I don’t have a clever title for you, but at least I’m HERE, right?

First things first–I finished the body of my sweater tonight. I know, the cabled waist makes it look kind of odd, but I haven’t blocked it yet, and the ribbing (on my swatch) stayed flatter and less pulled-in than it was straight off the needles, so I’m not worrying.

The trick is that, well, I simply can’t do any blocking right now because, I don’t know if you realized, but we’re PACKING.

Mom came across her old, Royal typewriter that she got somewhere around 1954. My sister and I always loved that typewriter and played with it whenever we could. The year that I broke my wrist, Mom let me use it to type all my homework (instead of trying to hold the paper still with the cast). Not that pounding on those keys made it easier, exactly, but … I got very, very good at typing with my right hand.

It sound come as no surprise to you that even my “graffiti” typed onto the platen with the white-out paper was correctly punctuated. (Since, you know, it only belonged to ONE of us.)

I told you about my book database woes, right? Here’s something to give you an idea of the scope. A couple years ago, I noticed some slight discrepancies between the List and the real books on the shelves, so I decided to take inventory. I sorted down my 3000-ish book database and sorted everything by location and then by author, and starting with the books in my bedroom closet, started comparing …

I never got past the closet. Just doing one side of it took me forever. Now, sure, it might have been easier if I’d drafted Mom to help–two people would certainly make it easier–but still, that’s hours of work. Hours and hours and hours of work. Days. Weeks!

And that was then the database was about 98% correct.

Now? Having just gotten rid of maybe a third of my books? And then packing what’s left into boxes and taking them across town and reshelving them in completely new configurations?

That print-out from the inventory attempt is about 100 pages long … Trying to compare a new version of that to what’s stashed on my shelves?

Um. Not going to happen. A nice person on Ravelry suggested using a database program like “Collectorz” with one of those little ISBN cat-scanners, but I have one of those scanners, and using it was a nightmare. Assuming I could get it to work (it was stubborn), getting the online information about each book title took FOREVER, and if you’ve got more than a hundred or two  books, that’s a huge chunk of time. Not to mention that none of that includes other things that I track on my database–like descriptions, locations, size, topic, whether it’s read or not. You can’t beat homemade if you have specific needs, right?

Chappy’s mood of the day? “What’s happening NOW?”

But then, my sister came down to help Mom start packing up the kitchen, and when you start messing with FOOD preparation equipment, Chappy gets worried!

Tags: Family, General // 2 Comments »