Also Notable………

Even though I was quite tired on Saturday, we really needed to get out to the garage and move some boxes of books around. Our previous house was larger than this one, and had less windows, so we had significantly more wall space. Being the crazy academics that we are, we had over 100 liner feet of hardback books on display (and don’t even ask me about the number of feet of shelf space we had devoted to paperbacks).

The small, beautiful 100 year old Craftsman that we live in now is our dream house, but the one disadvantage is that we can’t begin to display all of our books. Which means most of them are out in the detached garage in labeled boxes. Thus, whenever we need some of those, we need to switch some books out. However the real challenge is to find the books in the garage that we are looking for. The labels on the boxes are pretty accurate, but the boxes are all stacked neatly (thanks to our children’s help) in 3 box X 3 box grids, 3 boxes high, on 2 separate pallets. Thus 54 boxes. Stacked. The operative word here is stacked.

We used to have more than twice that many, but several years ago, during the last year that we in California had any significant rain, the garage roof leaked, I was too ill to deal with it, and we lost over half of our books to mold. But I digress…….

At any rate, since my husband is retiring, he now has time to delve back in to some research and writing that he hasn’t had time to pursue in several years. Thus the need to access some of the books in the garage. For various reasons he is no longer able to lift heavy items, which means that I was the one doing the heavy lifting (literally).

Which makes me happy. I found I was once again able to lift 40 pound boxes of books and move them around. I haven’t been able to do that in over a decade!! So all the little steps toward fitness that I have been taking are beginning to pay off. And that makes me very, very happy.