What are we collecting?
Besides dust and the insane amount of paperwork the military tries to drown people with, mainly books and movies. Most people are aware of one addiction or the other. If you’ve met me, you know I love to bury my nose in a good book. If you’ve met my husband, you know he can quote movies like nobody’s business. But our collections are like tumors, taking over. We both laugh at how much it feels like we’re always trying to stuff the latest addition to our collection somewhere. Don’t believe me?
Take a look.
April 2010.
Oh, just a few books. This was a year and some change into living together. I had college textbooks and a small collection of “for pleasure” books picked up from Borders. I don’t see any of Jeff’s books on the shelf, but he was deployed at the time so maybe they were with him?
September 2011.
I’m *so* glad we decided to pick up a second bookshelf from Wal*mart before we left the states. It’s one of those sturdy metal shelves that can go anywhere and hold anything. It also gave us the option to do ‘his’ and ‘hers’ bookshelves. Perfect. (Mine’s on the left!) As you can see, our books are overflowing. And that’s after my electronic love, the Kindle, took over a lot of book purchases. My mission this week was to organize the office (Only so housing could get into the room to do maintenance, not for our own pleasure. Priorities, clearly.) I finished my mission, and then went to a friend’s house and picked up a box full of books. She’s moving and I’m always looking for a new book. It was the perfect pairing. Except I have no idea where to put those 20-30 books I just picked up…for now they’re sitting in the car.
And here’s the bigger, and much more impressive, collection.
February 2010
Not a shabby collection, right? Most of these movies were collected by my then-single husband while he was stationed in Italy. Movie buying slowed down considerably when we got married and actually had bills, but it’s been picking up speed steadily since we moved back overseas. Ask anyone, AFN (American Forces Network) isn’t the most entertaining television on the planet.
September 2011.
Yes, I’ve got stacks on top of stacks on top of the full shelves. We’ve looked for larger storage solutions, but found limited options over here. Surprisingly, not a lot of people have this size of a movie collection! Ha. The best part? That’s not even all of the collection. See those black squares under the television?
Oh, those are also stuffed with movies. One has all the gaming accessories, three are overflowing with television series. I tried to count the movies a couple times. I always forget the numbers, but they are clearly way up there. We keep them alphabetized as much as possible, which helps when we’re looking for just the right movie. Jeff wants to get them all listed on the computer so we can better keep track of where we need to fill in blank spaces (like trilogies) and what we have doubles of (like Boondock Saints). We started to make a wishlist on Amazon and gave up because every thirty minutes or so Jeff would yell out “Oh hey, what about ________?!” or “I love _____, we need to buy that one”, or any other similar comment. It was time consuming, even for a list lover like me. Especially since we each buy movies pretty frequently these days.
This post was prompted by me happily placing the last book just so on our organized and neat bookshelves in the office. The desk was clear, the closet doors could close, the clutter was contained, and my side of the bookshelf was in alphabetical order (I tried to organize Jeff’s books once, he went back and changed everything, so I gave up forever). My bubble of organization bliss was popped when I remembered the box of books in the car. 20-30 books that somehow need to be crammed onto the bookshelves that are pretty full even after I crammed all my old textbooks into a plastic container in the closet.
And we may or may not have just ordered some new books on Amazon recently… I shudder a little to think of how full this apartment is going to be when we move in 2014.
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