This weekend involved a great deal of unproductive productivity brought on by having a better idea after having already implemented the not-as-good-idea.

See, in addition to a great number of books, we have a great many DVDs. I like movies and TV and over the years I've accumulated a great many of these, and while it makes for a really cool shelf look, they take up a lot of space. Because there's no way we were going to watch the great majority of these between now and moving day, they were (along with the bulk of the library) the first things to get boxed up and moved into storage.

But then I got to thinking -- we don't know how long those are gonna have to stay in storage. And who knows what we'll want to watch once we're settled in. For at least a while, our entertainment options are going to be necessarily limited to cheap things, and "watching movies you already own" is as cheap as it gets.

So over the weekend, I initiated Project Recovery, which involved going to the storage unit, shifting through all the boxes to find the ones with DVDs in them. (Yes, it would have been helpful to have labelled them in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.) My original plan was to go through each one there in the unit and move the actual discs into a very large binder I'd bought for the purpose. After one box of this, I decided this was a dumb idea, and loaded the remaining boxes of DVDs into the car and brought them home to complete this task in the air conditioning.

I still suspect there's a few discs floating about, since I can't find my dvd of "The Quantum of Solace" anywhere. But the vast majority of the DVDs have now been reduced from several banker-boxes worth of space into two enormous binders which together take up about the same amount of space as a piece of carry-on luggage. This will make it relatively trivial to bring all of them with us when we drive out in January.

(I also took the occasion to weed out some duplicates, including "Firefly" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, both of which have been upgraded to BluRay, and the first two seasons of M*A*S*H, made redundant when I gave kitanzi the "Medicine and Martinis" box set for Christmas a few years ago. I passed these on to Matt and Mary when they were here for dinner on Saturday.)

This is, I'm afraid, the limit of my useful productivity for the weekend, but I think it will reward us in a few months when we're wishing our movie collection was closer to hand. :)