Feeling: literate
Listening to: Vast - Somewhere Else to Be
Reading/Watching: Georgette Heyer - Bath Tangle

I have too many books.

Moving in to my apartment, I bought two sets of stacking bookshelves, so that I had a total of six four-foot-wide shelves, nearly seven feet tall when stacked. I was so happy that I could finally bring all my books from home (I could never fit more than a dozen or so in the dorm rooms). I even left half of my old books behind, because I'd outgrown them, and brought my favorites lovingly to my new home, thinking of all the extra space I'd have for new reading.

Then I filled the shelves. And started stacking the books two deep. Then putting books sideways on top of rows of other books. Textbooks I didn't want to sell back went into a long, shallow box under my bed.

When I was in the hospital, some people brought me more books. Those went into the big deep drawer of my nightstand so I could read them while I healed. I used up half of my campus bookstore account on english literature novels for classes I wasn't even taking. They went into a neat pile on my floor.

So today, Nimsay and I went to a housewares store, and I decided to buy another bookshelf. She bought two, because she has been living out of tipsy wire crates, and I bought one: a beautiful, four-tier, tall narrow folding bookshelf that would fit right next to my desk without preventing my bedroom door from opening.

I loaded the big flat boxes upright and slantwise into a single shopping cart, maneuvered sixty or eighty pounds of unwieldyness to the checkout, and walked it across two parking lots to my car, across the lane from where we ate lunch.

The parking lot was on an incline, so I braced one corner of the roll-happy cart against Luna's rear bumper, opened my trunk, and began wedging in the first box.

On the sly, the other two bookshelves decided to make a run for it. They leaned into gravity, throwing the cart's momentum forward. It slid off the bumper, and headed toward the neighboring SUV.

"No! Wait!" I yelled ineffectually, arms still full of the first box.

The cart glanced off the SUV, setting the alarm chirping and leaving two brief, parallel scratches in the driver-side door, then careened toward the curb, and the fence, beyond which lay a six or seven foot drop and a brief tumble down to the interstate access road.

"Stop!" I begged (because bookshelves are sentient and they can hear you), finally getting the first box in place just in time to watch the cart crash fantastically into the curb, and tip forward. The weight of the slanted boxes pulled it sideways once the back two wheels left the ground, and it whomped onto the grass just shy of the fence, scraping past Luna's front bumper along the way.

Nimsay, ever helpful, burst out laughing.

I wrestled the boxes out of the cart, righted it back on its wheels, and began dragging the errant boxes toward my open back door. The owner of the SUV came out of the restaurant behind us, clicked a button to make the alarm reset, and gave me a reproachful look. I sent up a brief prayer of thanks that she didn't see the scratches (they were tiny, really, and who knows whether or not they were there before?).

Once we got home, Nimsay's two bookshelves assembled just fine, but the one I bought was cracked and had a small piece broken off. I returned it to the store (completely justified- the other runaway bookshelf was totally free of crash scars), and brought home a new one.

The new one was built slightly off, and wouldn't line up right. I decided to skip the fancy stuff and make sure it would hold up rectangular things with pages. It did, so I didn't return that one.

Then I spent a lovely hour pulling out all the unloved books piled on floors, stacked in front or on top of others on the shelves, loaded in drawers, concealed under the bed. I arranged them fetchingly on the new shelves, thinking happily of how much more space I would have now, to put any new reads that came along.

It wasn't long before the booger was completely full.

I have too many books.

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