THINGS I CAN'T EVEN GIVE AWAY= OBSOLESCENCE

There are people who have a knack of staying ahead of the curve and who sell things while they still retain some monetary value. Alas, I'm not among them. For too long I kept (and still have, I believe, some) film cameras. What prevented me from realizing that I hadn't used them after I bought my first digital camera well over ten years ago? After finally giving away hundreds of dollars worth of good lenses thinking I would not be able to use them, along came a line of digital cameras that act like SLRs that can adapt lenses to them. All the rest of the equipment that filled many drawers sits there...polarizing lenses, slide mounting accessories, slide projectors, stuff to make things big, small, crop...all that was also made obsolete by Adobe PhotoShop.

VHS tapes are just as useless. Those that I was going to see 'someday' are now like yesterday's newspapers. Those that I took with my own video cameras, I have turned into DVD and have gained an enormous amount of space in the process.

Even more difficult to give away are audio tapes. When we were thrilled to have them in our cars, we had hundreds of tapes. We then bought CD players that connected to tape player so we could play CDs as we rode. One of the significant reasons for buying my last car was that it had a CD player. Now I have hundreds of audio tapes I must plow through then convert important family ones and others which I recorded myself, to CD.

The above doesn't touch that there are electronic devices to accompany many of this obsolete media. We haven't counted reel-to-reel tape, LPs, and I even go back to wire recorders but not Edison's cylinder recorders. They came out in 1877, I just missed that! Whew!