Downsizing

The other thing I did today was to move more of my nautical hardware to the tent.  So my office is clean and with a few small exceptions, nearly perfectly in order.  My plan is to start selling all my surplus sailing gear and free up more space in the tent for working on projects.  I've already sold some automotive parts and plan to put at least one item on eBay every day.  Today I listed two items.  A fuel pump and and laptop sleeve.  I need to downsize and get rid of everything I can.

Books, CDs, and DVD's take up space.  I've been converting everything to digital form.  It came in handy we watched a movie on my laptop when power was out and later when power was restored but there was no cable or broadband, I had my home network up and watched three movies located on my desktop system but routed to my Apple TV hooked up to my TV upstairs.

I have been organizing my eBooks, but having some difficulty with that.  I have a duplicate library I just discovered, so I need to eliminate duplicates.  I have also had some issues with cover art, and author names.  These are tedious and something I can work on bit by bit so that when I take off sailing I will have a decent library of books to read, along with a huge library of movies, many of which I've never seen.

I have always been one to hoard paper.  I had a huge file system about 10 years ago with 9 file drawers.  Realizing that I never looked at much of this stuff, I threw out a two drawer file cabinet and got myself down to 7 file drawers.  That was still too much.  I threw out another two drawer cabinet and got myself down to 5.  Still to much.  I did it again and got down to 3 file drawers and I managed to hold it to about that until the last few years when things ballooned again.  Last month I purged my files again and today I have about 3.5 file drawers.  I'd like to scan some of these documents and store them on-line and on a memory stick and get down to 2 file drawers--which is about as small as I can reduce to.  In any event, I'm very happy tha.

I've been doing similar things with books.  Many paperbacks I have tossed out.  Some I save to re-read once and then toss.  Others I have discovered are worth a lot.  I have one series of books that I found is worth about $400--so these will get sold soon.  Everything else I'm selling except for some books I can't part with like my Patrick O'Brien series, and some computer reference books.  My goal is to have no more than one bookcase of books.

I tried setting up an account on Amazon.com and it was such a headache that I gave up.  I will sell everything on eBay.


While getting rid of things is nice.  I still need to store some things.  For example: I want to store my mainsail.  The best place for that is on ECHO.  But I'd rather not at the moment.  As much as I'd like to go sailing on ECHO, that involves putting the sail back on, which is an exhausting job, and then taking it off again for the winter.  I also plan to haul out ECHO soon, so I have to have the sail off the boat in any case.  Better to tie it up in a small bundle and store it.

My realization is I need a trailer just for dry storage of normal boat gear and also as a mobile work bench.  My Silverado, named Bruiser, can haul a large trailer.  My Volvo, Sea Dog, can haul at most 3000 lbs.  I have the mainsail in the bed of Bruiser, but not for too long.  I need to bring the Genoa home next.  For the near term, I have plenty of tarps.  I'll make a clean place to store these sails in the tent and keep them covered and clean.  That means reorganizing the tent to store two rather big sails.  See how it is two steps back and then three steps forward if I want to make forward progress?  It can be painfully slow for a boat this big.

I really don't want to buy a trailer right now, but it is something to think about.  I also lost my parking brake on the Volvo and in the process noticed my clutch is slipping.  Another two steps backwards.