The best laid plans as they say. I intended to get to my closets this week but my daughter got sick and wanted me close by so instead, I spent a full day sorting books.

I have a lot of books. I have books I own, books I lend and books I borrow. I have books on all the subjects I am interested in (there are many). Should I need to lay my hands on a particular book, it helps to have a clue where to find it. It also helps, if you wish to borrow a book, to have returned any previous lent book in good condition and in a timely manner. If you books aren’t organized, it is too easy to forget what you have.

I spent most of my time on the book shelves in the living room as Karen was ensconced on the sofa there. I was pleased to discover that I did such a good job the last time I tackled this job that it was pretty easy this time around. Here is what my shelves look like from the bottom up.

 Shelf 1: bees, gardening, general preparedness

Shelf 2: herbal, foraging, wilderness, self-sufficiency memoirs

Shelf 3: poetry and spirituality,

Shelf 4: Large, self-made notebooks (my own preparedness notebooks, Mother Earth News magazine archives, household management

Shelf 5: a full shelf of really old gardening encyclopedias that I want to pass on but can’t get Bruce to apart with

Second case Shelf 1: psychology, home schooling, education

Shelf 2-3: novels, economics

Shelf 4: writing and public speaking,  religion

Shelf 4: home maintenance and repair

I have lots of other bookcases in the house.The one in the kitchen has my cookbooks and food preservation materials.  The garden room has children’s books, a lot of wildlife and natural history references as well as my homeschooling curriculum. Upstairs, the girls have their own bookcases. I keep all the series books there.

I found a couple of books I needed to return to their owners and a number that could be donated to either the sustainability library or to our town library.  I also pulled out a few periodicals although not as many as in years past. I have just about stopped buying magazines. I can nearly always get what I want from the magazine rack at the sustainability library. More mainstream news is available at the library. It seems a waste of both financial and world resources for me to purchase magazines designed for a single read. When I do find an article that I want to have on hand, it is easy enough to copy it and put it in a binder. I have good luck with putting articles in plastic sleeves first. I had picked up a box of those at the dump one day. They have come in really handy.

I spent yesterday on the sofa myself, suffering from the same stomach woes as my daughter. I watched more coverage than was healthy of the earthquake as a result. It is truly horrible stuff. At one point, I could not look another second and switched over to HGTV, my go to station when I need to escape. They were showing a segment called House Hunters, international. A couple was looking for a second home in Santo Domingo. They found one they liked but were unhappy with the pool area because it could not be accessed from the bedroom without walking down 4 steps. I am not making this up. They really complained about those stairs. The juxtaposition was pretty remarkable.