Yesterday’s cleaning tasks occurred after two (2) gins, so I was suffused with the pleasant house-elfy willingness to do more than the minimum. I scrubbed all the toilet bowls, and spritzed/wiped the bowls of three sinks. I spritzed bleachy stuff on a shower curtain and on everything that looked mildewy or potentially mildewy in one (1) bathtub/shower. I cleaned the flat stovetop, and wiped the teakettle, and washed the little mat that goes under the dish soap and various kitchen scrubbies.
Things we have run out of:
• pepperoni
• snack cakes
• fresh fruit
• ground beef
• tortilla chips
Things in peril:
• fruit cups
• fresh vegetables (just baby carrots left)
• cream for coffee
• Kraft macaroni and cheese
• eggs
• pasta
• pasta sauce
• yogurt
• cheese sticks
Things I am very glad I ordered online (but the prices may have changed dramatically since then):
• 4 pounds of chocolate-covered dried cherries (FRUIT!)
• Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge is one of my favorite books and I had the sequel on my wish list but the price dropped and I impulse-bought)
• a 24-pack of Ensure Plus (Edward drinks one each day in an effort to maintain or increase his weight)
Pretty soon we will risk the grocery store, but we are trying to go as long as we sensibly can, and we are still in the stage of “It is perfectly reasonable to live a life where one does not have EVERY SINGLE grocery item one prefers to have.” Many, many generations of human beings lived in a world where fresh, varied produce was not a year-round thing, and where Tostitos didn’t even EXIST.
If you are finding yourself in need of an at-home work desk, but you hope to not ALWAYS need an at-home work desk, so you don’t want to invest a lot of money or get a piece of furniture that then you have to get rid of later, I recommend the desk we got Rob for his college apartment:
(image from Amazon.com)
It is not the desk of anyone’s dreams, but it fit our needs exactly: it had to pack up fairly small to fit in our minivan along with a mattress and other things, and it had to be easy to assemble, and it had to come apart again to be brought back home. It’s a folding desk, so it is flat in the box and then you take it out and fold the hinged sides out and there you go. When you’re done with it (at the end of the semester or pandemic), you fold it flat again and shove it under a bed or against the back wall of a closet. And it was under $100. And although it looks a little 1990s Pale Oak in the photos, it is not as bad as I’d expected.
For years I have resisted culling books (though I DO sometimes cull SOME), and part of my inner rationale has been a paranoid imagining of how I’d feel if we were Trapped Indoors Somehow And Couldn’t Get More Books For Some Reason. So this isolation/quarantine situation is basically the fulfillment of that EXACT PARANOID IMAGINING.
Except I suppose I could be ordering books online. But I keep going online to check the price of doing that, and feeling fresh appreciation for libraries. I found three books I wanted on Amazon, and all of them were reasonably priced, and one of them was a bargain book, and it was still $35 for three books. Three books I might not even LIKE! And it was WAY MORE THAN THAT on my local bookstore’s website: SIXTY-FIVE DOLLARS for three books to support my local bookstore!! I can’t face it. I can’t face it! I am too accustomed to bringing home a big pile of books on a whim, and rejecting them one after another if I don’t like them in the first 30 pages or so. I can’t handle the pressure of a $10-25 investment before even starting to read.
Besides, after all those years of saving books with that quarantine/blizzard reasoning, it seems I should at least give that a shot. But first I need to do some work. Did I ever tell you that, when we moved, I packed all our books carefully in boxes according to type and according to how we had them shelved at the old house; and that when we arrived in the new house, Paul opened all the boxes and sorted the books onto shelves in random handfuls based on nothing more than size and whim? So now on a single shelf we have, for example, three of the couple dozen books on the game of Go, and then one of many books on chess, and then five of my literature paperbacks from college, and then half a dozen Bloom County books, and then half a dozen of Paul’s sci-fi paperbacks from college, and then four books about physics, and then an annotated Bible, and then five of the seven Narnia books, and then two of the three medical manuals, and then two survival manuals, and so on.
He could not have discouraged me more if he had set out to do so. We’ve been here 1.25 years, and I have not been able to tackle the books. Really the only way to do it is to take every book off every shelf, make organized piles on the floor, and then put them all back. I can’t face it! I can’t face it! HOW COULD HE DO THIS TERRIBLE THING.
But now that I’m working at the library, there is some appeal to organizing things in roughly library order. Like, not going so far as to put decimal labels on all the non-fiction and have them in a precise order, but putting computer books first, and then self-help, and then religion, and then politics, so forth. And that would be a good quarantine project. So we’ll see.
And once all the fiction is in the same place, I’ll have an orderly way to work on my re-reading, if I want an orderly way. Or at least it’ll be all together so I can see what I have.
Diane was supposed to come over on Sunday and quarantine started on Friday so of course she didn’t come but she was supposed to help me organize my books from the move. So now of course they will remain unorganized for however long this lasts and everything is terrible. And I’m certainly not going to do it- that’s Diane’s job! I’m not going to do Diane’s job for her while she’s just sitting around in her house not organizing any books at all.
For some perhaps useful perspective. Anne Frank and 7 other people hid in a 450 sq ft attic for 761 days , remaining quiet to stay undiscovered. We can do our part to keep everyone safe by staying at home with electricity and bathrooms and food and computers and TV for a few weeks.
Do you do ebooks? You can read on phone but Kindle or tablet is great. Free from library too so easy to abandon.
We have officially finished our fiction library books. I have one non-fiction book but I’m not sure I can handle that right now. I have book my boss passed to me in the summer that I’m going to try today. I ordered Glennon Doyle’s new book online. I had checked the library database before they’ve closed and they didn’t have it in their system, so that helped me feel better about ordering. I’m thinking that if the kids aren’t interested in some of the chapter books people have passed on to us, I may box some of them up to pass on to someone else.
I second the Kindle idea. I don’t know if you’ve signed up for Anne Bogel’s daily newsletter, but every day she sends a selection of Kindle Deals. You can pick from a curated list of good books that are available for about $2 or so. Also, her podcast is great too—The Modern Mrs. Darcy.
I read your description of how Paul unpacked your books and gasped—GASPED! Barbarian. Who would shelve books like that? But my other thought was—The Barbarian and the Librarian. A good pair. And Disney’s next movie.
Seconding the Kindle + library ebook recommendations!
Also I totally agree with the pleasantness of roughly organizing my household books in my library’s order. I’ve worked in college libraries for years, and I love splitting of fiction the way the LC system does. It puts together 19th century, then early 20th, then late 20th-early 21st (in author order within each set). It works so well for browsing (for me).
I can’t believe Paul UN-organized your books! I’ve always wanted organized books (ours are a mess) but it seems like such a gargantuan task.
This sentence made me so happy:
“When you’re done with it (at the end of the semester or pandemic)…”
Hope everyone is staying sane and healthy…
I do not do Kindle or e-books, and I have a hard time investing in actual books when they are free from the library. Totally with you there. I own some of my favorite books and I might re-read them. Just before the library closed, I sent my kids to grab some videos and books. I gave them two titles for me, both were upcoming on my book club list. They came home with one. Sigh. They came home with some good movies, but a bunch of dumb movies or movies we had already seen part of and don’t want to re-visit. Now those movies have to float around in my house and I am expected to keep track of them or I will end up owning them when this is all over. They did get ‘Sideways’ – I love that movie. Not appropriate to watch with kids and my kids are staying up later than Coach and I, no not sure when we can watch it.
While we are stuck at home, I told the kids they had to each learn to make a dinner. That has caused additional (like daily) trips to the grocery store so they could get their ingredients. Now we are supposed to try to stay home and we have plenty of meals, so no going to the store as much. Of course we are out of 2% milk and I had to look at the kids and ask WHY? Why would you chug glasses full of milk when we are in this situation? Seriously! I bought gallons upon gallons of milk. They will be stuck with skim for the foreseeable future. We are also running dangerously low on eggs and I bake a lot. Ugh.
The milk situation is the thing I feared most and I was … 100% right. Oldest drinks huge glasses of it like were going to go to the store every other day. DRINK SOME WATER, KID! Sigh.
I am just popping in to say that the Olive sequel was SO GOOD and SO TOUCHING and absolute perfection and I am jealous that you’re going to read it for the first time I just loved it so so so so much.
Olive is the perfect fictional character for our current circumstances. I wonder what she’d have to say about all of this! I hope you enjoy the book too. It’s become one of my favorites.
I would be So Mad if someone shelved my books that way. I started thinking about how to shelve my books immediately after we bought the house. I wish you peace and satisfaction as you re-shelve them the Correct way.
We currently have enough pantry staples. With two teens, what we’re running low on is patience.
This is timely. When we had a flood about 10 years ago the rec room where we have our biggest bookshelves, we had to take them all off the shelves and, therefore, had the rare opportunity to put them back in an organized way. It was satisfying. Well 10 years later they are a total jumble again. I just told H yesterday that this week when it’s supposed to be rainy if Youngest gets bored and hassles me about it, I’m going to set her on organizing the two massive bookcases by author. She loves to organize and it should take her almost an entire day. Win/win!
Paul. PAUL.
What Paul did is the exact reason The Husband was NOT allowed to unpack the boxes of books….but then again, I still have a couple of boxes of books that haven’t been unpacked (we’ve been here what? About 4 years now?) because I have nowhere to put them! I need to rectify that I suppose.
Ooh, (re)organizing books is a perfect quarantine project!! AND a good spite project, because you can heave Paul’s into some boxes as you go. “Here are you books,” you can say, “they were all out of order, so I wasn’t sure what you wanted done with them.” Hee hee!
Thriftbooks.com
Most books are around $4, and if you order $10 you get free shipping!
Most of my “this will be good for quarantine” projects I don’t really want to do, I just want them done. But with your librarian skills it sounds like you might actually enjoy this project. And it will be incredibly satisfying when it’s done. Plus, you’ll probably fine some great reads in the process. Good luck!
Also, a lot of time you can read the beginning of a book online before you buy it. It’s not as good as the library method (take everything that looks interesting then decide at home if you were right) but better than nothing.
One of the things I really like about my kindle is that you can get a free sample of any book, usually the first couple of chapters. Generally that’s enough for me to decide if I want to read the book or not without spending any money
We are in a similar spot with running out of things I’d prefer to have and having others in peril, as you say. Among those in peril are milk and eggs (and bread), which are kind of not NECESSITIES, but kind of things that go into a lot of other things. Like … anything I might want to bake at all. And … my coffee (just the milk, not the eggs). And my husband has said we need to start “rationing” coffee, because we are low on decaf, which is what we drink most and … well, let’s just say I’m lucky if I get two cups out of the first pot because my husband gets up much earlier than me and he drinks SO. MUCH. COFFEE. He has promised to fill a thermos for me and I just … what? I know it’s petty and silly and not a crisis, but how about, to make my life just the tiniest bit more pleasant, you simply NOT DRINK SO MUCH COFFEE so that I can pour mine fresh from the pot instead of from a janky old thermos. It shouldn’t matter. But somehow it DOES.
Anyway, I was planning a trip to the store tomorrow but am realizing that we should try to stretch and wait instead. I have switched to oat milk for my coffee. I mean, it will last longer. Because I don’t like it as much and will drink less coffee, which will be good for the rationing, I suppose. And I baked a huge batch of chocolate chip cookies, and can probably not bake any rolls for soup, or cookies/cake for snack, or pancakes/crepes for breakfast for a little while longer while we work through our … saltines and graham crackers and breakfast cereals. Again, these are all problems others would be lucky to have, but this is where we are, so.
YES OMG WHY WHY WHY SO MANY GO BOOKS (hmph. I do not play Go. It is my husband. They are his books. In case you could not tell.
SWISTLE! I just read Olive, Again and it’s so good. It was the last book I got from the library before it closed. It’s better than the first one, even. Or, I think so. I love her writing so much, and it’s just such a good book.
The books would be grounds for divorce in my world. What kind of monster.