Mindless Repetition

I woke up fairly late (for me) yesterday, but because I had picked up my comics on Wednesday, I figured I could still sit around doing not much in particular for a while, as all I had to do for the day was gas up the car and go grocery shopping.
So it was around noon by the time I finally took a shower and got dressed to head out into the world, but just as I was getting dressed my mom called. So I talked to her, and then got a very late start on my day.
I stopped to get gas first, and the was going to head over to Super Target to do my grocery shopping. However, while we’d put backing boards into a substantial number of bags on Wednesday night, I’d whiled away the evening on Friday putting comics into them while watching TV, so the pile of available bags had diminished considerably. I decided to rectify that by heading to the comic shop anyway and picking up some more bags and boards.
When I approached the counter with my armful of archiving supplies, the cute-ish girl that works there asked, “Do you need your stuff?”
I said that no, I’d already picked it up on Wednesday. She said, “Duh, I probably rang you up.” I confirmed that, but I don’t think she noticed. Another customer, looking at all the bags and boards, said, “You must have picked up a lot of stuff on Wednesday.” I said, “No, I’ve just been very lazy for a very long time.”
After that it was off to a world of crying babies and children who don’t have the sense to get out of the way of the shopping cart that’s about to run them down, pushed by someone who wouldn’t really feel all that bad about doing so, because, really, it would be a valuable life lesson for them to get knocked down.
After that I came home and set to work on doing some more bagging and boarding.
I have to say, at this point I find myself having a hard time pulling myself away from the bagging and boarding. I guess I have some need to perform a mindless, repetitive task right now, though given how repetitive my life is, you wouldn’t think that would be a need that’s been going unfulfilled.
While putting a stack of comics into bags I found an issue of Adventures of Superman that was missing its back cover, and it was clear that it had been cut off, not torn. As a guess, I would say that I’d cut off the back cover because in those days I didn’t have ready access to a copy machine and the back cover had either a subscription form (it would have been around the time that I’d ordered a subscription to Adventures of Superman, Action Comics, and Superman) or a voting form for the Comic Buyer’s Guide Awards.
(I used to vote for the CBG Awards every year because a. I wanted to let my voice be heard in the hopes that the comics and creators I liked were recognized and b.voting for the CBG Awards got you a free copy of the issue of CBG in which the Award results were printed)
So I took a break from my archiving to go online to buy a replacement copy of that issue. While I was at it, I remembered that I was missing a couple of issues of the Superman titles from the period in which I was collecting them (1986-1995), so I might as well fill the gaps in the collection by ordering those as well.
So I fired up my comic database and printed out lists of the issues I have so that I could identify the gaps. I found that I was only missing two issues of Action. I’d already added the replacement issue of Adventures to my cart at Mile High Comics’ site, so I did a search on Action to order the missing issues. Sadly, they didn’t have either of them in stock, so I cleared my cart – I decided it would make sense to order all three from one source – and went to another site. They only had one of the two issues of Action that I needed. So I tried another site. Same thing. Finally I found a site from which I could order all three, and promptly did so.
Again, while I was at it, I decided that I’d order some of those Drawer Boxes to replace my longboxes. I figured I need about ten of them, which worked out, as they sell them in packages of five.
They actually sell Drawer Boxes at the comic shop, but they’re fifteen bucks apiece, as opposed to fifty bucks for a package of five directly from the site.
However, the shipping costs and tax tacked on an additional sixty bucks to the cost, which would actually make buying them directly from the site more expensive that buying them from the comic shop, where I would have the advantage of not having to wait for them to be shipped and would also get a discount that would make the cost even lower than the total cost of ordering them from the site.
(When you use their subscription service, the comic shop gives you discounts on your purchases. The amount of the discount is dependent on how many monthly titles you have in your pull list; I have enough to get the maximum discount.)
So it looks like I’ll be buying them from the comic shop after all.