The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want for good stuff to listen to. There are sermons online (does anyone else like to listen to sermons in their free time?), Librivox for free audio books in the public domain, conference CDs, audio books from the library…
But! I discovered a new source and I am delighting in it! I just drove three hours to pick up my friend at the airport and realized at the last minute that I didn’t have an audio book available. In with my bills to pay was a handbill for Library2Go (an Oregon system) from our library’s circulation desk. Library2Go uses the services of OverDrive. I include this link because you may be able to find your library within the system. Click on Find Free Downloads button and search for your library by country or by state.
Without leaving your home, you can download professionally read audio books for a ten-day checkout period. If a book isn’t available at the moment, you can place a hold on that book, and receive an email when it is available.
I downloaded The Small House at Allington
It’s a wonderful opportunity that is probably available to most of you.
I have a deep-cleaning question for you.
What do you intend to do with obsolete media?
I’m speaking, of course, of VHS videos and cassette tapes. I (uh) am (er) thinking of (clearing throat) pitching, as in throwing away, all the boxes of tapes I have. (gasp) A shelf in our closet is occupied with boxes of cassettes: sermons, conferences, homeschooling. Stuff we listened to once or twice, appreciated it, but doubt we will go back to again. The medium does make a difference. All the minimum, we will cull our collection. Perhaps offer it tapes for free at a garage sale.
What about you? What will you do?
A Living Pencil 
We recently purged our video collection. All Blue’s Clues, Bob the Builder, and Elmo went to my younger sister who still has a child in the correct age-range. We kept a small box of videos that we haven’t been able to afford to replace on DVD yet. The rest were donated to the library – they still offer videos for check-out, but I don’t know for how long!Carrie
Carol, would you consider donating appropriate videos to our school? If you have titles that could be used in a class (i.e., a historical movie or one that reinforces a book, etc.), we would be more than happy to accept them! Videos, as opposed to DVDs, are much easier to use in the classroom. If you have the titles of some, please e-mail me. I think you have my addy, if not leave a comment and I’ll re-check later. Thanks!Janie
Hello Carol, We are moving in a few days and that’s always a good time to let things go. Like you, I’m having trouble getting rid of videos. They are all family-friendly films that we could never find in any video/DVD store here. We had about 20 our favorite VHS tapes made into DVDs, but there are still many others left. I told my husband, “Until our VCR dies, I’m going to hang onto most of them.” The cassettes (I cringe at the thought) are in the garbage at this moment. My consolation is that we did get a lot of good use out of them.In response to your other posts I am someone who loves listening to sermons on my iPod. I have a favorite pastor I listen to, but also Kay Arthur’s daily radio show and a young seminary student who talks about apologetics. Of course, I listen to some more lighthearted podcasts as well. When I have a lot of housework to do I load up my iPod and actually get excited about all the good things I can listen to while working!
Oops! I forgot to mention that Small House at Allington was my first contact with Anthony Trollope. I remember it with the fondness of a first kiss. =)
I still contemplating the twenty CDs used for Small House. And how long it took to burn those?At any rate, I am still holding onto my VHSs.Pack Rat in GA, DanaPS But I like Janie’s idea about donating them to a Christian school, IF there is a librarian/media specialist to catalog….
SIgh. It’s lovely to read your comments…Janie, we have very, very few VHS videos, and the only one that is suitable for you is one I don’t want to give up – Branaugh’s Henry V. We’ve not been ones to buy many videos and DVDs. What I have are cassettes. Of course, I don’t want to throw them out, but I’m trying to be practical and wondering what we should do. I asked Curt his opinion, but haven’t gotten an answer yet. We have a series (50+ cassettes) on Calvinism, but the recording quality is bad and the teacher’s voice sounds like Donald Duck.I remember my father had this same problem. Above my bed (in a closet/bedroom) was a shelf full of reel-to-reel tapes. Hope, happy moving…I guess! Is moving ever happy? I’m coming in for a landing with Small House and thoroughly enjoying it. I don’t think I’ll be able to hold off reading the Last Chronicle of Barset when this is finished. The bummer about listening is hearing the most excellent snippets, promising myself I’ll look it up in the book and highlight it, and then forgetting to do so.Dana – My computer is in my kitchen and I just burned them, three or four at a time, in between other chores. My son has been listening to books, and his MP3 player is NOT ipod, so he just loads them right onto his device. So you are a packrat, eh? I am, 90% of the time. When the spirit moves me to clean (read, throw out stuff), I comply!!
i too love downloading sermons to listen to, especially the ones from my English daughter’s first church there (the one in London where she met her dashing young medical student) All Souls. They have a huge selection of them on their website,and the fact they have those lovely accents just adds to the experience. Oh–i still have VHS tapes myself–i can’t quite part with all the stuff like “Beauty and the Beast” and such…unfortunately, that means they may end up in my attic (when we’ve remoded to the point to have one again!) And if you have something like a second hand store around to donate to, or a Rasputin’s kind of store that takes used cds and dvds and some vhs, you can get a few pennies toward something else…