Rant #3,219: Last Night, I Couldn't Get To Sleep At All

Another sleepless night …

And on Friday the 13th yet.

Too many things going through my mind as I tried to go to sleep.

Where am I going to put all my records—all 10,000 of them—when we move into our much smaller living residence, with about half the space of what we had?

Where will the 45s go?

Where will the LPs go?

My wife and I have spoken about this, and what we do know is that the CDs, cassette tapes and our DVDs are going to have to go into a storage area, something that we have never had to use but which will be an imperative when we finally leave our current environs.

The “problem” is that my wife, my son and myself are collectors, to various degrees.

We like to hold entertainment media in our hands, and have them at our disposal when we want them.

That has amounted to thousands of 45s, LPs, tapes, CDs, and DVDs collecting in our home for the past 30-plus years, and we just don’t have the room for all the stuff in the new place.

My wife and I have thrown away scads of cassette tapes and VHS tapes—many made by ourselves over the years—but I do want to keep many of my music cassettes—of which I must have over 150 or so—but they will have to go into a storage area.

The same thing for our collective DVDs and CDs—of which we have hundreds—but we simply do not have the room to store in our house anymore.

Our son has probably 200 pro wrestling videos, and even though much of this is now available online, I know he wants to keep them in his new room, and we will try to accommodate his request.

And my records—the jewel of my collecting life over the past several decades—I just cannot have them in a storage area, they must be in the new residence.

The albums are currently on shelves in my work area—my daughter’s old room—and my 45s are also in that room in plastic storage bins.

That worked fine when we had twice the amount of space that we have in the old place, but in the new place, it is going to take a lot of creativity to figure out where to put, and how to store, this admittedly massive collection.

We are most probably going to take my mother’s old curio cabinet with us, and we have scheduled with a handyman to have it sanded and repainted to make it look like new.

That should hold a good amount of the LPs—a couple of hundred at least—or perhaps all of my 45s.

But what to do with the rest?

My mother also had a sort of auxiliary pantry, and perhaps we can take that with us and use those for the 45s—I think most of them would fit in there—and the curio cabinet could be used just for LPs.

But it is a quandary that keeps me up at night, and certainly is keeping me up this night, as I had a bit of a nightmare about where the records are going to go and could not get back to sleep afterward.

All told, we haven’t even reached the packing stage yet, still throwing out scads of garbage from all our years here onto the street for pickup.

There must be another 50 bags on the street in front of our house, and we have more to go as we decide what we need and what definitely goes.

We must have put well more than 150 bags filled with junk on the street during the past three weeks, and I wanted everything in bags so that no one could see what we were throwing out.

Yes, it is on the street, but we don’t need human scavengers sorting through what we have put out there and leaving the remains all over the place.

But last night, I was looking out the window to see when the contractor we were going to hire to remove the kitchen in our part of the house would arrive, and lo and behold, I saw someone using his phone to see as he picked through our garbage on the street.

I ran downstairs, but the person fled to his car and after I screamed out, “Who is picking through our garbage?” the car sped away, so I never got a good look at who it was, nor did I get the car’s license plate or make or model. It was just too dark out there to see.

But the person who will be doing the ripping up of our kitchen did finally arrive way past the appointed time that he was supposed to be here, and from what I gather fro his comments, this is going to cost us a lot to do, but we will have to bear the costs so that we can legally sell the house.

And when I add up all the costs—and less the costs of the reverse mortgage that my mother had on the house—it will be completely amazing if my sister and I—right now the legal owners of the house—will get much of anything from the eventual home sale …

And what we might get will probably be eaten up by fees to the lawyer we are using and the broker who is trying to sell the house, so if we get a dime from this albatross around my neck, I will be completely amazed.

But we are powerless to do anything about it, so we just have to do what we have to do and get rid of this house as quickly as possible.

All I know is that someone will get a spacious and nice six-bedroom home in a good area to do with what they want—even gut it if they would like—and my family and I, who have called this place home for decades …. we won’t get bupkis, and quite frankly, we will be lucky to not have to owe any money on this house.

And you wonder why I stay up at night thinking about such things … ?

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.