Sally is working today, and I’m left to my own devices until 2:00, when I’m going to meet on old friend. So, until then, I’m hanging out in downtown Frederick (where I’m meeting said friend) and finding myself feeling ridiculously nostalgic for my teen years – which is rather amusing given how eager I was to flee this town upon graduation from high school.

Reminiscing about my youth, however, is not what I really wanted to do before opening up my laptop. Maybe I’ll do some of that once I’ve finished with some other ruminations currently bouncing around in my head:

• I’ve started selling off pieces from my baseball card collection again. It’s now been eight years since I left the hobby, and that amount of time has made deciding what to keep and what to sell remarkably painless. Unfortunately, this process will likely take years. The easiest thing to do would be to simply select what I want to keep, and then accept the offer from the dealer who would give me the most money for the remainder. However, I just can’t bring myself to do that, knowing how much the collection’s actual value and what the likely range of offers would be. I figure that will be a point in the future where selling it piecemeal just isn’t worth the effort to me anymore. Until then, the money is going to shore up the back account (a necessity following the purchase of a new water heater back in March and some other looming, necessary home maintenance) and towards the purchasing of some of the newer Lego sets that have caught my eye.
• In addition to the baseball cards, I’m also eventually going to post some other items of value to eBay – in particular Lego sets I no longer want or need. The fact is that my Lego collection now takes up a frightening amount of space. If I want to keep buying interesting new sets, I’m going to need to start making the space for them
• Sally and I spent this past Sunday-Tuesday in Staunton. Originally, our trip there included seeing Nickel Creek in concert in Charlottesville on Monday night, but a few days before the weekend started, Nickel Creek announced that a postponement due to illness. In place of the concert, we instead saw Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in a downtown movie theater. I didn’t do this simply to make Sally happy – she had been looking forward to its release since first hearing that it was in production – I genuinely wanted to see it as well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The number of attempts by misogynistic Bible-thumpers over the past five years speaks volumes about how bugfuck insane, closed-minded, and authoritarian they are. (I didn’t actually need to see the movie to know this, but Sally says the movie was a faithful adaptation of the book, and that’s all the additional information I needed.)
• While in Staunton, an individual approached me with questions about the decorated denim jacket I chose to wear that day and then proceed to ask if I was interested in selling it. I immediately and emphatically stated that I wasn’t interested in doing so, and then left it at that. In retrospect, it might have been interesting to have stated what I would’ve felt was a fair price. The actual cost of one of my jackets, once all pins and patches are purchased and applied, is around $300-$325. Add what seems to be a fair markup for my time and effort acquiring those materials and then properly putting it all together, it seems to me that $450 would have been a fair starting point for negotiation. (Though, there wouldn’t be much wiggle room below that price.)
• One of the long-term, seemingly never-ending, projects in our home is getting the entirety of our music collection imported onto the Apple Mini that is wired into our home entertainment system and creating a large variety of playlists to suit either or both of our various musical moods. One of the more recent playlist creations, and a current favorite, is one I titled “This Dance Mix Is a Little Bit Off.” The list is so-named because the majority of the music contains some element of darkness (musically and/or lyrically.) As a result, there’s a lot of Depeche Mode and ‘80s New Wave and alternative. In addition, there are “Weird” Al parodies of songs you might hear on a dance floor – such as “Word Crimes,” his take on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” – and other interesting little tidbits like Cookie Monster’s “Me Lost Me Cookie at the Disco” and the disco cover mashup of music from the original Star Wars. I make no apologies for anything in it.

It’s actually getting rather close to 2:00 now. If there is any musings about my nostalgia regarding late ‘80s Frederick, it’s going to have to be in a future post.