With my usage of two monitors for manga comics lettering and retouch work, I found myself with very little space to move around in my room. That's when I decided to do some general cleaning while my nephew Enzo was in the hospital. It was my only chance since I had the house all to myself and I needed the sala space to store the junk before I move it to the trash.

I admit I'm sort of a pack rat so I keep (read: "collect") a lot of stuff. I had this inkling that I had accumulated too much junk through the years. I decided to just classify them into "stuff to go" and "stuff to keep". I had to let go of a whole stack of old PC, gaming, fitness and photography magazines. The photography magazines were the toughest to let go since a lot of them belonged to my Dad. But I really had to discard them, like most of the stuff I let go they were obsolete, unusable, deteriorating and just plainly took up a lot of space. Other than those I also discarded a decade old PC monitor, 2 PC casings, various add-on cards, speakers, earphones, microphones, car pillows (a whole trash bagful!), 2 USB PCI cards, old martial arts equipment, striking mitts, speed punch gloves, computer peripherals, PC and electronics boxes, broken DVD players, old belt and gym bags, Baguio sturdy woven hiking bags (which I haven't used in more than a decade, they were the kind that you can sit on when in line for subjects at UP), lots of foam padding, styrofoam, plastics, art and crafts resources, paints, varnishes, thinners and various other disposables. When I finished removing the "stuff to go" and temporarily placing them in the sala, I realized that the volume of discardables was about half the size of my room floor space. O_o;;

I disposed of the discardables via my mom's garage sale, I pegged the prices very, very low (PhP10 - PhP50 only) so that I could get rid of them fast. The whole bulk was bought by Mr. Jojo even before everything was displayed outside. Easy sale. Now I have plenty of room for new junk. Hehehe. I didn't get rid of any of my (now few) musical instruments, cameras and usable computer parts. I love my cameras, even if they are old film cams. Two old things I didn't part with and decided to resurrect were an old Franklin eBookman EBM-911 and Fujifilm Instax 200.

The Franklin eBookman isn't really much of a PDA, it's really more of an ebook reader. It was given to me years ago by my sister who got it from her former officemate Armand. She got a Palm Pilot from her sister-in-law (and my kumare) Kay so she had no use for the eBookman. I gladly accepted it. I stopped using it when I was able to install software that allowed me to read books on my celfone. I bought AA batteries, restored the MMC, plugged it in to the PC and revived it. Now it houses about 60 titles in its 32Mb MMC. It plays converted MP3s so I can use it as a music player too, but I don't know if it can recognize MMCs larger than 64Mb since it's old tech. Oh well, next risky project for me would be figuring out how to make it recognize a larger capacit MMC. :D

When it comes to text readers, I always start off with Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. I quickly follow those up with Sir Richard R. Burton's Vikram and The Vampire, Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur and Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology. Yup, all gothica, medieval and mythology, it's my "hello world" for eBooks. I found the public domain eBook texts and more titles on Project Gutenberg but decided on Franklin Free Library and Manybooks.net downloads since they're more readable and specific for the Franklin Reader and MobiPocket software that came with the eBookman.

The Fujifilm Instax 200 I bought many years ago on a whim at the dawning of digicams. It's an instant camera similar to Polaroid models, nice, quick and handy if you want to see printed pics in less than a minute. Only drawback is that the film costs too much. A 10-exposure film cartridge costs PhP300+. That explains why I only use it once a year. But I love it just the same.