Media madness

Well, hello everyone.  It's been a while!  I've gotten some guff from some folks recently (ahem, Nina and Monica) about not having posted in a long time.  I know, I know - I've been lazy.  Things got kind of insane last summer, so I had to take a break from the home improvement for a bit, but I'm hoping to get back to it this year.

I don't have anything major to share with you today, but I thought it would be good to get back on the horse.  One of my resolutions for 2013 is to get my media in order.  By "media" I mean my books, music, CDs, and movies.  I've got a LOT of 'em.  Let me give you a little tour of the piles of crap I mean to address over the next several months.

First, I've got four cabinets in my big bookcase, two of which I've been using to store cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and DVDs.  Only one of these formats is currently used in the 21st century...so I should get rid of the other ones and free up some space.

Here you can see the cassette tapes on the top shelf.  There's a lot of them, right?  Old mix tapes, favorite Led Zeppelin bootlegs, dubs of CDs from when I was in college, and then some random gems like Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation."  What???  Anyway, the time has come to either get rid of them, convert them to a digital format, or replace them. 

Then, we've got the VHS tapes.  There's favorite movies, musicals, and operas that I would hate to lose.  There's also some home movies of my sister and I engaged in some spectacularly embarrassing dance recitals.  The world would hate for me to lose those.  So the same set of decisions apply here as with the cassette tapes: I need to decide which of these are important enough to me to replace them or convert them; if they aren't that important, I need to purge them.

Finally, there's my CDs.  I really LIKE the physicalness of having a CD, with the album art and everything.  So I'm not quite ready to give all of that up...but I could still purge a lot of the weird music I've collected over the years.  Or at least put it on my computer and then toss the CDs themselves to free up some space. 

So here's a picture of my current CD storage.  I've got these two mini shelves that I got from work when we were purging a bunch of old furniture.  They're fine as far as how they look, but I just think I should try to get rid of at least one of them.  I don't need all those CDs, it's not like I'm going to be buying a bunch of them in the future, and I could free up that space in the corner for some other exciting thing.

 

 So I haven't done much so far, but one of my beginning projects is to start choosing which VHS tapes I'm going to replace and slowly start doing that.  Last month, I decided to replace all of my Jane Austen VHS tapes.  That may not sound like a big deal, but you're talking to the world's foremost expert on the cinematic representation of Jane Austen on film.  So all in all I replaced about 6 or 7 movies, including the 6-volume BBC Pride & Prejudice.  With the DVDs now in their place, this is the amount of space that has already been freed up.  (Incidentally, what you may not have been able to tell from the pictures above is that there are even more tapes behind each of the front rows of tapes.  So what looks like maybe not that big a job from these pictures is actually quite the undertaking!)

Like I said, it's not a huge impact so far, but it's a step in the right direction.  I'm hoping to get some more work in on the CDs this week, and also replace another handful of DVDs.

For those of you wondering about the never-finished hallway project, I will also try to start working on that!  Monica, thank you for prodding me.