My recent divesture of thousands of books I never intended to read still stings too much to discuss, so this NYT blog entry about culling your personal book collection was hard to read, although I couldn't not read it. I was just thinking about doing a bit of this myself, since I have yet to fix up my office and boxes of unlooked-at books have been stacked along two walls for quite some time. It's hard to tell how much bulk the Kindle has eliminated, but it has to have helped some. I didn't take any paper books with me to Florida last week and I still managed to read quite a bit. As Christopher noted, the e-reader is easier to manage on windy days (and they were all windy days).
The family vacation thing worked really well. The worst day was one we spent gift-shopping, which would have been miserable had the weather not been delightful and had South Beach not been full of people shopping with their itty-bitty dogs. People-watching is good, People-with-dogs-watching is great. The best day was visiting the Everglades, which was full of birds and alligators. In between, there was a lot of sitting on the beach and walking along the boardwalk. We managed to skirt all the weather-related travel problems on both ends of the trip, luckily.
Back at home, we have not settled much. Victoria doesn't want to resume school when her neighborhood friends are on vacation. Brian has been home every day--I don't know why this is disruptive, as he stays out of my way for the most part, but I never get very much done in the house when he's here. I do have a tutoring session and art class scheduled for Wednesday, but the rest of the week will probably be filled with nothing. I've been spending a lot of time filling my iPod. My fake one finally gave out--it was a Creative Zen Nomad, it lasted for six years. I've been ripping a lot of CDs, but they are in awful shape and I have to listen to each song to see if it's ok before transferring. That takes a lot of time. It's maddening, too, since so many of them are unusable. Take care of your stuff!
The family vacation thing worked really well. The worst day was one we spent gift-shopping, which would have been miserable had the weather not been delightful and had South Beach not been full of people shopping with their itty-bitty dogs. People-watching is good, People-with-dogs-watching is great. The best day was visiting the Everglades, which was full of birds and alligators. In between, there was a lot of sitting on the beach and walking along the boardwalk. We managed to skirt all the weather-related travel problems on both ends of the trip, luckily.
Back at home, we have not settled much. Victoria doesn't want to resume school when her neighborhood friends are on vacation. Brian has been home every day--I don't know why this is disruptive, as he stays out of my way for the most part, but I never get very much done in the house when he's here. I do have a tutoring session and art class scheduled for Wednesday, but the rest of the week will probably be filled with nothing. I've been spending a lot of time filling my iPod. My fake one finally gave out--it was a Creative Zen Nomad, it lasted for six years. I've been ripping a lot of CDs, but they are in awful shape and I have to listen to each song to see if it's ok before transferring. That takes a lot of time. It's maddening, too, since so many of them are unusable. Take care of your stuff!
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chasethestars
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I feel your pain... we've always had several feet more books than we've had bookshelf space. Every bookcase in the place has a row or a couple stacks across the top.
visiting the Everglades
WAITAsec you guys were down here in th' Sunshine State? Cool! (and it *is* cool... got down to 30 last night).
CDs in awful shape
Yeah, CDs, for all their virtues, are a lot more *fragile* than LPs are. An LP gets a scratch and you've just got some popping noise (that's fairly easy to edit out if you rip it); scratch a CD and you can accumulate enough multibit errors to make a song unplayable. Y'know, with disk space as cheap as it is, it might make sense to rip CDs to WAV files as you buy them, so they're backed up and you can make a lossless copy if one gets munged.
You mean instead of setting them free under the passenger seat of the Subaru to mingle with the crayons and french fries? Sounds crazy to me, but it just might work!
re: but the rest of the week will probably be filled with nothing. I have that sense, as well. I forced myself to sit down and write in my paper journal this morning, because I knew I did something productive in the last few days, but I was having trouble remembering!
I can’t bring myself to get rid of even a book I dislike, perhaps because I read “Fahrenheit 451” at an impressionable age.
ayup.
1] The book goes to someone who wants it
2] I get a book I want in exchange
3] I can trade my book credits to get CDs or DVDs I want instead
This really has changed my book clutter situation for the better. It has also given me tons of expensive audio books to listen to in the car for the price of media rate postage.
If you're intersted the site is:
http://www.paperbackswap.com
And if you sign up please tell them Media-Junkie sent you. It will actually get me a free credit.