One of the (many) good influences that P. has had on me was becoming more and more keenly aware of just how much “stuff” is in my life and how it starts to become almost oppressive over time. There’s a certain amount of mental overhead associated with every single thing you own.

I don’t think I’ll ever become one of those minimalists who take pride in owning as little as possible. Their faux-ascetic lifestyle is not for me. But yeah, I can see the point.

I’ve been taking a first few steps toward ridding myself of stuff over the past few months. Clothes, dishes, appliances, books, etc etc. I’ve become a semi-expert on how to get rid of stuff in Orange County. I know the hours of all the recycling centers in the area. I know where the salvage sheds are where you can drop off functional items that you don’t need anymore. I know which thrift stores will take what. The Habitat ReStore number is on my phone. I know where you can drop off scrap metal, scrap wood, scrap electronics. I know the proper places to dispose of household hazardous waste like old cleaning supplies, paint, pesticides.

There was one thing I was having trouble with. Music CDs. Say hello to 294 Gigabytes of “stuff”.

Yes, that’s seven full bins of CDs. I get a lot of CDs sent to my by record labels due to my Taproot Radio show and podcast. At first it was such a joy. Every single one was precious. But as they started piling up, the mental weight started piling up as well. After a while I started to slowly realize, that at some point I would run out of space for them all and I’d _have_ to start getting rid of them. But that moment came inconveniently too late.

What to do? What’s the proper way to get these out of my house? You would think used book stores would take them, even for free. But they won’t. They’ll pick through a stack you take them and maybe take one or two. If you insist they might give you a couple of bucks for them. But at the end, you are going to leave with almost as many as you walked in with. Hardly worth the effort.

For a while, I’d make anonymous donations of stacks of CDs to various libraries in the area. That worked, sorta. Well they were out of my life, but I felt like I’d dumped a bunch of CDs on to someone who didn’t want them. Guilt Guilt Guilt ove making them someone else’s problem.

I could just take them to the dump and take them to he household waste bins and dump them en masse. But not only do I want to get them out of my life, I want to Do The Right Thing.

A quick internet search did yield too much information. There were a few pages suggesting that CDs could be recycled or at least destroyed in an appropriate way. But they didn’t talk about anything specific I could do locally. Emails to the Orange County Recycling center went unanswered.

BUT, I asked the guy working the household hazardous waste center one weekend morning when I was dropping off 10 cans of old used paint. I’d gotten to the point where I was asking anyone who would listen.

Turns out, he knew what to do. Orange county residents can take CDs, doesn’t matter if they are data CDs or music CDs, to the Orange County recycling center and put them in the electroncs recycling bins and they will, in his words, “recycle the discs and as much of the packaging as they can.”  SCORE!

Now I finally have a method, to get CDs out of the house. I’m slowly ripping them all to iTunes. My best guess is that I am going to just about fill my 300Gb USB drive.

It’s not completely getting rid of stuff. But a single external hard drive takes up a hell of a lot less space than 7 bins of CDs. (And counting.) Now I just have to make sure I’m ripping the CDs and taking them to the recycling center at a faster rate than they are arriving in the mailbox.

Kinda like bailing water.