Purging

I am moving.  Again.

I am not looking forward to moving again.  I would not, unlike Gloria, rather die than move, but not not looking forward to it.

So I'm purging.  Again.

I've already done this once.  I've already given away more than $100,000 worth of books.  I've already given away forty years' accumulation of ancient computer technology.  I've already purged pretty thoroughly, because when I moved the first time, I got rid of all of my stuff, rather than Gloria's stuff.

But, I'm moving again, so I'm purging again.

I'm going through what remains of my stuff. I'm looking at what I've got, and what remains, and what I can reduce even further.  There is of course Gloria's stuff.  I've already gotten rid of most of her clothes, and now I have to deal with her specialty items.  I have, for example, pretty much a container full of her sewing room.  There is a lot of fabric.  Most of it is quilting fabric.  All color matched and beautifully sorted.  Gloria would not have had it any other way.  There are also a number of quilting, and embroidery, kits.  What am I going to do with that?  There are the quilt guilds.  I'm sure that they would be willing to take it off my hands, but it does seem a bit of a shame not to recoup any of the costs that went into purchasing it in the first place.

Then there's our wedding china.  That is a bit more emotionally fraught.  For one thing, it's our wedding china.  It's not just china.

Gloria had a couple of pieces when we got married, because she liked it.  Partly because it was gorgeous in and of itself, but also because it was a petitpoint design, and of course she loved embroidery too.  So, that became our wedding china.  And through wedding gifts we managed to build a twelve place setting set of the china.  That was added to on anniversaries, and occasionally birthdays and Christmases.  The total replacement cost for what we have (sorry, what *I* have, I will keep doing that probably for some time yet), anyway there's $70,000 worth of Royal Albert PetitPoint china in the china cabinet.

What am I going to do with fine china?  I'm not sure that I could actually get twelve people into my new place, let alone seat them all for a formal dinner.  For one thing the only table I've got now seats four, and that would be at a bit of a push.

So, what am I going to do with $70,000 worth of Royal Albert fine bone china?  It isn't actually all that big: I could pack it up and take it with me.  It wouldn't be terribly heavy; not in comparison to my books; so it isn't completely unreasonable.  And then I could see if anyone in a logging and mill town of 27,000 people is desperately desiring to purchase a whole lot of Royal Albert fine bone china.  No, that's probably not going to happen.

But I have tried all kinds of different ways to deal with it.  There are stores that deal with second hand fine china, but at the moment they seem to be overstocked and in need of buyers themselves.  They don't seem to be purchasing.  I have contacted churches, and other institutions but, even before I did so I figured that I was rather unlikely.  And, I was right.  Nobody wants it.

Well, that would not be completely true.  I am sure that there are some collectors who would really like to have it, but I'm not sure how to contact them.  I have tried Facebook, and it's infamous Marketplace, but so far that has been pretty much a dud.

Speaking of duds, I am also working on the VHS tapes.  (I figured that I could reduce the bulk by doing the conversion of VHS to DVD, since DVDs are an awful lot smaller to transport.)  I have previously mentioned the VHS tapes. ( https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/02/why-vhs-you-ask.html ) Starting with one of our first meetings about Gloria's memorial service, and the comment, gee, wouldn't it be great if Mum could sing at her own service?  Of course I had lots of video of Gloria singing, and had even collected it on to compilation tapes.  And then we found the tapes!  And they were VHS tapes.  And then I remembered that I had converted some of the tapes to DVD!  And then we found that none of the compilation tapes had been part of that conversion.  And so it went.

Well, at someone's suggestion (you know who you are), I contacted Trusty Electronics of Texas.  For $100, they sent me a combination VHS and DVR machine!  Except that it wasn't a DVR machine, it was just a DVD machine.  And it wasn't $100, it was $150.  And then it was another $50 or more as prices and duties and taxes piled on top.  Well, since I had had to deal with the VHS compilation tapes in another way, that machine has been sitting around untested.  So I have finally gotten around to testing it.

And it turns out this $200 plus machine doesn't work.  At all.  It ate my cleaning tape!  My only VHS cleaning tape!  And it won't do anything.  Well, that means a slight lightning of my load because, of course, I've just purged that machine.  Oh, and Trusty Electronics of Texas?  Apparently it no longer exists.  A few months after I bought this they seem to have gone out of business so thoroughly that when you go to their website, Shopify is trying to sell you the domain name!  (It *would* be Texas ...)

However, through the kindness of friends, I do actually have now a working VHS machine!  And, wonder of wonders, it actually works!  It actually connects to my dubbing machine!  (The dubbing machine that had the VHS side go dead, just when I needed it most.)

So my conversion project is back underway.  This is nice, and it may be handy in reducing the volume of VHS tapes to a stack of DVDs, but it is somewhat emotionally fraught, since the way to copy these tapes is to play them, and every once in a while, of course, Gloria is laughing at the antics of the grandkids.  Gloria had a very beautiful, and distinctive, laugh.

(The guy who ended up doing the emergency conversion that let us [at some considerable trouble] play Gloria's singing at her own service also seriously messed up.  One of the conversions was almost unusable, with extremely poor sound quality.  And, in an attempt at redundant backup, when I converted [or attempted to convert] the VHS tapes to DVD now that I can do it, I found that he had OVERWRITTEN almost all of one tape.  Do NOT use the services of Everlasting Studios.)

There are some other things that I can do in terms of purging.  There's a box, just labeled pictures.  I should find out what they are.  I know that there are boxes, probably of family photographs, in the storage room in the basement.  I should get to, and go through, those.  I could go through my kitchen stuff.  I've got a set of eight plates: I probably don't need all eight.  I could pack the plates, possibly in a set of four, that I will use in Port Alberni and have that ready to go, and just use plates that I'm going to be throwing away anyway in my cupboard.  There are three boxes that the girls have labelled "Mementos" down in the storage container.  I should get those back to the apartment and go through them.  I suspect most of the mementos are Gloria's: I don't keep many.

I've already gone through the bathrooms.  I'm not completely finished, but I've done the bulk of that.  I have dealt with stacks of cleansers and laundry products that Gloria knew how to use, and I don't.  I have had a first pass through the fridge, throwing away stuff then I'm pretty sure I'm never going to eat.  I have gone through my books again.  That didn't result in a great reduction.  I am packing, very slowly, and piece meal, hardware and technical items, and trying to determine if any of them can go in the garbage.  *It's* not producing any great reductions at this point either.  I've gone through my t-shirts.  I'm quite a few t-shirts, pretty much all of them giveaways from presentations at conferences and trade shows.  Again, that didn't result in any great reduction, although I have sorted my t-shirts into heavy, for cold weather, light, for summer, and brightly colored.

I suppose that I should have a look at the towels and linens, which, for some reason, the girls put into the china cabinet.  I have also gone through assorted knick knacks keeping a rather small set and making a rather larger, but still not terribly significant, pile of stuff that can go, since it doesn't have any particular meaning for me.

I figure that a lot of the sorting of mementos, pictures, and other assorted paraphernalia can be gone through while I am doing transcribing from VHS tapes onto DVDs.  Although, I would just as soon go out walking while the conversion process is going on.  A tape is running, even as I am dictating, back at the apartment, while I am walking around the parking lot of the McDonald's over on Annacis Island, using their Wi-Fi for the dictation.  I have already gone through the filing cabinet for a slight reduction in scrap paper.  I suppose I should go through Gloria's tax forms, and my own, and some of the accounts in our accounts folder, to get rid of whole sections of papers that are older than I need to keep.

Someone, in suggesting that I purge, noted that purging was a way to clean up space, and give you more room available for sorting and packing.  This does not appear to be true.  My apartment is now much more cluttered than it was before I started purging.  For one thing, I've got boxes lying around waiting to be packed.  For another, I have things like the racking that I needed to set up to test the various VHS machines in order to try and see if the conversion project was going to work.  I also have partly unpacked boxes that I am going through, and items, such as papers, spread out for examination.  So, no, purging doesn't give you more space to work in.