Farewell to Jewel Boxes

      Every once in a while Uncle Jack does something so brilliant that he feels compelled to share it with his readers.  This time he trained his razor-sharp mind, honed to a fine point by his four long years in Ashland, Wisconsin High School whence he graduated in 1948, to the knotty problem of what to do with his collection of 300+ classical and jazz CDs now that he has moved from a fairly large house into a much smaller condo. Nearly all of his CDs were housed in those infamous plastic containers known as "jewel boxes" which he has long despised for their tendency to fall apart in his hands every time he tries to open one..
      He packed them into three large boxes for the trip from Nags Head to Baltimore where they have been taking up entirely too much space on the floor in his livingroom/diningroom/office. A couple of weeks ago, prompted by the acquisition of a new CD player, he decided it was time to get them off the floor and into some kind of organized storage where he could quickly find the CD he wanted to listen to. But how and where?
     At this point he did the "something brilliant" mentioned above---he Googled "CD storage".  The 49,700,000 responses suggested that lots of people out there in cyberspace have been thinking about CD storage for a long time and  it became quickly obvious that many music lovers shared his disgust with the clunky  "jewel boxes" and had devised numerous ways to get rid of them.
     By far the most popular solution was a derivative of the old-fashioned photo album, adapted to hold CDs in pockets instead of photos.  They come in all sizes and shapes and degrees of elegance so a bit of hands-on investigation was required.  One trip to Uncle Jack's neighborhood Target  was all it took.  He found a well-made (in China of course), compact album for a mere $19.50 that would accommodate 150 of his disks with room in the pockets for all the printed material from the jewel boxes.  He bought two of them and in a frenzy of activity the next morning transferred his entire CD collection into two handy pouches where they are at his fingertips at all times and take up less than a tenth of the space required by the wretched jewel boxes.
       After two weeks of experience with his new system he is pleased to report that no unforeseen problems have appeared and he can unreservedly recommend this splendid solution to the problem of economical, space-saving, convenient, efficient CD storage. He is so proud of himself he can hardly stand it.