Day 20, More closet work

Friday, 12/21/2018

A drizzly morning so instead of the long walk I like to take on a Friday I drove to the Y and ran a half hour on the treadmill. Back home I revisited the problem of disposing of the “better” selection of Marian’s clothes — the four bags and several hanging items that Jean thought were too good for her church’s thrift shop, and should be consigned, with the receipts perhaps going to Stanford Women’s Basketball. This was a brilliant idea of hers.

However, I emailed two basketball friends who I thought might know about consignment shops, and they replied that they didn’t. So I started researching them. Actually Yelp lists second-hand and consignment clothing shops. A couple in Menlo Park, a couple in Los Altos.

From the sites for these stores I got a better idea of the kind and quality of clothes they want and how they operate. It wasn’t looking very promising, frankly. So I unpacked the four bags and did another division of sheep from goats, that is, setting aside only items with fine fabric (cashmere, silk) or brand names that I recognized as not being run-of-the-mill store or catalog brands. About half made the cut and went back to the closet: leather coats, silk or cashmere tops, a couple of other obviously fine items.

On Santa Cruz ave. in Menlo Park is the American Cancer Society “Discovery store” where donated clothes are sold to benefit cancer research. I took the two big bags of lesser items there. Then I checked out the two shops in Los Altos. The lady at one said she was overstocked, she might look at my things in January. The lady at the other was quite negative: people look for high-end designer brands (the only one of those that Marian had was a little blouse from DKNY); leather and faux-leather jackets don’t sell well; silk and cashmere tops are pretty slow. Welp, that just about eliminates my inventory.

Probably in January, unless another idea surfaces, I’ll take the remaining items to the ACS shop.

In the evening I finished playing The Return of the King and spent some time going through the bonus material on the third disc of this “extended edition”. As to the film, I was most impressed by the way Peter Jackson and crew created battle scenes. The seamless mix of live and CGI and model work to produce the chaos of a fantasy battle is amazing. I still don’t forgive him for discarding the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire”. He addresses this directly in one of the bonus talks: to him, the story was all about Frodo. He just didn’t see the wonderful possibilities for irony and humor in this closing chapter, or the importance of finishing the arcs of Merry and Pippin. It could all have been done in three minutes of film.