You've gotta help me out.
For the past couple of weekends, I've been trying to clean the "living room" side of the basement. I put it into quotations because it's really a hodgepodge of electronic equipment (computers, TVs, telescopes, gaming consoles, wires of various sorts), furniture (couch, loveseat, more desks than there have ever been people living in this house, office chairs, dozens of bookshelves), books/magazines (everything from dime store novels to textbooks to reference manuals to fiction to biographies, plus every issue of National Geographic going back to the sixties, random video game manuals, rock magazines and issues of Playboy from the seventies), media (CDs, DVDs, computer games, video games, installation disks, VHS tapes, vinyl records), Mom's artwork (pottery, oil paintings, sketches, mechanical drawings), and assorted shit (PeopleSoft training manuals, board games with half the pieces missing, action figures, baseball cards, coffee mugs, newspaper clippings, knickknacks, empty photo frames, more pens than one person can use in a lifetime, posters, lamps, empty boxes from video games and electronic equipment, file folders and banker's boxes full of fuck-knows-what, drawers to dressers we no longer have, remotes for electronic equipment that doesn't work, musical instruments).
So, as you can see, it's a bit of a challenge to weed out things we still might want vs. things we can give to Goodwill vs. things we should throw out vs. things we might be able to get decent money for on eBay or something.
Really, as to that last one, I draw the line at looking up the values of thousands of baseball cards online. I'm sticking them in a plastic bin and if this house is ever sold, someone else can deal with them. Those and the obscure reference books and the floppy disks are someone else's problem. I mean, seriously, some of this shit my parents have kept. Most of it isn't even relative to today like these items: a guide which refers to "our 48 United States," a pre-Watson and Crick biology book, a periodic table of elements that stops at 102, electrical engineering books written back when everyone used party telephone lines, and my personal favorite: a fourteen book encyclopedia of astronautics written before there was ever such a thing as a Space Shuttle.
Of course, because Dad is a hoarder, it's hard to convince him to get rid of anything. Even things that we can't use because the technology is so out-dated it isn't even funny. We have a Magnavox Odyssey and even though I'm geek enough to think that's cool, I really don't think we're going to be hooking it up to the TV anytime soon (if we even can hook it up to a modern-day one) to play some Table Tennis.
Man, I'm starving. Time to remind Dad to order some pizza.
So, as you can see, it's a bit of a challenge to weed out things we still might want vs. things we can give to Goodwill vs. things we should throw out vs. things we might be able to get decent money for on eBay or something.
Really, as to that last one, I draw the line at looking up the values of thousands of baseball cards online. I'm sticking them in a plastic bin and if this house is ever sold, someone else can deal with them. Those and the obscure reference books and the floppy disks are someone else's problem. I mean, seriously, some of this shit my parents have kept. Most of it isn't even relative to today like these items: a guide which refers to "our 48 United States," a pre-Watson and Crick biology book, a periodic table of elements that stops at 102, electrical engineering books written back when everyone used party telephone lines, and my personal favorite: a fourteen book encyclopedia of astronautics written before there was ever such a thing as a Space Shuttle.
Of course, because Dad is a hoarder, it's hard to convince him to get rid of anything. Even things that we can't use because the technology is so out-dated it isn't even funny. We have a Magnavox Odyssey and even though I'm geek enough to think that's cool, I really don't think we're going to be hooking it up to the TV anytime soon (if we even can hook it up to a modern-day one) to play some Table Tennis.
Man, I'm starving. Time to remind Dad to order some pizza.