packing materials

I've gotten wonderful boxes from the shipping room at the library; libraries receive a lot of books and other clean shipments. But now that I'm getting close to packing breakables like vases, dishes, glasses, I need packing material. Styrofoam peanuts are good, but when you unpack they stick to everything, often shedding little tiny pieces with a lot of static cling. Newspaper is fine if you want to wash the ink off of everything when you unpack. Bubble wrap has it's uses, but it's expensive ... and who would have tons of it around?

The professional movers use blank newsprint -- they have stacks of it and they wrap stuff in it, they crumple it up for padding. When I packed to come out here, a friend had a bunch of it, and then the movers used a lot more to finish the packing I didn't do. But I gave my giant stack of it away, and i've been dreading buying it.

Well, today I remembered to look for packing material in the shipping room. I asked the shipping dude, and we found a giant plastic bag (significantly larger than a 40 gallon leaf bag) of plain newsprint. Plus some boxes full of the stuff. It won't be enough, because it takes up a lot of space when it's already crumpled ... but it's a great start.

Excuse me while I go spray Shindy cat, who is chasing Delilah all over the place.