Yes, I'm still alive.
I have far too many books for my home. So I've actually, gasp, started weeding my collection, endevouring to keep only those items I actually see myself using again. Well, in theory, at least. I can tell this will be a repeating activity, with re-evaluations at regular intervals until I've gotten the collection down to a reasonable size for my home. The idea is that someday my book collections should all live on bookcases, and not take up a wall of the living room five boxes high, nine boxes wide, and two boxes deep; the non-fiction is all on bookcases already, what's in boxes is the fiction and magazines. One planned activity for this week is installing shelves on that wall, and seeing where that leaves me after I fill them. And there are the bookcases upstairs, which should get some books, too. I haven't wed the Ts yet; my non-fiction is organized by Library of Congress Call Numbers, the Ts are where all the technology stuff fall, including all the woodworking and home maintenance materials, of which I have loads which it is doubtful I'll ever actually utilize, given how full my garage is with stuff.
The garage. It has a problem. Well, several. It has one light, woefully inadequate for its size. The breaker box is funky, and should be replaced. And, most traumatically, the roof leaks, which encourages mold and such ickyness, as well as rust. The roof is on the list for things to get done this summer, now that we've sold the old homestead in Portland.
Oh, I didn't mention that? We've sold the Portland building, which was my home for 1976-1987, then for 1995-2012; there was a seven year period where I was out-of-state, and merely had lots of stuff stored there. The proceeds from the sale are being dealt with by paying off everyone's indebtedness except for mortgages, then setting aside enough money to take care of mom's care for five years, and then using the rest to make major repairs to roofs and such. And to buy me a newer car, mine's a 1986 Stanza and parts are scarce, as well as it's just wearing out. While I prefer a station-wagon, practicality and lowered likelihood of needing to transport long objects is directing my eye toward the Honda Fit or the Toyota Corolla, less than five years old. And looking into getting a roof rack installed, for if I ever need to transport long items.
I actually went to the local fighter practice last Sunday; Jarl Ulfred, from the Barony of Three Mountains (where I used to live) was coming up to give a workshop, so I made myself show up, which was the second SCA activity I'd been at in 15 years. Did I watch the heavy fighters? No. I got roped in by the heavy rapier fighters, and watched their practice for a couple of hours. I liked what I saw, they were working on drill for quite some time before sparring, and seemed like friendly folks. Actually, they all seemed like friendly folks, which went along with the impression I had from lurking on the local email list for the last year. So I'm going to go to fighter practice again today, bringing my rapier equipment with me; I'd need to borrow weapons and a mask, as Cameron has mine, and he's just moved to California (if I can get contact info from my sister, I'll ask him to ship my mask back to me, which would be much cheaper than buying a new one.) An Tir only does Heavy Rapier, so I'll need new weapons, but my armor passes specs (Yay! My old Midrealm armor from twenty years ago is still good to go); well, based on the current requirements I had to make additional groin protection, to push that up to puncture resistant. So I've now used my sewing machine for the first time in 15+ years. And had to buy new scissors, so that I could cut through eight layers of fabric at one time and not have to pin out pattern pieces umpteen bazzillion times. So, anyway, I may start to have some social activity again, which would be very good. Really good. And impetus to work on getting those books on shelves and out of the middle of my living room, in case I wanted to have anyone over. Which the list of how many boxes didn't include the 24 boxes of romance novels in the library, which will also need to get wed. Hey, when Goodwill was selling romance novels for 49 cents each, I bought a bunch of them, bunches and bunches of them. Now to determine just which of them are silly enough to keep.
If I functioned just a bit better I'd set up with ABE Books or as an Amazon or Barnes & Noble affiliate to sell the stuff I'm weeding, we'll see about how I dispose of them; weeding doesn't do any good if they keep on taking up space in boxes. Certain of my books are worth real money. Others, not so much.
Well, I've been writing this for most of an hour now, so I think I'll post it. Hopefully it won't be so long until the next post.
