Packing? Bah!

Packing has started to creep back into my life again. I’m hoping to pick up a townhouse soon, which means I’ll be moving again, but not nearly as far as the last two times. It’s odd: I didn’t move for 20 years but this next move will be the fifth one – including temporary housing – in 11 years; the third in the last 12 months. Still, I can deal with that. What can’t I deal with?

No. More. Books. Ever.

I always knew that reading was one of the hobbies that sucked up a lot of my time (and money, it seems – I might rediscover the local library) but it never bothered me before. At one point I had four bookcases filled to the point of sagging shelves and it still wasn’t enough storage for all of my reading materials. Technical books have always taken up more room than novels, but it never mattered: never enough shelf space. Before coming west I chucked eight xerox-paper boxes of tech books. They were all extremely dated; some I hadn’t opened since ’96… I mean really. The “newly released” admin guide to Oracle 8? Jeez!

Out here I only have two book cases and yes, they were overflowing once more, so I decided to rethink my “library” such as it is… for the last month I put a bunch of books up on Amazon, as part of their used catalog. About ten went, leaving me with about 18 books to deal width. Of those, a majority of them were already posted by other people at cheap prices ($1-$2). Not really worth posting my own copies. I also have a bunch of fiction around that I will re-read every couple of years, but I also have a lot of novels that I wouldn’t bother to read again. This includes the Star Wars – post Jedi – and Star Trek – post TNG – titles… paperbacks, mostly, but I had gotten bored with both story lines over the years.

It was time: time to take a trip down to the Half-Price bookstore… didn’t get hardly any cash for them, but I’m hoping that they will at least go to a good home. And I had to run out of there; they had all types of books and movies and stuff… I mostly did this so I wouldn’t have to pack as much stuff next month – last thing I need is to restock the place!

For the pile of books in the picture, I got a total of $25. And what’s worse is that when I got there, I saw a guy dumping a whole rack of “clearance” books into the recycle dumpster… sort of kills the “good home theory” but, well, it was done in good faith.

Hell, at least I won’t have to pack them!


3 thoughts on “Packing? Bah!”

  1. you should donate them to you local public library. if they cannot use them the “friends of the library” often run book sales to make money for the library. Much less chance of them going in the dumpster.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.