So, that discipline thing?
Still a work in start-up mode. But the first week is the hardest. One of the reasons I haven't been doing some of this work is that it's hard to find the starting point.
Like, I've finally unloaded the books I wanted to have on hand for writing the lesbian western from the shelf on the computer hutch, making room for my husband to put his geneology and gaming references next to my general references (atlases, dictionaries, field guides, etc.). So, that's good.
But they don't all fit back where they belong. There's now four books sitting on top of the books on the geography shelf, which is a single five- or six-foot board mounted above the filing cabinet and writing desk. There is no more space to put geography books unless we mount another shelf, or clear off the tops of the filing cabinet and writing desk to arrange them there. I was only able to put a couple of the history books back into their proper places - I'm going to have to bring in a ladder and rearrange the entire history wall in order to fit the stuff I was using, and the accumulated new books, on history, archeology, human paleontology, sociology, etc., not to mention the periodicals, onto the history wall. I may have to break out a category and put it - somewhere. And while I was putting up the cookbooks, plant books, and, how-to books downstairs, I found a great big neglected Fortean book, which joins the other Fortean books lying sideways on top of the Forteana-religion-folklore books.
The whole house is like this; and it's a four-bedroom house with ten to twelve foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in more than one of them. The non-fiction must be rearranged and there's not much space to rearrange it to - maybe six feet of shelf space, or less, scattered around the whole house. Some of it in closets; not that I object to shelving books in closets, but we can't get at the exploration and natural disaster books in the mathom* room closet till we decide what to do with the stuff blocking our way to it.
That we will have to add more shelf space somewhere, somehow, is a given, and by the way we need more filing cabinet space, too. But we won't know how much, or where to put it, or precisely what form it should take, until we've done the best we can rearranging what we've got and getting rid of what we can bear to. And then we get to budget their acquisition.
Obviously, what I need here is not just discipline, but access to an inter- or extra-dimensional portal that triples or quadruples my storage space without such troublesome necessities as buying the house next door and using it as a library annex. A bookcase that fits in the space between the filing cabinet and the writing desk, which will store the books we don't use for a long time in some out of the way corner of the universe, with little dust and good preservative qualities, that will respond to voice commands to produce The 1923 Sears-Roebuck Catalog, or books relevant to 15th-century Spanish clothing, or guides to farm machinery, or whatever, without our having to remember precisely the titles, authors, or even whether we actually have such a thing.
What I'm hoping is that I'll make some noticeable progress on the book space problem and then get so hair-tearingly frustrated that cutting out a jeans pattern will seem as blessedly peaceful and easy as putting in a disk or picking up a book, with the added temptation of a prospect of accomplishing something.
*Mathom, for those of you whose Tolkien-derived language skills are rusty, is a hobbit word meaning "something I'm not using right now but am not about to throw away." Our mathom room doubles as our guest room and is the sole repository of things we do have a use for, such as back issues of Fortean Times, Damon's pulp and Sherlock Holmes books, and anthologies; but since the work done on the house it's reaccumulated a lot of mathom stuff. Notably some invaluable SCA references that should probably go on the "history" or "crafts" shelves, had we any room there.
I suggest buying the house next door to use as a library annex. But if you ever get access to the extra-dimensional space, could you clue me in on the secret?
ReplyDeleteOnly if you promise not to share it with Michael, who would abuse the capacity and probably overstrain it, spoiling it for the rest of us, and then explain how this isn't his fault and there should have been plenty of space.
ReplyDeleteI swear to only use it for Books. And not let Michael know the magic words to open it.
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