media move & chd

Today was Housecleaning Day. We got a fair amount done. Not enough, but one of the things achieved was the Culling of Books.

We kept the signed stuff (of which we have a surprising number, at this point). We kept the hardbacks. We kept a very small handful of beloved series. The rest I SCANNED INTO A DATABASE USING BARCODES AND MY PHONE.

Bahahahahahaha! I’m sorry, but that is JUST SO AWESOME. I kept scanning barcodes and bemoaning my youth, when I had so often wished for just such a thing while trying to corral my book collection into a database, and NOW I HAVE IT. And now we have a list of all the books we didn’t feel the need to keep in paper copy but may someday wish to replace in e-copy. Well, all the books here, anyway. There are hundreds in Alaska, where we will soon be going and plan to spend an exciting day, you guessed it, scanning them into a database using barcodes and my phone. :)

Seriously, we’re down to 3 shelves of fiction in this house (um, not counting the dozens and dozens of books by this “CE Murphy” woman, who really takes up a lot of shelf space around here), and I can’t say I’m crying bitter tears over it. I have moved too many times. My emotional attachment to physical entertainment media has disappeared. All I want for Christmas is a Brennan JB7, which will allow us to get rid of the CDs. Ted’s already got two media drives for our movies and we have 70% of them ripped. With any kind of luck, by early 2012 we will have only TV on DVD (because it’s too much bother to rip), a handful of DVDs with extras worth re-watching, and what few CDs have sentimental value, which may add up to “my Jim Byrnes CDs, even if none of them are signed”. And if I can find a good Europe-based platform from which to purchase direct download music & film I won’t bother buying physical media at all anymore, which has thus far been our method to get new stuff.

…in completely unrelated news, my hair, which has gotten quite long, is driving me kind of bonkers. I’d talked myself into getting a body wave perm (because my hair, besides being long, is also extremely straight, and left to its own devices has no body worth mentioning. There’s a *lot* of it, but it’s deceptively straight (hairdressers tend to say, “Er, wow, you actually have quite a lot of hair, don’t you?”).) so I went into Peter Mark, one of the salons here, and said I wanted to make an appointment. They said “Have you ever had a perm here before?” “Nope,” said I. “Then we recommend you come in to talk to one of our permanent specialists before booking an appointment,” they said, “because we need to make certain your hair can tolerate the very harsh chemicals we use.” “Uh,” I said, “are they harsher than a regular permanent? I’ve had them before, just not here.” “If you haven’t had one here,” they said, “because of the harshness of the chemicals used we recommend you talk to a specialist.”

“Right,” I said, and went away and didn’t come back, because jeebus. I mean, I’m sure they’re doing a CYA in case someone’s got baby-fine hair that melts if chemicals are waved near it, but that was not a pitch to convince *me* to let them do anything to my hair. So instead I went and got these “self-sticking” hair rollers which are velcro over (apparently) some sort of ceramic which conducts heat evenly, and in theory one can blowdry one’s hair and get waves. I can at least manage to roll them (though they really do sort of need a bobby pin to stay in place, despite the self-sticking bit. Still, they cling to the ends of the hair so it’s easy to roll, anyway), which is more than I can usually do with hair things. And I have this nice caramel color to put on my head tomorrow, and perhaps the nice caramel color and some experimenting with the velcro rollers will make me less aggravated with my hair.

Or maybe I’ll be forced to put the Rogue stripe back. I guess we’ll see.