Houseworking Vacation

[womzilla]

I think I've noted here before that I have an absurd amount of paid time off (PTO) from my company: in addition to the eight market holidays, I get a pool of 22 days paid time off per year. On top of that, I carried over 10 unused days from 2005, a complex story in itself. Company policy is that you can only carry over 5 days. However, our PTO allotment at our previous firm was much less generous, and none of the development staff properly budgeted their time in 2005. Thus, come the end of November, almost everyone had 10-20 days unused. Rather than have all development completely stop for the month, our department head wrangled us disposition to carry over 10.

Anyway, the net result is that I have 32 PTO days this year, of which I have to use 27 or lose them. When the year started, I jokingly suggested that I just take a full week off whenever we had a three-day weekend, but I'm mostly going to be taking them one or two at a time. I decided back in January that I was going to take two days around Washington's Birthday, giving me five days off in a row to do some serious habitat renewal, all of it in my study.


When we moved here, each of us took a room set aside as a study. Of the three, I got the largest because mine would have both the guest bed (a double-bed once called "the most comfortable bed in America") and my comics collection, which at that time was around 27 long boxes ("bozo shoe boxes"). I also had two small closets for my games collection, which at that time was a manageable size.

That was fourteen years ago. In the time since, I have accumulated a few things. Well, a lot of things.  

The comics pile has spread--the original mountain is now 32 boxes, and approximately eight long boxes and fourteen short boxes are blocking bookcases on the opposite wall, along with sizable piles of unread comics elsewhere in the study.

But wait, there's more! When Crossover/Unplugged closed its doors after September 11, I brought home a lot of games--board games and computer games that I either salvaged from the company library or that I had stored at the company for research purposes. I've never really dealt with integrating them into the rest of the collection, and as a result the comics mountain is topped with 32(!) bankers' boxes containing games and gaming magazines and some comics magazines. (I think there are two full boxes of The Comics Journal.)

And there's more. In front of the comics mountain were boxes of Crap--unsorted papers, clippings, magazines, computer hardware, and just stuff. And off to the side, five or six years' worth of Comic Buyers Guide; awaiting trimming.

The result is that I have hundreds of games and tens of thousands of comics in my study that I simply cannot reach. And something Needed to Be Done.



I started by culling and reboxing the Crap. I managed to eliminate about half the total volume and repack the remainder carelessly into bankers' boxes which I could then stack somewhat out of the way. Similarly, I boxed and stacked the CBGs. The front of the comics mountain is now mostly exposed for the first time in at least five years.

I have also started culling the games collection. Using a fairly ruthless rubric of "When will I ever play this? What purpose does it serve in my collection?", I have managed to cull eight boxes of games out of the sixteen that I've examined. I will sell what I can and donate the rest to whatever thrift shop I can find. (I'm a big fan of Goodwill, which is secular, but it's actually somewhat hard to find a Goodwill drop-off in lower Westchester.) My goal is to eliminate half of my games and arrange the rest in such a manner that I can actually lay my hands on any game I own within five minutes.


A lot of work remains. I haven't even touched the comics collection, which I also want to cull severely (my goal is a more modest 30%, but that might be insufficient to the space goals). But before I can cull, I need to organize the last few years' accumulation so that I'm not just jamming unsorted comics into the mountain never to be seen again. nellorat wants to dig a few titles out for a paper she's doing for the ICFA; I don't know how I'm going to be able to accommodate her, but things have a way of working out.

Maybe I'll go alphabetize a few boxes before I go off for my morning chores.

Update: Chanting protesters on BBC remind me of my current slogan:

What do we want?
Incremental progress towards measurable goals!
When do we want it?
In due course!

Onward.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I tried to find the original a few weeks ago and for whatever reason failed; I like the project-manager faux-specific blandness of the version I came up with a great deal and have stuck with it. It's also more fun to try to imagine a crowd shouting it.