good intentions, or, confessions of an inveterate packrat

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My inherited packrat ways are not helped by a town full of used-/remaindered-book stores. When books are a dollar, or 50 cents, or even less, my resistance to acquisition goes way, way down.

After a time in this practically-free book environment, I am here to testify that, yes, it really is possible to have Too Many Books........................

I am working on reform of my proclivities. I have gotten pretty good at not acquiring (well, with the exception of totally free magazines, also from the library), but de-acquistion is much harder, I find.

The web is an enormous help. I was able to do a major purge of books, several years ago, when I discovered that nearly all of them were under $10 at Amazon. No longer do I have the "but what if I neeeeeeed it someday!!!" excuse. If I can get it, any time, well, I don't have to have it in the house all the time until that unlikely day.

The second major help from the www is that information contained in books tends to be on the web. So why keep eleven tons of books around, if you can find the answers/directions/recipes in weightless, take-up-no-space-in-your-home, completely and entirely dust-free electrons?

Not that I have the slightest intention of giving up alllllll my books, mind.

Just the ones that I have never opened, or haven't opened in 20 years, and figure I probably never will open........


Most of my bookshelves look like the lower two you see here, behind the vacuum cleaner.

Note, however, the two above! On Saturday last, I clean-swept them. I removed everything from a shelf, dusted the shelf, dusted each item, and put about half of the books into a bag that will take them to the library (where some other sucker, er, book lover will pay their dollar or 50 cents and move my ex-problem to their space).

Slowly but slowly, perhaps I am retrieving my space from all the Stuff.





And now on to another organizational task.

I have been keeping track of my own pics all these years (declining to use Photoshop Elements' built-in organizing capacity).

With the newer versions of Elements you don't have a choice. You have to use their system (no way to access your pics other than through their proprietary file-accesser).

This has advantages and disadvantages. It knows how to tag pics, which will be nice for searching (once things are tagged!). It will be possible to do things like make slide shows, without duplicating pics and moving them around. Those are good things. (Fervently hoping that I won't need to reorganize/tag things in the future!)

I am not an early adopter. I hope that I am glad in the end that took the trouble to do the organizing........

Our newer computer now has Elements 6 (a jump from 3 on the old computer!). So far, I've been able to do everything I am used to doing, with only a few hiccups, and I have begun to scratch the surface of the organizing/tagging. It will take a while; I have 28,000 pics.............

So if you don't see as much of me for a while, it will be because I'm wrestling with change...............

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