This past weekend was pretty hectic.

Last week, while surveying my property for damage from the herd of hurricanes that have blown through town for the last month or so, I discovered that my crawl-space and cellar doors were badly in need of replacing, so I played manly handyman all day Saturday and built them from scratch with power-tools, lumber, hammer, and nails.

I got the bruises, scratches and cuts to prove it (not to mention a sweat-soaked t-shirt which has seen its best days pass by).

I spent much of Saturday night and Sunday morning rearranging my office closet. I've been storing my old Star Wars comic books on the shelf in there, but since it's an old house, it's not as airtight and dry as I would like. I've been worried recently that the mold and mildew slow advancing along the closet wall had also made headway into my comic book boxes. After removing them from the closet and checking to make sure they were unharmed (they were), I now have them resting safely atop my bookshelves.

I now have more room in my closet, and Tina has promised to clean the mildew out as soon as she can (I'm alarmingly allergic to dust, mildew, mold, and most housework).

However, my problems are far from over.

Closets are strange and mysterious places. Closets are home to the most bizarre and illogical phenomena known to man. Biologists speak of these processes only in hushed whispers in back halls or lavatories because they don't want to publicly admit what we all know is going on in there.

Inanimate objects mate and reproduce like bunnies, but only, for some reason, in closets. Wire coat hangers increase exponentially, so do little sheets of notebook paper, pencil stubs, magazines, legal pads, family photo albums, comic books, and collectibles.

In this weekend's effort to organize my closet, I discovered the progeny of thirty-two years of collecting crap:

Comic books I don't read

Magazines I've never looked at

Posters

Framed pictures of celebrities

Even some collectible plates (a birthday gift from a long-gone ex-girlfriend) that I've never even taken out of the boxes.

Now, even though my closet has never known such neatness, my office is more cluttered than ever before, and I'm too damn lazy to open the attic. (Besides, isn't the attic just a way of prolonging the inevitable?)

Instead, I've decided to share the detritus of my life with you, my fans and constant readers.

I've put the first lot of my useless crap up for bid on eBay, America's Largest Online Yard Sale, and I've decided to use this forum, my weblog, to shamelessly pimp the aforementioned useless crap.

In honor of the Star Wars Original Trilogy's release on DVD last week, this week I have some choice Star Wars paraphernalia:

Marvel's official adaptation of Star Wars

Three issues of Marvel's original run of Star Wars comics

The aforementioned Star Wars commemorative plate

A similar plate for The Empire Strikes Back

And to complete the set, I have a plate for Return of the Jedi, too

As an added incentive, I also found a couple of copies of a recent GSU Review issue that features one of my stories, "Negative Space". The first three of my regular readers who win one of these auctions will get, at no extra cost, an autographed copy of this jewel of literature. Just email me when you win and let me know you're a regular reader, and if you're one of the first three to contact me, I'll throw the Review in the box before I ship it out.

Enjoyable trinkets and bathroom reading material for you and extra office space for me. Could you ask for anything more?