I had already been trying to winnow down our collection of VHS tapes before my mother-in-law passed away in 2013. After a session of helping his dad clean out their house, Louie came home with four BOXES of VHS tapes! I was pretty stressed about it. He let me throw away some of the older taped-off-televsion tapes we had. The rest of those boxes sat for a long time.
In August 2020, I determined to tackle the videotape issue. I laid them all out on the pool table. We had 170 VHS tapes on August 4th. I waited until Louie was in a receptive mood to go through them. One at a time, I held them up and asked if he wanted to keep it. The rest went into a donation pile or one of the categories listed below. On August 12th, we had 85 tapes left. Here are some that I donated (I didn't orient the photos properly for reading titles - sorry!):
Now, I love October Sky, Braveheart, and others, but we can always borrow the DVDs from the public library if we want to watch them again! If he was willing to let it go, I had to be okay with it, too! I was so glad to learn that Goodwill takes these tapes. Dumping them in the garbage would have bummed me out a bit. But I wasn't interested in trying to sell them myself!
We ended up with 33 that he wanted to keep and ten that I decided to keep. That left me with 42 to deal with. Slowly over the fall, I would see what was on a tape and then either toss it or put it in the "to digitize" pile. By October 24th, I had the 43 "keepers" in a bin and 28 "TBD."
My categories were "Save," "Louie decide," "Jeanne decide," "Watch & decide," and "Digitize." I did throw some tapes into the garbage . . . as much as I dislike landfills, they are a fact of our lives. Within the digitize category, I sorted them by high, medium, and low priority.
Louie's mom loved musicals (me, too!) so we watched "Carousel," which I had never seen before. (It was horrid!) Then we watched "State Fair," which wasn't much better. (I had seen a stage version once, but never the movie.) These are the four we have left to watch and then I'm confident my husband will let me donate them as well:
Last week, he set up a computer for me to digitize the VHS tapes that I want to keep. I did one from when Pepper was a puppy and Nick's twelfth birthday party with all his buddies over. There's one with Morgan as a baby and a few of Alex's birthday parties. I'm eager to make progress on this project! I may or may not have a follow-up blog entry, but it feels good to have gotten this far!
