In yet another illustration of Coach DI's organizational ability, he sent out an
email via the rowing mail list, on Friday afternoon (instead of just telling us at
practice when we wee all there). This meant some people, including Yosemite Sam,
didn't show up because they didn't read the email. Some people, on the other hand,
did show up because they didn't know we weren't originally supposed to be rowing
for three weeks, until the next session starts. (Yes, the dates are listed when
you sign up but that was three months ago, and sessions are usually
contiguous.)
DI also vented some frustrations because not enough
Masters' women had signed up to row in the Head of the Charles. I bit my tongue
very hard to avoid telling him that most of my reasons for not doing so were that
last year was so unpleasant, thanks largely to him.
I'm considering
driving to LA next weekend, to hang out with several people from my email List,
including one who will be visiting from the Netherlands. I am nervous about doing
that 5-6 hour drive alone; the 5.5 hour drive I did from central Massachusetts to
Philadelphia, shortly before starting this journal, has given me a bit more
confidence, and this will be a trip I've done, as driver or passenger, several
times before. On the other hand, the scenery is boring. Once you pass from
the Sonoran desert into the Mojave, the land is much less lush. There are
mountains, thank goodness, but otherwise, there's not much to look at until you
get almost to Palm Springs, where the miles and miles of windmills that are fun to
watch. After that things get a bit greener, but then you get into a hundred miles
of strip malls, as monotonous as the desert but without its sere
beauty.
Meanwhile, aside from the usual job hunting (there's a high-
tech job fair today), my challenge for the week is to organize books into the new
bookshelves. The fiction and nonfiction each present their separate challenges.
The first goal for the nonfiction is to organize them in a way that makes sense,
so I'll be able to find my books; the secondary goal is to do this efficiently, so
I can get the maximum number of books on the shelves (or leave the maximum amount
of space for new books). The nonfiction varies quite a bit in height; for
instance, I only have a few on architecture, but they range from about 3" high by
2" deep to about 11" by 14". It would be easier to shelve from smallest to
largest, ignoring distinctions of subject, as Pepys did, but then I'd never be
able to find anything. What I may do is based on a suggestion of Rudder's:
starting with the A's in the Library of Congress system, go all the way through to
Z, setting most shelves at a standard height and leaving one higher shelf in each
bookcase, to lump together all the books too tall to fit in their proper
place.
The fiction presents a different challenge. We have quite a
few Library of America volumes in their handsome slipcases. Those, Rudder's old
Reader's Digest children's series in their rainbow-colored jackets, and my motley
assortment of hardbacks definitely go in the new shelves. But what then? The
paperbacks crammed and double-stacked on the upstairs shelves include about 50%
science fiction and fantasy, 25% mystery, and 25% childrens'/YA, with a few
miscellaneous books, and some thrillers belonging to Rudder. (The percentage of SF
has decreased over recent years, and may be lower than that by now.) Most of them
will have to stay upstairs....so who gets promoted to the dignity of the family
room? These are the ones people coming to our house will see, and the sort of
people who judge you by what you read are the sort whose opinion I care most
about. Or I could lump all our fiction together and just shelve by author, with
say, A-F downstairs and the rest up, but that doesn't seem right
either.
By the way, I have no idea how many books we have, but they
will eventually fill four 7'x 3' bookcases downstairs, plus two that are as tall
and even wider upstairs, and some miscellaneous ones here and there. So we're not
talking university library-scale here, but there are enough that some system is
necessary.