Reorganizing One of Those Chores

Do you ever have one of those chores that you just hate so much that you let go as long as possible? It's the chore that will have you volunteering to wash and paint walls or cheerfully pick lint balls off your flannel sheets. The kind of chore that will make you scrub down your bathrooms, do dishes, scoop cat boxes (or dog poop)--do anything else but THAT chore?  

C'mon now...I know you do.  Time to confess to that chore now. Alrighty then--I'll go first.

My favorite chore to hate is organizing the DVDs. *sighs* 

 

 D and I don't watch television at all. First because I gave up watching television shows like 15 years ago and I haven't looked back.   The commercials irritated me and I found myself spending more time in front of the silly boob box instead of doing what I needed to do or wanting to do--like interact with my son in a meaningful way.  I became a single mother when he was four years old. At first, TV numbed both of us to the trauma he was going through and the panic I had at finding myself going through a divorce. But later, I realized that the numbness was becoming permanent. Instead I started doing the VHS-movie-thang. 

There were rules about watching a movie. Chores had to be done. Homework had to be done. It was only allowed on Friday and Saturday nights. When Matthew and I had a "Breakfast Sunday" then and only then did we watch movies all day long. Breakfast Sundays were once in a great while--not more than once a month. They were special treats.

Back to why we don't watch TV--Because of where we live, cable is the only way to watch television. Cable here is expensive. When D and I first were married, we were both students and cable was an expense we couldn't afford. So we watch movies. We've graduated from VHS to DVDs thanks to a DVD player from his father.  And because we both like movies, we started collecting them. Really, seriously collecting movies. Mostly to afford this habit, we haunt the dump bins at box stores and buy previously viewed.  Or whenever there was a special or they were five bucks or less.  

 

 Thank the gods for Netflix. That is the best thing invented, I swear. This will help slow our movie collecting down to a crawl.  In seven years, we have a lot of movies.  At last count there were over 600 movies. That was a year ago. I hate to think about how many we have now. 

So yesterday afternoon, after we had put Christmas away--much to the chagrin of the cats--I started reorganizing the DVDs. That means putting them in my Excel worksheet and alphabetizing them in the racks and the credenza. It means finally dusting the cases because it's another one of those chores I tend to ignore as long as possible. It also means culling out the duplicates, full screen editions when we also bought the preferred widescreen edition, and deciding which movies we didn't really like or can live without. It's believing I was done with movie titles from A to F and  finding those sneaky Bs and Cs hiding out in the Ws. It's finding five copies of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" because we couldn't remember if we bought it or not. FOUR TIMES! It's discovering that we accidentally gave away our only copy of a favorite and now we have to replace it. Again!

 It means finding homes for the movies we are keeping and those that we are giving away.  

It means asking ourselves why we don't have anything to watch on the weekends when we forgot to turn in the Netflix on time!