Happy Veteran’s Day, everybody. 
We’ve spent it eating delish cornmeal strawberry pancakes (the dogs got their Mickey Mouse pancake, per tradition) and singing along with too-loud music (Magnetic Fields, Johnny Cash, and Kristin Hersh, thus far) and painting the front room and some assorted pieces of furniture and reorganizing. Earlier, I finally gave up on the return of VHS* (I was a hold out on cassette tapes too), and tossed all our tapes. A trash bag and a half full of Buster Keaton and weird Houdini movies and many, many fine screwballs and proto-screwballs (all of which, I’m now assured, are on DVD). A technological era has ended. And our DVDs now fit in the glass case that previously held the VHS tapes.
The sad thing about painting the front room (which, to be honest, Christopher is mainly doing — I’m much better at purging and organizing and prepping than the actual physical labor… especially in a room with elaborate trim!)? Is that it makes me want to paint the living room and the kitchen even more.
See: Home ownership, the joys of. (It is joyous when the painting is done though. But the dogs and cat are nervous and exploration-inclined in the meantime and there are stacks of displaced books everywhichwhere.)
Pictures someday soonish. The great e-mail answering project returns tomorrow, but I’ve already got ye olde inbox down from 2,000+ to 78 or so.
*I will be insufferable at being forced to give these up if, in the great zombie apocalypse ahead, all we can find for entertainment are VHS players.
Don’t you mean “makes me want to make Christopher paint the living room and kitchen”
Congratulations on finishing your creative thesis!The finish line is in sight. Looks like it’s been a good month for you on all fronts.
I’m impressed that you ditched the VHS tapes. I haven’t been able to do that yet. I thought that if they survived the Beta-max phase, they would surely survive DVDs.
I help pick the colors!
Thanks, Patti — I’m still not convinced, but C’s wanted to dump them for awhile. He finally got me by pointing out we have yet to watch anything on VHS since we moved in here more than four years ago. Still, what about the potential zombie apocalypse?
I wouldn’t normally try to make this process harder, believe me. I went through it too. But I thought I ought to mention: there are no DVD copies of I Married a Witch available in print at this time, and Amazon Marketplace (my cursory black market sample) doesn’t list any used copies for the US standard region one NTSC disc or the region two PAL. My heart leaped and sank again when I saw your illustration: I’ve been trying to find a copy of this for two years now. On VHS even.
I hate to think of what the rest of your collection might have been. You know you can get money for these on eBay don’t you? At least if they’re not homemade. I know that’s a time-consuming pain in the tuckus, but many towns have eBay consignment shops that do all the hard work for you and let you keep, like, two-thirds of the profits.
I googled them all, I swear. There are several foreign companies that appear to sell I Married a Witch on DVD (why are any of these movies hard to find?!). I will pull out that and the other good ones for you!
Wow. Good work. And here I thought I was on top of this. I don’t know if that’s a crappy pirate offshore PAL knockoff or not (reeks Hong Kong to me), but I also don’t really care. The studio wants us to worry ourselves over licensing, they should damn well keep their popular stuff in print. Come on. How hard are POD movies, if nothing better?
Don’t save this for me, Gwenda. I was worried about your loss. You seem to have that problem covered, and I’ll pony up the twenty-five for Blackbeard’s copy here. I don’t want to undo any of your shelf space gains over the years it’ll take me to actually relieve you of it. And mostly, I want to muster up the guts to get rid of the VHS tapes I’ve got already (like you’ve done). Thanks for the heads up.
Uh, ya know, you can buy a dual DVD/VHS that dubs the latter to the former in a handy, one-button process. ‘Cuz my squeeze has one and is doing just that with all her big plastic bags o’ VHS. I’m just sayin’, you might still be able to catch the garbage truck….
Furthermore, let me add that I’m sure this is all Christopher’s fault.