OK, really more like purging for fun and cutting my losses.  🙂

I used to go to a really neat comic book shop in Culver City.  It was not your normal shop, where you have to look very hard to actually find the comics; it was a shop where the first thing you saw when you entered was a shelf of Archies and all-ages books, but it was also a shop where they ordered 50 copies of each new DC Archive because their clientele tended to be Serious Fans who didn’t mind spending $49.95 on hardcover comic book reprints.

It was the sort of shop that, when I went in on one of my first visits and asked if they had any back issues of Green Lantern, the owner smiled at me, handed me an issue #1 from 1960 and asked if that was far enough back – not in a smug way, but I think honestly just to see my face as I went through the stages of “what the hell am I holding, and dear god let me not drop it.”

My wife and I became regulars, and that was a bit of a problem because they were all too happy to drop a free copy of Previews in our bag and take the filled-out order forms from us on our next visit.

This was also right around the time when DC launched their DC direct line and there were all kinds of really neat toys being solicited.

Yeah, I think we can all see where this went.  By the time we moved out of Los Angeles, we had boxes and boxes of really neat toys.

We had also become quite hooked on collecting old videogames and video game systems from the 1980s, so we had boxes and boxes of Atari and Coleco and NES games.

Almost 4 years ago, I put on my to-do list: “Go through storage.  eBay toys and classic games.”

I managed to knock a big one of those off the list a couple summers ago – the classic video games.

That was, in retrospect, easy, mostly because I didn’t have to split them up and sell them individually.  I did one auction of something like 400 Atari 2600 cartridges, another one of 90 or so NES carts… so on and so forth, and when it was all over I shipped off some VERY heavy boxes and had a nice balance in the PayPal account.

The proceeds from those auctions, and a bunch of frequent flyer miles, were how I financed my 2007 Japan trip, by the way.  It was a LOT of old games.

But I still had boxes and boxes of toys – above and beyond the ones that we wanted to keep to display – to go through, and it’s harder to sell toys in big lots.  People tend to want specific characters, after all.

Right now, though, I have a couple of weeks between school terms, and while I’m still working full time, I don’t have any homework – I had the opportunity to finally get down to it.

Just setting up the auctions took four evenings – first, sorting through and deciding what was actually going to get sold and what was just going straight to Goodwill, then taking photos, writing descriptions, researching shipping, and on and on.

Tonight, though, I finally posted them, and – in a week – I will finally get to check that to-do item off my list, and hopefully I’ll have made back a small fraction of the original purchase prices.  🙂