Sunday, January 3, 2010

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!


 

6 comments:

  1. Want to trade organizing DVDs for ironing? The most boring, evil, waste-of-time chore ever! A former boss was a movie collector and he had THOUSANDS of flicks. He turned a room in his house into a home theater. Then when he decided to kick the habit he spent many a work hour selling them on ebay! Ha!

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  2. Oh my gosh! I didn't know people could have that many movies but how awesome is that. I watch very little TV. We do have cable, just the basic or else we can only get about 5 channels and we like things that are on the other channels of course. I watch Amazing Race and American Idol. I'll watch Survivor if I remember that it's on.I will watch the Cubs if I can sit and watch and do something else at the same time. I guess I have a competitive nature! HAHA! I could easily live without a TV, Irv could not.

    I love the way you organize your movies. How cool to be able to just decide what you want to watch in the evening and go to the shelf and there it is. Good for you!

    Organizing them.....UGH!!

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  3. I watch TV some but not as much as I used to. We have tons of VCR tapes which we don't watch anymore. I have a few DVD tapes. It always seems like they are coming out with something new, now the Blue Ray DVD's and I'm not even sure how that differs from the regular DVD.

    The thing I hate is washing out the fridge. I love it when it's done and I think at the time, I'm going to keep it looking nice but I don't LOL.

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  4. I love that you organize your movies with the help of Excel. I don't think I could function without a spreadsheet for so many tasks.

    I know what you mean about not being able to remember if you have a particular movie or not. The Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood is the one I can never remember if I have or not.

    Dusting! That is my all time most disliked household chore.

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  5. Yes TV has gotten to be a real drag, too many commercials and an awful lot of garbage.

    On New Year's Eve all my cable channels were doing marathons, back to back episodes of what "they" thought was "the" program "everybody" wanted to watch
    ad-nauseam ! Ghost Lab on Discovery Channel, old Twilight Zone episodes on the Sci-Fi channel, House Hunters on HGTV.

    Netflix sounds intriguing, I've been considering it and after reading your acclamations, will definitely look into it...that and getting a library card to my local library !

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  6. I love that you organized all your DVD's. Can't believe the collection you have. You have your own little net flix at home!
    Good for you that you live without cable. More money in your pocket.
    My daughter would be very jealous of your collection.

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