Or, more accurately, 98 boxes now, and counting. I am trying to pack. Thursday morning a van will appear on my doorstep and someone will whisk all the boxes and most of the furniture (well, I’m keeping the bed, a girl needs someplace to sleep, after all, and the computer and desk) away to storage where it will remain until we have found a flat in Trondheim and are ready to move in.
I may have mentioned this before, but I have a lot of stuff.
And books. I have a lot of books.
To complicate the matter I am a bit obsessive about said books, insisting on updating the database (what do you mean “Database?”? Of course I have all my books registered in a database. Doesn’t everyone?) with the location of each book. As in: Which box each book has gone into. I am not entirely sure that there is any point to this (though I suppose it would make it easier to claim insurance should, god forbid, any boxes get lost in transit), but it makes me feel happier knowing that I have a system. Sort of. Except the actual packing and updating with box numbers is getting to me. I’d quite like to be done now. Which I’m not.
Another problem is that I keep finding books I’d meant to read but “forgotten” about. A. Edward Newton’s Amenities of Book Collecting…! How could I have forgotten that I finally found a decent and decently priced copy on ABE? Holbrook Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania! But I’ve been wanting to read that for ages! Why haven’t I? Oh well, only one thing to do: Read it now. The pile of books I can’t possibly put in storage because I really need to read them NOW is growing larger by the minute. At least this time around I’ve managed to supress the urge to refuse to put books I’m particularly fond of into storage. There are some books that, while I might not read them very often and might not look at them for months at a time, I have great qualms about placing anywhere where I can’t have immediate access to them should I want it. This time around it really is just books that I want to read as soon as possible that have gone into the “can’t be packed” pile. It’s still a largish pile, but it’s far from as large as it could have been (and has normally been, in the history of me moving).
In earlier moves I have also had the satisfaction of purging – that is, getting rid of stuff and books that I no longer want or need. Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately? I’m not entirely sure) I have gotten quite good at regular purging lately, I get rid of stuff and books as I go along. Which means that, with only a few boxes of books to go, I’ve found all of two – 2 – books I might as well get rid of (one being a paperback duplicate of one I have in hardback, one being a chickflick novel I’m never going to read).
All in all, I am now officially sick of packing. We are definitely not going to buy a flat we’re not 100% happy with because I really do not want to move again, ever.
This is probably the last post for a while – I’ll be off, probably packing. Speak to you again next week when all I have is the computer and a pile of books. Mind you, I might be reading instead.