Clearing Out Junk, Maybe Making Some Money
I’ve been helping my parents clean out their house the last few days. My dad is going to retire in a few months (allegedly) and they want to move closer to my sister when that happens. With my plans of moving to the Northeast within the next five years, the timing kinda works out.
Anyway, their attic is what needed it the most. A lot of it belongs to me and my sister. I found a lot of stuff I didn’t know what to do with. Small things I didn’t want anymore, and probably not something the average Goodwill-er will want either. Stuff like a DVI to HDMI adapter, a broken PS2, or one of those picture frame hangers that’s a big plastic-coated wire. Useful stuff to the right person, but that person probably isn’t going to our local Goodwill. And they’re too cheap and small to bother selling on eBay or a yard sale. I really don’t know what to do with some of this stuff.
Others I want to keep but know there is absolutely no reason to do so. I found a bunch of old VHS tapes from when I was a kid. They’re all kids shows, like Rugrats and the “There Goes a…” series that looked at a bunch of vehicles. I don’t know why I was into that crap as a kid. I don’t really want any of that now, but I kinda do. I still have a working VCR, so I could watch them, but I really don’t. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of this stuff! I’ve seen a million VHS tapes rot away at Goodwill for ages before they’re just thrown out. I don’t want that to happen to my beloved childhood. But, I mean, who cares?
I also kept all the empty boxes from my most recent PC build, three years ago. I thought I might need them in case some part doesn’t work, or I might need the random extra components that come with them. But I haven’t needed any of that, so at least those boxes were an easy throw away. There were some old picture frames with some cool Street Sharks art I found online, and some other art, too. I think its from Jet Set Radio, but I can’t say for sure. That I also got rid of, I’m sorry.
All of this really puts into perspective how much junk I’ve held on to for no real reason. I guess having the opportunity to treat my parent’s attic as my own free storage unit put me in a frame of mind where I never felt like I had to throw stuff away. That’s changed now. They’re downsizing their house when they move, and I don’t need any of this crap anyway. I didn’t find a single thing over there that I stopped and thought “wow, I can use this.”
When I got back home, I decided to clear out some of the junk over here. I have these model tanks and other vehicles I got as a teenager that have been sitting in a drawer for over a decade now. That’s actually worth a little something, so that’s going on eBay. So are these 200+ Yu-gi-oh cards. None of them are super valuable, but I think I can get something out of them. There’s some neat stuff in there, like that one set of three cards you got from Yu-gi-oh War of the Roses on PS2. I remember going to Toys R Us for Christmas and picking that game out and getting the cards. And then I later worked at that Toys R Us and it sucked, but whatever.
Most recently I bought a new AMD graphics card. I was using an NVIDA one but when I switched to Linux, I just couldn’t get it to cooperate. The new card works much better, though it’s not actually new. I took a gamble and bought a secondhand card on eBay, an RX 6600 from 2021. New than the RTX 2060 I had before, but I held on to it just in case. Well, I’m pretty sure this AMD card is good, so that’s going up for sale too. It feels good to clear out some crap from the house and get some money for it in the process. It creates the allusion that I’m making money, when in reality I’m selling most of this stuff for less than it was originally worth. And all the room I cleared out will immediately be filled up with new crap! But it’s new, and that’s exciting!
