The Plastic-Less Office

I just sold my last cd. After twenty years and close to 1000 albums, I now own no music on compact disc.

The idea came to me a couple of years ago. Ed's friend Barton (who used to run an amazing music blog) decided once he had all his music on mp3, he no longer needed the discs. So he sold them in lots on ebay and did fairly well. The idea stuck in my brain until Ben started crawling. Every day, he'd go to the cd bookcase and grab handfuls of records, scattering them all over the floor. The fiftieth time I put my original copy of 3rd Bass' "Derelects of Dialect" back on the shelf, I wondered what the point was.

I'm an archivist. I'm not proud of that side of myself, but it's there. The house is full of stuff that I just HAD to own three years ago. If I'm into an artists' work, I want EVERYTHING by that artist. Season 9 of the X Files. Beatle anthologies. I own Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four run twice in hardcover. I just want to know I have a good copy at my fingertips.

But with music, I always do. I own a 160 GB ipod that's not full. I have 700 GBs of hard drive space for my files. They're backed up on a 500 GB hard drive that resides in Connecticut and a new 1.5 TB drive on the shelf. Why do I need fifth copies of everything on 700 MB cds?

I don't. So off they went. Secondspin.com took almost everything at decent (for this economy) prices. It took three months but now the cd bookcase has actual books in it. Throw in a digitized comic book library (I miss those GIT Marvel DVD ROMs) and my obsession becomes virtual and my space becomes liveable.

Now if I could only figure out a way to digitize action figures.