Packaging!

New Year's Resolution: nope, not lose weight. Been doing that, thank you: 47 lbs. now. Nope, not exercise: been getting slightly more active without the weight, but the knees are still plenty quick to reassure me they're still there, still not fixed. This year it was Get Organized!

Better organized, anyway. With some things I'm very organized. In a house with likely over a thousand books, if they're not alphabetized by author, one can never find anything. The reason there are stacks of them on the windowsill is that we've not taken the time to rearrange the shelves to create more room so they can be folded into the existing system, aka organized. Of course the computer Dummies books are on the computer stand, the tropical aquarium fish books are on their own shelf, the field guides are in their own spot, and the very oversized books have their own book case entirely, but hey, it's a system.

With DVDs I have to be organized, doubly so. First they have to be registered on my computer list, which gets printed out regularly (not enough!) and tucked into my pocketbook so when I'm at the store I don't buy something I forgot I already have. It's been done. Happened yesterday, in fact. My list wasn't the most recent. Oops.

Second, they get their cases removed and get slid into albums with disc sleeves, again in alphabetical order. I do try to leave spaces in them so new DVDs can be added without having to pull everything out and re-file. However, yesterday it was time to file the three bagfuls of DVDs which had been sitting on the den floor where they had been waiting after getting computerized, and add into the mix all of Steve's DVD movies.

Well, most. I made exceptions for his John Wayne collections and a western movies collection that crammed 50 movies onto a few discs, no way to alphabetize. I also rejected the how-to DVDs. They don't really count as movies. Seriously.

Since I had been caring for my dad the last couple years plus, I brought a sharp knife to the task. Non sequitur? Just wait a sec, it'll make sense. With Daddy living his awake life in the living room and unable to really watch TV, we had to do our watching pretty much around his schedule so as not to bother him. That hardly left room for the regular TV programs, much less adding in movies. Thus, most of them were in their original packaging, unwatched. They needed that knife to break through the cellophane and the end tape.

I had stuff spread out all over my bed, and the packaging got dumped onto the floor until I paused in the task to round it all up and pack it into shopping bags for dumping in the garbage can. As a side note, something actually on the topic of the title, three bags of DVDs made 6 bags of trash.

There were three start-overs to the job, only one of which was due to needing to go to the store to purchase a new album, one promising to hold 342 discs. I have no idea how it'll go on the shelf, but that's another day's organizing task. The most frustrating one was after getting all the way into the Ls before Steve added his DVD collection into the mix.

And they weren't alphabetized yet.

I made him do it. I also had him write movie titles on half Post-It notes to put on those discs where the title is in the teeny weenie ring on the ring around the center hole. Having to squinch the eyes once to read it was twice too many times.

About four hours into the process, including the shopping expedition, having gotten to the "m"s for the first and last time, I came upon one particularly remarkable example of, uh, enthusiastic packaging. Yeah, that's it: enthusiastic. First was the cellophane. Then a sleeve, made of cardstock weight paper. Then a cardboard box, open along one long end. Out of that slid a single piece of cardstock weight paper again, plus a multiply folded cardboard folder holding the DVD. If course, it looked like several of the cases I had already opened which held several DVDs, opening first in the middle, and then each side having a flap which opened outward to finally reveal... just one disc.

"Meek's Cutoff". I wonder if it's a good movie. I'd never heard of it before picking it up, haven't heard anything about it since for that matter. It's a western. It was cheap. I figured at least Steve should like it, and maybe we can find a couple hours to watch it together.

And laugh at the packaging.