vhs vs dvd

Shortly after we married we stopped going anywhere besides work and Church. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of it, since my job kept me flying in and out almost weekly, but when we were home at the same time almost all of it was spent viewing television, either from the home projection system in the great room or the table model in the bedroom. And we were constantly recording something, from old Three Stooges comedy movies and loony tunes shorts to opening and closing Olympics ceremonies and extensive coverage of what turned out not to be the Y2K end of the world. When we got a free weekend for HBO or Showtime or Cinemax, we kept both recorders going nonstop. When we moved from the beach house to the country, we packed the tapes into three duffle bags and schlepped them down the four flights of stairs and then upon arrival at the new house arranged a cement block-and-board bookcase for them. Each time something went on tape, I faithfully typed the addition into the alphabetically arranged library list, showing the subject/title and author/star along with any other relevant info. As the collection grew, I started numbering the boxes. But soon even that wasn’t sufficient to quickly find whatever it was Jim wanted to watch, and so began to log not only the number of the box but also the color. Eventually I put the whole shebang on the computer so he could open the file and find stuff when I was out of town. By the time we moved from NC to Texas our obsession had garnered six hundred plus VHS tapes. There were over a hundred red (2 hours 40 minutes playing time, which we used for Kevin Costner epics), yellow (2 hr 10 minutes for the majority of telecast movies), and gray, black, white, and blue (2 hours each) for all the rest. I don’t even remember how many copier paper boxes we filled with tapes but it seemed the stream would never end as we packed the Ryder truck.

Once we got to Allen, Texas, and the rental house, I carefully stacked the boxes in the spare bedroom, close to the door, so they were easily accessible to Jim, who had decided he didn’t want to work for a while and was staying at home, and he insisted he must be able to find things quickly when I wasn’t there to do it for him. Six months later, at the end of our lease, we packed up and moved again, to our current home. This time we built a brick-and-six-foot-wide-six-board-high shelving system in the office. I just about crippled myself moving all those boxes up the stairs, but once it was done I was quite proud of the effect. The tapes were arranged by color, with the numbers facing outward, again, so Jim could find whatever he wanted with a minimum amount of effort. And since the shelf was located adjacent to the computer desk, and the library listing had a shortcut on the desktop, it was one-stop shopping.

Fast forward twelve years. I’m tired of hearing him gripe about how none of those old tapes will play on either of the current players. I’m sick of looking at (and dusting) the shelves. And, I’ve become firmly convinced that the DVD format is head and shoulders above tapes, anyway, not to mention they’re way lighter and take up half as much space. And so, three weeks ago I asked him to spend a bit of his midnight hours going through the tapes, and if there was something he really really really absolutely positively no doubt in his mind could not live without to put it into a storage box I had conveniently placed on the office floor, reason being because I intended to trash anything that was still here after he left on this latest deployment.

Are you surprised that he said he didn’t find anything worth saving? Well, I wasn’t. Sooooo, I went through them all, discarding with gleeful abandon, then toted that barge and lifted that bale and after six hours there were only fifty tapes remaining upstairs. (You couldn’t walk through the garage, the floor was so full of trash bags, but the upstairs looked fantastic!) And then, on Friday, early in the morning, I wheeled the city-supplied trash bin (which was by then full to overflowing and almost too heavy to move by myself without getting a hernia) to the street, and made eight trips to pile up all the garbage bags, waiting for the green monster to pick up and haul away. By noon it was all gone and the trash bin was back in its place just outside the garage door. Sooner or later I’ll get around to making a new list of what was retained, but because I know from experience that you never need something until after you throw it away, I didn’t delete the old list. For comparison purposes only, doncha know.

P.S. He asked two days later if I’d kept Stephen King’s “The Stand.” Well, no, honey, darn my hide, but that was one he’d tried to watch about a year ago and discovered a whole hour was missing from the middle of the series when evidently the cable went out, as it was so wont to do in coastal Carolina with our way less than satisfactory cable provider. Guess I’ll just have to search Amazon dot com for a DVD of it. But it won’t be any time soon, I guarantee.