It's like Christmas!

I spent a few hours today in the basement -- our plan is to eventually finish the basement with a home theater -- going through the pile of boxes. Many of them are from our original move to Colorado from Georgia in 1992 and spent twelve years in the attic of the old house. Most of my books moved in boxes and never got unpacked; we simply had no room for most of them. Moving into the new house meant unpacking boxes and boxes of books and loading them into the new bookshelves and seemingly limitless space of the new house (which is now pretty well crammed with books). It was like opening present on Xmas morning. I got to read through books that I haven' t seen in a decade: Chaucer (in Middle English), was a particulary missed volume. I actually took a class in college to justify buying it.

Still, we left a dozen or so boxes of books in the basement after the move, since we had no space for them. One of my goals during the Great Off (besides watching every movie with Colin Farrell in it) is to go through the remaining books and see if I can part with any them.

I went through three boxes and ruthlessly culled out all the bad 1980s bodice rippers, horrible sci-fi, and other embarrasing book detritus. I think I kept a total of a dozen books from the whole lot -- kept the good sci-fi, first editions, boxed set of Narnia, the erotica, and a few Stephen King novels. It was actually pretty painless at the time.

Now, of course, I'm thinking that I should go through the "to go" boxes and see if I was hasty in discarding them. The Adorable husband is going to take them to the used book store to see if they are worth any credit. I can't do it myself.

Only ten more boxes to go. And three boxes of vinyl records. Does anyone even have a turntable anymore?