Phew. What a weekend. It started off very early on Saturday morning. Alex woke up crying before six. I got up and took him though to the spare bedroom, to see if he would go back to sleep with me there, but he squirmed and moaned and didn’t really want to lie still. I think I dozed off a few times, but at about seven he really wanted to get up.
We went downstairs, and I gave him some juice, and then some Weetabix, and then he threw it all up. Over me, the couch, and himself.
But that was the worst of it. He still felt rotten, but he was clearly relieved that his tummy didn’t feel so bad any more. And it kick-started us into the rest of the day: Alex shower-monkeyed with me, and we got clean while Abi got up and whipped the covers off of the couch downstairs and started stuffing them through the laundry. (Big bonus points to Abi for having the foresight to have bought two sets of covers when we got the sofa!) Then after Alex was dressed, I did all the dishes that had been piling up. After that, we put the other covers on the sofa, and suddenly the whole downstairs seemed clean and fresh again!
Alex fell asleep just before noon. Given that he’d had an interrupted night’s sleep, we fully expected him to sleep for a while, so I headed out to do some shopping. Alex was still asleep when I got back two hours later, and Abi only woke up briefly enough to say hello and settle back down again (she was napping, too; it was about two o’clock before we got to bed the night before, so Alex wasn’t the only one who didn’t get enough sleep). I unpacked the groceries, and then started installing Apache on my Linux box. But the tiredness caught up with me, too, so while the make process was running, I lay down on the sofa and took forty winks, too.
And that was just the start of the day. For the rest of Saturday, and most of today, we’ve been weeding the Sutherland library. We have about 2,500 books, most of them stored in boxes (23, before this weekend) up in our loft. A few years ago, we went through a phase of intensive second-hand book-buying. We targeted sections of Edinburgh, and then systematically trawled through every charity shop, picking up almost anything that looked like science fiction or fantasy. We would come home with 60 or 70 books crammed into our backpacks and shopping bags. There was never really any chance we would read all of them. A large proportion of them were junk that, realistically, we wouldn’t even want to read.
Also, over the years, we’ve bought a lot of books, read them, and just added them to the stacks without much really considering whether they’re worth keeping, or whether we’d ever read them again. Abi and I are both love books. They are very important to us, even just the fact of having them. The idea of buying a book, reading it, and immediately selling it on, giving it away, or even (gasp) throwing it out is quite alien to us.
Our habit is to buy books we think we’ll read, and put them on the shelves. Maybe we’ll read them, but then again maybe not. There are more books that we fancy reading (and buy) than we actually have time to consume. It’s a terrible thing, but these days I rarely get through more than one book a week, which is a paltry fifty books a year. I’d guess that when we got married back in 1993, Abi and I had maybe 500 books between us. That means we’ve been buying–on average–about 200 books a year.
But we don’t mind this. We don’t mind the idea that there are book we’ll buy that we’ll never read. They’re books that we might read, or that look interesting. Plus, they’re books. They’re our little paper friends.
But still…2,500 of them is quite a lot. And there really are some of them that we just don’t want any more. Books that we’d never read again, or books that, if we were honest with ourselves, we never had any intention of reading even when we bought them.
We have them all nicely catalogued, of course. A couple of weeks ago, we had both individually gone through the spreadsheet and marked off which books we thought we’d be happy to discard. The final exercise was to bring all the boxes down from the loft, and do a manual sort through them to see if there were any more that sprang out as obvious junkers, or whether any of the ones we’d marked were actually keepers.
We finished the process earlier this evening. Phew. Not only was it tough mentally and emotionally (putting away books is hard), but because we only have a ladder up to our loft, it was physically demanding, too (putting away boxes of books is hard). And of course, Alex wanted to help, so we had him to wrangle at the same time. We’re both going to be sore in the morning.
(In between the sorting and stacking, we found time to have a wee adventure today as well. We walked to Straiton Park, where we stopped of at Tk-Maxx and got me a nice new autumn jacket, and bought some stuff at Ikea. We had intended to just buy some more packing boxes, but they were out of stock. So we came back with a new chopping board, a wooden tray, and a packet of coat hangers instead. I like a fundamental law of nature: it’s not possible to visit Ikea and not buy anything. But we had a very nice walk out there–the haar didn’t close in until after we had got there.)
Phew, again. I think I’m going to sleep well tonight.