return

Well that would be my holiday over.

As is so often the way I achieved some things, but generally fell short of what I'd hoped to get through.

At the beginning of the holiday I popped down to see my Dad. It was my birthday and the bank holiday too and I'd not seen him since Christmas, so it seemed like a good opportunity.

It was good to see him, but it obviously absorbed three of the days.

When I got back my big plan was to go though the plethora of boxes I have and sort things out. The stuff in the boxes falls into three basic categories:

1) Junk I need to throw away, but through a combination of laziness and my pack-rat instincts I end up just sticking in a box.

2) Stuff I need to get rid of, but the bin isn't the way. This includes old electrical bits and bobs which are too big to chuck (and you're not supposed to throw away of course), and other stuff that I should take down the recycling place for example. Or there's tonnes of stuff that should go on e-bay.

3) Stuff I either need to or want to hang on to.

The idea was that I'd identify all the stuff that that fell into 1 and dispose of it in the rubbish. This I basically did, although because I didn't tackle every single box, I'm sure there's a bit more stuff.

The idea with 2 was that I'd identify it, and then take the stuff that needed recycling down the recycling place, which would free up a huge amount of space (there's a lot of it). This would then allow me more room to sort stuff that I could e-bay or whatever.

This was a partial success, in that I identified quite a lot of stuff to go down the recycling centre. But the problem was this too so long (Tuesday I did domestic stuff, and I was still sorting stuff on Saturday, and I didn't even finish then) that I just didn't have the time or energy to haul it all away.

The third group are more tricky.

My ultimate aim is to basically just be left hanging onto a handful of manga, anime and other stuff that kinda represent the 'cream of the crop'. In other words, they either quintessentially define my taste or are things I could watch/read over and over. The problem is really pinning down what these are.

The other problem is the stuff I need to hang onto. See, I seem to have ended up in a situation with manga especially where I'm collecting about 20-odd series.

The real problem with this is that the western companies tend to dawdle quite a bit when putting stuff out. There can be twenty or thirty volumes already out in Japan, but they only release three or four a year.

And on top of that, only a handful of the series I'm collecting have actually finished in Japan. This means I have a huge number of volumes of manga, many of which don't fall into the 'keep forever' pile, but it's not really going to be worth my while to sell them.

I mean, because I'm up to date, they will sell quite well - "all so far released" collections tend to do about as well as complete collection - but the problem is I don't really want to stop buying the new volumes. That means I'll end up with lots of random volumes, and those really don't sell well.

For example, I ended up with 3 random Bleach volumes, and to confirm my suspicions I put them on e-bay. I believe they finally sold for 5p each. That makes them total money sinks - it costs me money to auction them.

But the problem is there are loads of volumes now and they really take up a hell of a lot of room :/.