don’t put my stuff upon no shelf
21 Jan 07
As anyone who has visited our humble home can attest, we have a bit of a storage problem. One of the reasons the every day project has sputtered is because I’ve had a few ideas for ameliorating this storage problem but keep running into obstacles. Not just obstacles, actually; part of the problem is that any attempt to rearrange stuff in a house casts light on other situations that snowball into something insurmountable. (Is that a mixed metaphor? I suppose something that snowballs should be unstoppable. Anyways. . . .)
For example, I’ve been thinking about putting a small shelf in the tv room upstairs. Said shelf would be a games shelf first and foremost, but would also be a place to put some of the overflow of books, at least until we establish our weeding criteria. However, to put it bluntly, the tv room is rather desolate. Since moving into this house, we’ve done very little to erase the presence of its previous owner, whose tastes rather differed from our own. This tv room was a girl’s bedroom. It’s a bit smaller than the other upstairs rooms because of a previous “renovation” that expanded the bathroom at the expense of this bedroom. The new wall that was created is wood-panelled with the stuff of 70s rec-room nostalgia. The other walls are a dirty mauvish colour adorned by a gruesome wallpaper trim—a nasty 4 inches of abstract dusty-rose blobs and grey “brushstrokes” with a vaguely Greek border. There’s just so much to do.
To make a long story short, I’ve been looking around for appropriate shelves. Those I have found that are kind of attractive would just make the room’s desolation more apparent. Home-made—sorry, DIY would do, but we don’t have the right combination of scraps in the basement. So today I checked out Zeller’s. I’ll be damned if I’ll spend $50 on a piece of crap pressboard thing laminated with vinyl “wood grain”. I’m stalemated, it seems, or at least playing out a patient middle game. To console myself, I went to the LCBO and spent my gift cards. More on that later!
Posted by pzed on January 21, 2007 at 6.02pm
cull, weed, prune…
17 Jan 07
Saturday while driving, I heard some of the CBC radio show Talking Books, with host Ian Brown. The topic of Saturdays show was culling your personal library:
Ian Brown and his guests mull over what to keep, what to save, and why we hang on to some books for decades, if not forever. If purging your book collection is on that New Year’s list, listen in – it just might help!
Now, “cull” is an interesting word to use, here. In libraries I think we most often say “weed”, although the dismally bureaucratic term “deselect” seems to be quite popular, assumedly because it has no negative connotations, and also because it’s jargon. To me, culling means killing perfectly good members of a herd simply because there are too many of them to continue to live comfortably in their environment. One would hope that the hunters employed to implement the cull target older and less healthy individuals, but who knows, really. Weeding, on the other hand, means getting rid of unwanted plants. Although there are some legally identified noxious weeds in most jurisdictions (e.g. Noxious Weeds in Ontario), generally when weeding our garden we don’t worry about what’s legally a weed and what’s not. If we like a plant, it stays; if we don’t like it, it goes.
That’s a somewhat long-winded introduction to what I really wanted to talk about. What would happen if we decided that we want to limit our book collection to include only those that are interesting as artifacts? It occurs to me that since I work in a library that provides free interlibrary loan, I pretty much have access to the content of any book out there. If I want to read it, I can get it. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t continue to buy new books, or pick up silly things used and at library book sales, but that having done so, I might make the decision whether to add a book to our permanent collection based on criteria that include content as a very minor, if not irrelevant, factor. I can also look at our cluttered shelves, many of which have piles of books in front of them, from a very different perspective if I recast the question of whether something is worth keeping in physical rather than intellectual terms.
Posted by pzed on January 17, 2007 at 6.00pm
grr..rr..rr..rr..rr
10 Jan 07
Well, the shredding match continues and I AM VICTOR. Er, no, Christ is Victor. But I don’t think Victor is Christ.
Anyway, today I lightened my load to the tune of: a folder of old phone bills; car insurance policies dating back to 2001; repair bills on the aerostar; the receipt for said minivan; an accident report (I was not at fault) from February 2000; a receipt for a computer I bought in 1996; credit union account statements dating back to 2001; CPP contribution statements for 2000, 2002, and 2003; the statement that came with my GST credit in 2000 and the note indicating I was no longer eligible for the credit in 2003; quotes and other documents related to hiring the moving company that brought us to Windsor in 2001; records related to the student loans I finished paying in 2001; passwords and instructions for using the UWindsor dial-up network; visa bills from 2003 to 2005; and the owner’s manual for the fridge I replaced in November.
Okay, not all of this was actually shredded. Some went straight in the blue box as it contained no top secret data. Feels good, either way.
Posted by pzed on January 10, 2007 at 9.28pm
the little things
9 Jan 07
Yesterday was the first day of what I’m now calling my Every Day Project. The idea is to try to do a little something every day to make life better. Usually for me. Of course, every day won’t actually mean every day, that’s just unpossible; rather, it’s meant as an ironic nod to the power of positive thinking. But it seems to be working (as these things usually do for the first week or so): yesterday I succeded in cleaning up my dresser, and in the process I wrapped some coins. Today, I took those coins to the credit union and deposited them. Oh, and I also cleaned off the top of my filing cabinet and started a glorious shred-o-rama. Highlights? Gone are the records of the Royal Bank savings account I closed in 2001, and equally gone are my tax returns from 1996-1999. The fun never stops.
Posted by pzed on January 9, 2007 at 5.39pm
resolutions are for sissies
8 Jan 07
I’m just going to try to do something every day that makes my life (and hopefully the lives of those around me) just a little better. Yesterday, I finished putting up smoke alarms in our house. We are officially no longer in contravention of the law! Tonight, I’m going to create two new categories on this blog (the other is for recipes†) and clean off my dresser.
One of the things on my list for the not too distant future is to buy a decent digital camera, after which I will add photographic evidence to the documentation of my “every day” project. Won’t that be exciting.
† Why recipes? Because the house is full of misplaced slips of paper on which I write these things every time I have to call my mum to remind me.
Posted by pzed on January 8, 2007 at 8.09pm
