Happy Birthday to me... I get to downsize!

With my thirty third birthday coming up, my wonderful and sweet Justin decided to get me the most wonderful gift.  It's even in keeping with my desire to downsize our possessions funny enough.  :)  A Kindle.  We had discussed possibly getting Kindles for ourselves for some time and after Christmas, Justin took his Christmas gift money and purchased his own Kindle with 3G.  After checking it out, I admitted I would kind of like to get one, though without the 3G as I really don't need to purchase and download books while out of WiFi range.  I had even more or less decided to purchase my own after tax returns came in.  Anyhow, my honey went ahead and bought me my very own about a week ago.  Yay!  Now comes the fun of slowly replacing our "must have" books with Kindle/ebook editions and selling off or possibly donating our paperbacks and hardbacks.  Each Kindle can hold up to 3500 books, a huge space savings for us in our rather cluttered 1000 sq foot home (give or take).  We had already gone through and brutally cut back our collection, giving away about about a hundred titles, mostly paperback fiction, to our library's book swap cart, and donating a few of my old college texts to the library in the hopes of helping future students out in their research.  Now, as spring approaches, my daughter starts walking about the house, and our limited space begins to feel all that much more limited, I think a further purge will be coming.  Some titles may just be put back in boxes for the moment, books more sentimental to us... but more than a few can be passed on to new homes I think.

With the book purge, I want to further our DVD purging as well.  Since we subscribed to Netflix and can now stream the majority of movies we want to watch, our DVD collection has become more dust collector than entertainment.  Again, there are the few movies, my Harry Potter collection comes to mind, that I would prefer to keep a physical copy of, but many, if not most, could be sold off to free both shelf and floor space (getting rid of the extra shelving would be a wonderful bonus!).

So happy birthday to me, I get to clear out space in my crowded house and give myself and my family some much needed breathing room.