I promised you pictures of the yarn I bought yesterday.

Three skeins of “Calypso” yarn in the “Saturn” color by Creatively Dyed Yarns. (I blame Kim for this because she showed me the skeins in her bag and made me want some of my own. I bought more than one skein because I wanted to do something other than socks … so, this will either grow into a lace shawl of some kind, or (if I can find a suitable pattern) a lightweight sweater, which I think I would simply adore.

Also three skeins of this yarn from the Spinning Mill in Melville, New York (who does not appear to have a website I could find). I had tried to buy some of their yarn last year, but she didn’t take credit cards. (No website, no credit cards, how quaint!) I made a point of looking for her yesterday and got this beautiful stuff. (To give you an idea how nice? Everyone who saw it asked if it was Briar Rose yarn.) Unfortunately, it’s  not the color I wanted last year–another woman beat me to it by about 15 seconds, darn it. That shade was close to this, but with more green … but, still, this is lovely.

Now, I told you the other day about the man from the used bookstore, who took away 6 boxes of the books I laboriously weeded out from my library? But that there were still a lot more left?

Since Dad, Mike, and Tyler moved the desk out of Mom’s office yesterday–it’s now standing on its side in the living room, trying to trick us into walking into it face first as we round the corner from the stairs–that opened up that floorspace. So, to get a better idea of what books I would still HAVE, I moved all the ‘get rid of’ books to the floor.

What? Doesn’t look like that big a pile? How about some different perspective?

That entire pile is books. There are (I think) 9 paper boxes full of them (that’s the smaller-size paper boxes, that hold 5 reams of paper), and then each of those boxes is piled with books up to the window sills.

No, I didn’t count them, but there are a LOT of them! And now I need to figure out what to do with them … preferably something that does not involve my having to pack and carry them somewhere (since the point of weeding them out in the first place was to avoid moving with them so we wouldn’t have to go to the effort of carrying them ourselves).

How many books did I weed out?

I’m not actually sure, but you can see that these cases–which had been overflowing on every shelf–now have huge swaths of empty space AND that includes books that I took out of my bedroom closet.

The two shelves on the other side of the table are even more dramatic–the case on the right which is currently sporting some horizontally-stacked books–is now my entire general fiction (trade and paperback size) collection. I emptied out the shelves from the left case so that, when the movers come to pack up the books a few days before we move, I’ll know that all the books on the right are fiction. (The books on the left are mostly writing books and essays, and will go upstairs.)

That’s actually the other thing I have to figure out now … what goes WHERE. Not just furniture and such, but which/how many bookcases will I have upstairs in my room, and which (the rest of them) will be downstairs? I know that, upstairs, bare minimum, I want writing references, knitting/craft books, and my photo albums. Cookbooks will be in the living room, right next to the kitchen. Everything else will be downstairs. But … if possible, I want a bookcase next to my bed, like I have now, with some of my favorites on it–I’m just not sure how that space will work.

But, also, we need to figure out the arrangement for the bookcases downstairs–we’ve got a long wall we can put them on, but between Mom and me, we’ve got something like nine short bookcases and four tall ones (plus two wooden shelving units) … and some melamine cubbies, too. Since we’re consolidating and we don’t have to worry about not blocking windows, it would be easier to get rid of some of the short ones and substitute more of the tall ones … except, then we’d have to BUY more tall ones, and that’s not really an option. So, I’m mentally running floorplans in my head to figure out how things could look or will look or should look, while still finding room for all those short bookcases which are (mentally) eating up wall space at a frightening rate. (It helps, though, that they’re all white; it does not help that they’re different heights.)

Anyway, this has been my day–moving books from here to there, trying to arrange things so that, when packed, I can find stuff later.

The joy of trying to bring my database of books up to date at the end of this–of somehow eliminating all the books I’ve gotten rid of while keeping the ones I still have in an excel sheet that’s over 3000 lines long is going to be … fun. Well, no, actually, I’m shaking in my boots at the thought of the amount of work that’s going to be! But, well, that’s not something I need to worry about for months, right?

Want another look at the discard pile? I told Mom that I’m trying to build her a new desk to replace the one they moved out of the room yesterday.

And, honestly, I don’t know what we’re going to do with all of these …

Tags: General, Knitting/Spinning, Reading // 10 Comments »