So, we rented a big dumpster to facilitate the cleaning out of my parents' home. Both of my parents were clutter-holics. And packrats. Those terms sound so crass and negative. Let's call them instead sentimental archivists.  Over the years, it has been a game of sorts, not really a fun one, or one with a winner, but still a kind of game for my brother and I to determine which of our parents' idiosyncracies was most responsible for the physical disaray of their home. Was it my father's all-consuming videotaping disorder hobby? Was it my mother's refusal to throw anything out? Was it her tendency to get stopped on a project before she started? Was it his laziness and procrastination? Was it their collective denial about the size of their house? Neither of them seemed to be talented at the kind of clutter triage skills that we in the information age have had to adopt. This should be saved. This should be tossed. This should be saved temporarily. This I'm not sure about. This can be given away. I think the only question my parents ever asked themselves about a piece of paper is "where can I put this that won't necessarily start a fire." 

There are some upsides to it. We've found a lot of really interesting, funny, poignant and meaningful artifacts. Tons of photos. Cards that my brother and I made for Mother's Day and St. Valentine's Day when we were little. Military trinkets and other tailsmen of history that reveal something of the time in which they lived. It's a cathartic process.

Monday & Tuesday
Monday I babysat Alexander at my house while Scot and Kathy worked, so I was really surprised on Tuesday morning to see how much they had been able to clear out.  I'm sure our friends and family who came over to help wouldn't have believed that there was five times as much stuff there in January, because it now looked like a normal amount of clutter for being lived in for 25 years.  Cheered and inspired by the fact that I could now see into the dining room from the living room, I began the video project. 

My father liked to record and archive television shows, live music, special events and movies - anything broadcast on TV. He worked off of a kind of bay or station he created with 4 VHS VCRs and, at least for awhile, one BETAMAX machine.  He spent most of his time recording shows onto a master tape, which he then copied onto an archive tape, with the commercials edited out, and the theme music recorded over the end credits.  At any given time he was probably archiving ten shows. He also had a collection of First Shows - the pilot episodes of every show that debuted since 1990, and some pilots of classics show that he would catch a re-broadcast of occasionally. 

Instead of labeling the tapes on the side, as human beings do, he wrote all the information (including the name of which VCR he used and any flaws in the recording) on a POST IT NOTE which he slapped onto the front of the tapecover. Did they sometimes fall off? Did that make it a pain to see what was on a tape? Did that mean that if a tape was separated from its cover that you'd have to watch it to see what was on it? Yes, yes and yes.

My father's collection took up a lot of space and time and was a huge headache for my mom and all of us, so you might think that all I wanted to do was to go over there and destroy each and every one of those tapes gleefully. And part of me does, fo shizzle.

But it is precisely because of all that time, energy, space, and money that my father spent on it (as opposed to on his family) that I decided that I would my hand on each of those tapes at least once. I would look at it, acknowledge it, and sort it into either the trash pile or the might-be-of-some-use-to-someone pile. 

And I know that you can get most of this stuff on DVDs if you want it now, but I figure there are schools and libraries and families who let their kids use the old VCR in the family room who would appreciate these tapes. 

And it was harder to just toss them after I did the math. Here's the math.

Let’s say you average 8hrs of sleep a night, leaving you 16 hours a day of wake time. Of that time awake, let’s say 5 hrs/day are spent preparing and eating meals, getting showered and dressed, going to the bathroom, answering the phone, traveling to and from places, chores, errands, shopping.  This is all averages and estimates, but let's say that leaves us with 11 hours a day to spend as we see fit; working,  playing, building model airplanes, etc.  That's about 4000 hours a year.