The Return of the Prodigal Books: the Great Shelving Project Concludes

Even though I got plenty of sleep, I feel a bit fuzzy-headed this morning.  So let me assemble a collection of observations and see if anything coheres.

--On Friday, we had a "Tracking the Tropics" update while we were watching a September 11 special.  We went to sleep expecting a tropical storm by morning.  While it was blustery with occasional rain bands, it wasn't bad most of the day yesterday.  We did move both cars to the driveway last night, just to be on the safe side.

--We have a variety of window leaks, but they don't all leak at the same time.  I'm guessing that it has to do with the direction of the wind and rain.  Last night the windows in the front bedroom both leaked.  Sigh.

--We are still finding damage from past floods.  We threw away many of the last of my spouse's MPA books yesterday.  When we pulled them off the lower shelf in the cottage, we discovered horrible mold.  We just threw the books away--we don't plan to replace them.  They're 20 years old, and they're for a program of study and a career that's not likely to return.

--One of the benefits of a wet, blustery day:  we made a lot of progress on our Great Shelving Project.  We can get all of our books on the shelves.  Even though we had done measurements, we weren't really sure.  Here's what the shelves looked like a week ago:

--This was not the original design.  We were going to have shelves go all the way across.  But we discovered that the studs weren't where they're supposed to be--we think there was once a window that's been closed in.

--I still feel such delight when taking my books out of boxes--I'm so happy to see them, event though I know that I'm not likely to read them again. Here's what the shelves look like now:

--I am still not used to these floating shelves.  I still worry that they'll pull the wall down, even though they are attached to studs that are holding up a very heavy ceiling--and it's an exterior wall.

--We are trying to decide what to do with ancient photo albums.  My spouse and I both had cheap cameras when we were kids.  We took lots of pictures, which we stuck in albums--non-archival quality film put in non-archival albums.  Should we keep this pictures which are aging poorly?  Just choose a representative few from each year?  I don't want to digitize everything; it's probably not worth the expense to do that.

--I have done a lot of fragmentary poem writing this week-end.  I'm wondering if all these fragments want to be in a single poem.  I'll think about that later.  I'm just happy to be writing poem like fragments again, fragments that are more than haiku.