Transporting my whole movie collection

Just a short one today, probably my last in the country. And you get no picture. Sorry.

So when you're considering how much space you have to bring things with you in a move to, say, Australia, and you're a movie buff, one of the first things that occurs to you is that you can probably only afford to take a dozen of your favorite movies at most. You'll probably have a half-dozen must-haves, then the rest would be movies you love but haven't seen recently. Anything you have seen recently probably stays behind.

Uh uh.

The other choice is that you leave the cases behind, and throw all the DVDs and BluRays themselves into one of those Case Logic folders you once used to carry around your CDs.

As luck would have it, I had one of those folders. And, as even greater luck would have it, I had a package of fresh new sleeves to replace the broken ones that had been in there from the time it actually carried those CDs. I don't even remember getting those replacement sleeves.

So last night, in front of the Red Sox-Yankees game (probably the last baseball game I'll see on regular TV for awhile), I sat in my mostly bare living room and systematically loaded that baby up.

Even funnier was that I had a steak knife next to me to open a good 20-30 packages I had never even opened before. A DVD/BluRay is meant to be opened, and now, finally, all mine have seen the light of day.

I was getting brash. I took multiple copies of Raising Arizona, just to be sure. I took both the DVD and the BluRay of Donnie Darko, because I think the BluRay is the director's cut only. I was even taking marginal movies with me. That's how compact the thing is.

One small way Australia will feel more like home, sooner.