Another thing finally accomplished! It's a milestone telling us we are finally moved in... mostly. There are still a couple stacks of boxes, some organizing needed. But most of those things are ones that wouldn't particularly change our lives whether or not they were unpacked and organized, or left for another year or two.
This one mattered. I finally looked at the budget, now that we've disposed of all the old bills, dragged out because of the house sale or misdirected mail, and the new bills, finally settling down now that we're settling in. Necessary furniture is here, things left behind but needed are replaced for the most part, and the pantry room fairly well stocked. Many of the needed decorations are in their new places. Routines are becoming established.
Even gardening for next year is happening, with additions to the original plans getting forced upon us. The management does yard and outside home inspections here, and one patch of garden I was willing to live with is now getting dug out and replanted. I'd pulled buckets and buckets of weeds from it in early summer. They're back. They will continue to return, unless they get sprayed a couple times, like the oak tree in the middle of an astilbe. I'd tried planting astilbe plants in the Shafer garden decades ago. One still struggles there. This patch of raised bed has five. Management has decreed the weeds MUST GO! But poisoning means the astilbes die too. So Paul will help dig those out first, and take them back home to his gardens. The bleeding heart has died back until spring, so spraying won't harm it. So tomorrow night, spray, spray, spray!!! I'll have about 3 weeks to kill off everything before bulbs go in, perhaps longer.
In the scheme of things, paring down in this case is relatively easy. Remove the wanted, kill, kill everything else, replant. Of course it's a tiny bit expensive too, But that's also the fun part, picking out with Steve the plants to go in, in this case asiatic lilies in many colors, and peach colored holyhocks in the back.
Today's accomplishment was a combination of paring way-y-y back, packing/unpacking, shopping once the budget said OK, and just plain work. I'm referring to our library.
Note that once again, I was not the one doing all the work. Paul came down to build, paint, and install all the shelves. I was the one filling them, back before my shoulders rebelled. Like my ideal of a library, all the fiction was filed alphabetically by author. How else do you find anything? The really tall stuff went under the windows.
We knew we'd never have room to move all of them into, much less the need we were sure years ago that we'd have to keep them all with us forever. Choices had to be made. Boxes had to be found, filled, taped, labeled, stacked. There were fairly unsuccessful garage sales, large donations to the library system and some friends. Boxes were taped, stacked, eventually transported, and again stacked. They sat. We talked about doing something.
"Later, please." This from me, needing respite from unpacking.
"Later, please."Again from me, needing respite from organizing, shopping, more organizing, more shopping.
Talks about doing something with the books became less frequent.
Last week I ordered a shelving unit. Paul came over to put it together. It went where the stack of books had been sitting, having moved those in front of another window. We talked about filling them.
"Later, please," this from me fighting a different fight, this time with my laptop, unsuccessful at downloading some needed training videos, frustrated, and with no earthly idea how all those boxes of books would go in that small shelf unit.
I finally opened one. It held several categories of books, which got placed on four different shelves. This was no way to start! The next box held books from three different authors, all of which had a lot more books somewhere in these boxes. But one of those authors had four series we'd collected, of which we only still liked two. They got sorted, including from more boxes. One series went over on the table, to go elsewhere. One filled a cubby, another overflowed a cubby, the fourth made a new stack on the table. Now what to do? So many more boxes to go, so few more cubbies.
I decided my filing system was wrong. We'd already noted most of the cubbies wouldn't hold anything but shorter paperbacks... vertically. Hardcovers not at all, except in the middle, taller cubbies. While discovering the total scope of the problem, I was creating stacks all over the floor, divided by author. So many series had a shelf and a half of books. Now what?
Some say think out of the box. I decided to rethink staying in the box. Or cubby. Most series contained books in several sizes, so some laid flat in front of shorter vertical ones filling the back. A couple drifted over between adjacent short and tall cubbies, so more or less together so long as your eyes didn't stop at the dividers. Some had two full cubbies, with both filled with a front and a back layer of books. A few books stick out past the bookcase. Some cubies are totally random selections of one or two books per author when they only wrote that many. Or maybe I only collected that many.
Occasionally we discovered two identical books from the same author, and once that we'd done that three times! Of course that made sense, considering the author was Steve's father! Those books are getting harder to find, despite the fact that at least one was on the NYT Best Selling list. Steve is very proud of those books. His father, Clyde Brundy, spent many years traveling through the western states while employed as a bookkeeper for a highway construction company. He became familiar with the geography of the places he wound up writing about, and in his process of writing, did all kinds of research. His facts are correct. His characters and their situations and attitudes are realistic. He wrote strong women characters. If you happen to like westerns with some realism in them, something more complex than sheriff vs. bad guy, try to find some while they still exist. I personally recommend that you start with High Empire, the same way I did, and the book Steve named his own blog after, in case you want to check out some of Steve's stories. He will swear to "at least most of them" are true. Neither of us have read them through recently enough to be positive, but if you run into him performing with Satchmo, or putting a ghost to rest, or taking a special girl to a dance in an empty ballroom, they're factual.
Back to the shelves now, you notice books are in them every which way. They may look disorganized, but they're not. One cubby remains to be filled. We think of it as room for the future. Do we add Anne Hillerman's books to her father's collection? Do we collect more of a different author or discover a brand new one? Even with an empty space, one collection of books isn't there. All the Native American ones, whether aimed at adults or children, whether stories or histories, including stacks of those devoted to pueblo pottery art/artists, have been moved from the Arizona living room to my Minnesota bedroom. Same cabinets as before, just different contents, mostly, and taking more shelves, along with the pottery some of them talk about. Like all our books, if you wish to read one and will take good care and return it, you are welcomed to do so.
It better go back in the right place!
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