my all-time favorite restaurants, and I've been going there since I was a kid.  They make a new shirt every year.  I haven't worn this one in years though, and I already have some similar shirts.  My father-in-law collects these shirts, but my wife said that he probably already has this one.  I think I'll toss this one into the Goodwill bag.
• Two high school gym class shirts.  I went to a private high school, and even phys. ed. class had a dress code.  We had to at least wear one of these shirts, the matching shorts, a jock strap, and sneakers.  The shorts had a space where you'd write your last name in magic marker.  The shirts had one too.  They were also reversible, I guess to make it easy if you wanted to break the class into two teams to play.
  I absolutely HATED gym class.  I always did.  Hated, hated, HATED it.  It always had less to do with actual physical development, and everything to do with pretentious, asshole jocks.  It does NOT build any sort of social skills or "teamwork".  If anything, I'm convinced that events like the Columbine shootings wouldn't happen if gym class didn't exist.  Why this is still a part of public academia, I have no idea.  On top of all that, I have never been a sports fan, and to this day, I still hate sports.
  I should be BURNING this shirt.
• A shrunken sweater.  At this point I should just shrink it further to make a ski mask.  But it's easier to just add it to the Goodwill bag.
• A "Rock Cleveland" shirt that my father got me on one of his business trips, who knows when.  It's pretty small now.
• 34" waist pants.  Oh yeah, right, like I could still fit into these.
• A black "University of Charlotte" shirt.  This was presumably came from my dad too.  And it's rather small now.  I'm guessing I kept it so that i could use the black cloth for something.  Well, that hasn't happened.  Into the bag you go.
• Old work shirts.  I don't mean "work" as in blue-collar shirts to work in.  I mean free shirts that I got from companies I worked with.  This included at least one of those pull-over, partially-zippered sweatshirts.  I really don't wear these.
• Two nostalgic shirts.  These are tough to get rid of.  One is a fraternity rush shirt from my first year of college.  The other is a shirt I got made up in the mall when I was in the 8th grade, that shows a photo of metallica but with my face superimposed on Kirk Hammet's.  I think I'll pack them away and think about it further.  I've still made a lot of progress.

The Non-Federal Investigation of Bureau: candies

I could easily make a dozen posts on the stuff I found on my bureau alone.  But I'll try to do this in groups.

One of the more glaring types of clutter you might find are things that are edible, in places where you should only expect to find non-edible items.  Even the types of consumable items that don't seem to have an expiration date, suddenly DO look "expired" in this situation.  It's the "ewww!" factor, for me anyways.

• Pepermint candy.  I must have grabbed this from a restaurant when I was leaving, shoved it in my pocket, then took it out and left it on the bureau before I went to sleep that night.  Then it got buried, like a fossil.
• Cough drop.  It reminds me of Rich Hall's Sniglet called "Lynthlyptus", defined as "Any cough drop found in one's pocket after a few days".
• Bottle of Nose-Spray.  Yes, I know, you can't eat nose spray.  But I figured I'd list this here, just for the "ewww" factor.  And not just because I just used the words "eat" "nose" and "spray" in the same sentence in that order.  Two things I learned about Afrin 12-hour nose spray: 1) it works, but 2) it's physically addictive.  When the package says "Do not use this product for more than 2-3 days", they mean it.  Keep using for more than that, and you can't clear your nose without it.  Thankfully, I haven't used it in years.  I could easily fill a blog post talking about my history of nasal problems, the surgery for my deviated septum, what products I've taken since then, etc., but I'm not going to.  I'm only going to say this: the Afrin bottle here had an expiration date of December 2008.  Afrin, I banish thee!
• Bag of Candy-coated Almonds. These were a take-home gift at a wedding.  Or whatever the term is for those things.  There was a little poem or writing attached that explained the symbolic significance of the candies and why there were that number in the bag, etc.  I have plenty of photos from that wedding, so I sure don't need a sack of stale nuts.  "What the hell IS this?" asked my wife.  "Almonds", I replied.  Then the exchange went something like this:
  "When the hell did you get them?"
  "You don't want to know."
  "Where?"
  "I told you, you don't want to know."
  "Just tell me! More than ten years ago?"
  "No, I CAN say that they're less than ten years old."
  "What are they from?"
  "Sigh...Dave and [Dave's wife's name]'s wedding."
  "Dave [last name]?"
  "Yes, that Dave."
  "When did he get married?!?"
  "I dunno. Uh, five years ago?  Six years ago?"
  "Jesus!"
  "Hey, I TOLD you that you didn't want to know!"

The Non-Federal Investigation of Bureau: Receipts

One of the new target areas on my most recent "to-do" list was my bureau.  Namely, the top of my bureau.  Lots of stuff collects there.  Come to think of it, that was the same situation with my father when I was growing up.  The bureau top became quite the stuff magnet.

I started to tackle this once and for all.  It's still a work in progress as I type this, mainly because it's been a careful process of sorting through it.  I'm most certainly going to end up throwing away most of it, but given that some of these things include papers with bank account numbers, receipts, etc., it's worth dividing the trash into "to be shredded" and "not to be shredded" piles.

The most popular type of item was, indeed, receipts.  Usually I'm very good with keeping receipts and keeping them separate.  Normally I keep them in my wallet, then eventually transfer them to an envelope when my wallet gets too full.  They then get transferred to their respective bank or credit card statements before being filed away with them. 

Still, I managed to find 20 loose receipts on my bureau.  Some of these were on my wife's credit card (she doesn't want to throw them away, but doesn't want to keep them either, so if I'm around she hands them to me).  Some were just too big to fit into my wallet.  Here's just some of what I found:

• 2 receipts for CVS.  For those of you who don't live in a region where there's a CVS and never heard of them before, CVS is actually one of the largest drug store chains in the US, second only to Walgreen's.  Growing up, my mother told me that it stood for "Convenient Variety Store", though it turns out that it's actually "Consumer Value Stores".  Of course, they never use that name, and I doubt half of the CVS employees know what it stands for.
  I guess I saved these for the "Extra Value Dollars" they usually print on the end of the receipts.  That's their cute euphemism for "coupons".  Usually when you end up buying a certain product, your coupon will be for some rival product of the same type.
  I used to go there a lot, but since moving in 2010 I haven't been around a CVS, so I go elsewhere.  So there's really no use for coupons or receipts like these.

• Several receipts from Daddy's Junky Music.  I'll have more to say about them in a future blog post.
• Concert ticket receipts.  And yes, of course they're for concerts that I already went to.  The funny thing about Ticket Master is that they not only give you a printed receipt in the envelope on a sheet of paper, but an extra printed ticket that just has your name and address on it.  My wife saw this in the pile I was throwing away and gasped "Don't throw out my ticket stubs!"  I showed it to her and explained that it was just a receipt.
• Ski rental receipt.  Now that was actually quite handy to have at the time.  They put me in ski boots that were ridiculously tight, even by ski boot standards.  So I went back to the lodge, showed them the receipt, and they set me up with new boots.  That was a great trip.  It was also about a year ago.  And I have photos from the event, so I don't even need this as a souvenir.
• A sticker type of receipt that says "Nonrefundable if lost or stolen" with a bunch of numbers on it.  What did this go to?  I have no idea.  I'm guessing maybe the lift ticket I got with the skiing trip.
• Dunkin' Donuts gift card receipt.  I have $5.82 left on my card.  So what?  (An amusing side note: many years ago I got directions to a wedding reception.  The lady who wrote the directions actually wrote one of the steps as "Turn right at the Duncan Donuts".  Since when did chocolate crullers become part of a royal Scottish clan?)
• Hotel receipt.  You know how they print out a full 8.5x11" sheet for this and slip it under your door before you leave?  Well, you can't fit that in a wallet.  But the bureau is no place for it either.  Into the shredder you go.
• A printed receipt from Edible Arrangements.  The person I gave the gift to got them.  That was back in 2010.  I could have started growing a new tree with the seeds by now.
• Optometrist visit receipt. All this really reminded me was that the bastards don't take my new eye insurance plan, when I thought they did.

 

I'm Ice Box Man

"Leftovers make you feel good twice. Did you ever think about that? Leftovers give you two separate, good feelings. When you first put them away, you feel really intelligent: "I'm saving food!" And then, after a month, when hair is growing out of them, and you throw them away you feel really intelligent: I'm saving my life!"

- George Carlin, from "Ice Box Man" a routine from the album "A Place for My Stuff"

It's come to that time again for doing a heavy-duty cleaning of the fridge. And this time, yikes.  I threw out at least a full trash bag of stuff that had expired.  I think the oldest item was a bottle of mojito mix that had been sitting on the top shelf way in the back left corner.  The expiration date?  Two years ago!  But the crazy thing about that is, I know I've been in my present apartment for less than two years, and I know I bought the item earlier than that.

Here are a couple of things I learned or re-learned from the experience:

• You know how refrigerators have one or two draws in the bottom?  And usually, you can't see through them?  Sometimes they're called the "crisper" or are labeled with categories like "Vegetables".  I've said this before, and I'll say it again: it's generally a stupid idea to keep vegies in there.  That's because what happens is you forget that they're in there, and they just rot.  My suggestion?  Use this draw for the stuff that doesn't really expire, like soft drinks.  Or you could use it for the stuff you might use often, but draws like this are generally a pain in the ass to open.  Yet another thing you could do, at least with some refrigerators, is pull the draw out entirely and use the space as a shelf.
• A while back I did declare it as a rule for my wife and I: "Don't put fruits and vegetables in the draw.  We won't see them, then forget about them!"  I guess what happened though is that after some shopping trip or another, we ran out of room with the other shelves and decided to throw some stuff down there.  Well, this time around I found two oranges, and you could squeeze them like a Nerf ball.  I'm no botanist, but I know that means they're bad.
• Some of the things I threw out were items that we had two or three of.  For example, two containers of the same type of cream cheese, both open.  Or three different kinds of coffee creamers, all expired.  I guess my fridge is a microcosm of the general bigger problem that shows up when you're a pack rat: buying two or three of the same item because you forgot you already had it, and just didn't see it (or gave up looking for it).  All the more reason for basing your shopping list partially on what you really don't have at home, and sticking to the shopping list and only what's on the shopping list when you shop, I suppose.
• With the previous observation in mind, it helps to clump similar items in the fridge the best you can.  I noticed that we had the yogurts spread out in 3 different places.  Again, this seems to be a microcosm of the bigger clutter situation: throwing things in the next available space instead of organizing them together.
• By the way, why is there no "d" in "refrigerator", but its abbreviation is "fridge"?  Go try your spell check if you don't believe me.

 

Add 1 part Chocolatini mix to 4 DVD case covers

"Add 1 part Chocolatini mix to 4 DVD case covers..." to the trash bin, please!

Some time ago we got a gift certificate to Macy's or Marshall's or one of these places we typically never shop.  You'll notice that in stores like these, they usually have a strange selection of edible and drinkable stuff near the kitchenware. Lo and behold, I found some chocolate martini mix.  She doesn't like these, but I do.  We bought it.  Then we realized that the kit is really just assuming that you're making one enormous 2-liter batch.  So, it didn't end up being used.

It was in my car for a long time, maybe because we were transporting to a party or a person who WOULD use it, but that didn't happen.  I even tried doing some math on how much I'd have to use to make one or two, and stuck it on a post-it note, but given the two different-sized mixing packages in there, that wasn't really making sense either.

Thus after having this damn thing for over a year, it was clear that it was time to get rid of it.

Another search in my home recently turned up yet another collection of DVD case covers.  I'm not referring to DVD cases, nor the DVD case sleeves.  I mean those cardboard pieces that slide over the top of some DVD cases, so that they look more attractive in the store, but in order to watch the DVD you have to slide the case out from them every time.  Or sometimes you'll get a movie trilogy, and even though each movie is in its own case, there's one big case to hold them all in, which means you're screwed if your DVD racks are of the horizontal slot variety.

This is the third or fourth time I've thrown a collection of these away.  I keep thinking I have them all in one place, but they keep on mysteriously turning up every year or so.  Strange, but clutter.

VHS Bootleg Graveyard

When I went on my first truly major eBay selling spree a couple of years ago, one of the really harsh realities I had to often face was having something that I originally paid a lot of money for, and having to sell it for next to nothing. 

And I'm not talking about things like clothing or furniture which naturally wears away after a while.  I'm mainly talking about things that were especially sought after at the time for being collectible items.  It seemed that the longer you'd hold on to these, the more its rarity and value would go up.  The popularity of the internet of course changed all of this.

Brace yourself for a bitter old man rant:

Do kids today make the effort to hunt down bootlegs and rarities of their favorite bands?  Do they even KNOW what a bootleg is?  A bootleg is, in the loosest sense of the term, a recording of a band that you can't find for purchase anywhere.  If you were a really big fan of a band, then you wanted to get whatever you could from that band.  You couldn't just hop on the internet for that, because first of all your home probably didn't have access, and second of all even if you did, the connection speeds and computers weren't fast enough to get much of anything.  The effort you had to exert to get a band's entire catalog and beyond is what separated the casual fans from the true die-hard fans.

It didn't matter if it was a low-quality, muddy cassette recording of a demo session, or a concert video recorded by one guy holding up a shaky camcorder.  (And how the hell DID these people sneak those in?)  If that band you loved did it, then you had to have it.  Used record shops would sometimes carry bootlegs.  Other times, you had to find somebody to trade (which you could do in the earlier days of the internet, but again you still had to find the person who had what you wanted, set up a mailing arrangement, etc.)

There was a time when VHS concert bootlegs like this would sell anywhere from $20 to $50.  This past summer, I managed to find an old used music store that sold them.  I can't remember what they were asking for, but I know it wasn't more than 5 bucks a tape.  So I bought some, brought them home, and transferred them to DVD-R.  Great stuff. 

So...what to do with the tapes now?  Well there's really nothing to do.  I could try selling them, but I doubt anybody these days would take them.  Even if you were lucky and managed to sell them on eBay (without having your ad being taken down for legal reasons), you'd just be going through the hassle of shipping them.  I wouldn't be surprised if all of these shows have been uploaded to YouTube by now, albeit of poorer quality. 

Of course, the nagging feeling in the back of my mind said that I shouldn't be throwing away things that I would have paid $20 to $50 bucks each for.  But then the more rational part of my mind has to say, "Bill, those prices were what you'd see if this was still 1994.  But it's not.  It's 2011.  And you have digital copies of these now.  If you were ever going to trade copies with other fans -- and you probably won't end up doing that -- you'd be making copies from the DVD-Rs you made."  Thus, into the trash they went.

Disposing the Behemoth of DVD cases

I've blogged before about my relationship with DVD cases.  I own a lot of DVDs.  And I mean a lot.  I've certainly had some friends who've owned twice the amount I have, but most people I see don't have even half the amount I have.  And of course my Bluray collection has already started.

One problem of course is how much room they can take up.  You can buy one DVD rack or another, but eventually you end  up with 5 or 6 different shelving units that don't resemble each other.  CDs can cause the same problem.  One solution is to take the discs out, slip them into sleeves in a binder, and put the cases in storage.  This way you can have, for example 50 to several hundred discs in a single binder.

I rejected doing this for the longest time because I simply like to see my DVD collection out in the open, like a library of books.  It makes it easier for me to browse and select something.  And of course it's more aesthetically appealing than flipping through binders of discs with no artwork, no descriptions, and no other inserts.  That's especially frustrating when you have DVD sets of television series and you want to know what episode of which season of that show had that thing that they did.

Unfortunately, there are only so many places where you can put hundreds and hundreds of DVDs in a 1-bedroom apartment.   So I had to go with the binders.  That doesn't mean that I had to put all of my DVDs into binders, but at least try it with a genre or two of them.

I knew that I didn't want to do this with my enormous Doctor Who collection, nor with TV series, and a few particular DVD sets whose casings and thick booklets I liked too much (the special edition of Slacker is one example).  That still left me with well over 200 DVDs I could feel comfortable putting into binders.  One day I went through those DVDs and extracted the discs, putting them into binders.

Well, that was about a year ago.  I still had a huge box of empty cases, up in storage.  At the very least, I wanted to keep the sleeves.  That way if I get one of those binders that lets you put the sleeve and the disc together, or want to sell a movie at some point, or want to see the tracklisting, etc., then I have it.  So the sleeves were finally extracted and shoved into a folder.  The stack of labels was still thinner than a phone book.

This couldn't be done with all of the cases.  Some were in that old style with the carboard front cover and the black plastic clip on the right.  I put those in a separate box.  Even so, I was still left with about 200 reusable DVD cases:

I sure as hell weren't going to put these on eBay to try to ship them.  I took a look on Craigslist to see if there were other people selling DVD cases and just how much they were getting for them.  Then I said "Screw it.  I just want to get this enormous box out of my house.  I want to be able to walk to my closet again, unobstructed!"  So I made a post to Freecycle for a free set of 200 DVD cases.  Somebody replied the next day.  I met him.  He took them.  We thanked each other.

AND THUS SO, IT IS DONE!  YAY!

Andy Rooney and His Stuff

I'm back with my first new post since July.  No, I'm not dead.  Unfortunately, Andy Rooney is.  Too bad; I really liked him.  Even if I didn't agree with all of his rants, I still enjoyed them.

Sure enough, Andy Rooney had a few segments on "Stuff".

 

 

"...And I can't believe how many things I don't need ONE of, that I have TWO of."

Too bad Andy Rooney passed away. Now we have to deal with teenagers who'd never heard of him before last week, searching for his segments on YouTube just to post nasty comments about him.

You'd think that if there's one celebrity that bloggers and compulsive comment-posting people would praise, it's Andy Rooney: the guy who maintained a long running career making short complaints about different things every week. Talk about envy!

Bag Hutch!

Plastic shopping bags are handy for a variety of things.  I use them all the time to bring lunches from home to work.

But there's a point when you really just have to face the fact that you've saved enough of them, and can get rid of at least half of your collection.  Most supermarkets these days have drop-off bins just for these.

Of course, there's always BAG HUTCH: