Progress on New Year's resolutions

I can't remember when I last updated the blog on one of my New Year's resolutions, which was to develop some kind of plan to deal with all of my various forms of media (books, CDs, VHS tapes, cassette tapes, electronic stuff like email and iTunes).  Basically, here's my list of things in this category that I want to get done this year and which I've been slooooooowwwwly chipping away at.

• Organize photos on laptop
• Organize music on iTunes (i.e. I have a lot of weird random stuff that's found it's way there from various CDs I've burned that has the wrong artist or the wrong title or whatever.  The basic idea is to just make it easier to find what I'm looking for)
• Purge books (in progress)
• Purge CDs
• Burn CDs to iTunes (in progress)
• Purge VHS tapes (in progress)
• Buy replacement DVDs or convert select VHS tapes
• Purge cassette tapes
• Buy replacement iTunes or convert select cassette tapes
• Organize/purge Gmail
• Backup laptop media

So, as you can see from the crossed-out ones, I've accomplished some of this, and there are a number of other ones I've made some progress on.  As far as the cassette tapes, DVDs, and VHS tapes, here's where I started.  Everything is crammed in these two shelves - and trust me, they're stacked several rows deep, lest this look not that crowded to you.

I decided to start work on purging the VHS tapes since they take up the most space.  In order to get rid of them, I thought I'd try a couple different things.  First thing I did a couple months ago was that I cleaned out the bookcases and just stacked all of the VHS tapes in the corner.  I sorted them into a Disney pile (because they're a different size), a taped-off-the-TV pile (since these are some that I might want to either convert to a digital format or buy a better-quality version), and then a pile of all the other VHS tapes.

I find that when things are just sitting out there it's a good reminder to me to do something about it, because I just get more and more agitated seeing them sit there.  So I'm plenty agitated about these.  My first thought was that I'd try to sell these at a big garage sale that my friend usually has in the summer and get rid of as many as I could that way.  But that idea ran aground when it became difficult for my friend to schedule the sale.  So not knowing whether that was going to happen or not yet this summer, I felt like I needed to try something else because I'd slowly go insane having these sit in the corner.

My second plan was, if I can't sell them at a garage sale, why not try the next best thing, selling them on the interwebs?  I did a little research, and it turns out that there is in fact sort of a market for VHS tapes online!  Weird, but okay.  I set up my seller profile on Amazon, and decided to start with my Disney tapes, since I have some old ones and there seems to be a very specific market for those old clamshell cases.  I figured I'd just try it with a few of them to 1) see if any of them sold and 2) if I could actually make any money doing it. 

Without having to wait very long, I did actually get some answers when "The Little Mermaid" sold for $2.00.  WOOT!  Turns out I can sell them, but it is going to be very difficult to actually make it profitable.  In this case, I had to buy a pack of padded envelopes to mail it in for a cost of $1.55 per envelope.  Amazon charges the buyer whatever price I set (in this case, $2.00), then adds $3.99 for shipping, then subtracts its own fees, so I'm left with a profit of $3.35.  But once you subtract out the cost of the envelope ($1.55), and then the actual cost of the shipping ($3.43), I'm going to end up being pretty far in the hole if I sold a lot at this price.  So one solution would be to just price them all at a price where it's profitable, but then of course who knows if you'll sell any at all.  So I'll leave them up there for a while at a higher price and see what happens.

Meanwhile, I needed to figure something else out to get these things moving out of the house faster.  Somehow I stumbled on something on the internet that was about how there's a fair demand for VHS tapes from nursing homes because they're easier for the old folks to operate than DVDs.  Huh?  Well, okay.  Weirdly enough, I happen to have a coworker whose husband owns and runs a nursing home, so I asked him if he would want them and sure enough, he did!  So that's what I've decided to with the remainder of the non-Disney and non-taped-from-TV tapes.  It's not a nonprofit, so there won't be a tax deduction or anything, but it'll feel good to me to have them out of my house, and hopefully they'll bring some entertainment to somebody else, which feels better to me than putting them in the trash. 

And it's actually kind of perfect, because my tastes in entertainment pretty much mirror those of an elderly person.  The coworker asked me to go through them and look for ones that might not be appropriate for old people (the example given was "please, no 'Basic Instinct' " - ha!).  She needn't have worried.  My collection is almost entirely made up of '40s musicals, Jane Austen adaptations, dance movies, and classic dramas.  100% old people.  They're going to love it.