I realized when looking my blogs over that I hadn't updated this one in a long time. After all, it's not really "a new home chronicle" anymore, is it? We've been here twelve years. Some of our oldest neighbors have moved away, and, even though nice neighbors have replaced them, it's not the same. Most of the homes sold on this street are being bought to be rentals, and renters just don't care about their neighborhoods and the home as much as someone who actually has a stake in the house. (Some friends of ours have sadly learned this as a family member's home they rented was completely trashed. They have spent weeks trying to get it in shape to sell.) No one seems to want to own a home, at least in this area, anymore. A couple of miles up the road, maybe, near downtown Smyrna, where they can walk to the new Publix and the library and the little pond, maybe, but not here.

Life has been good here, but as the years have gone on aging has taken its toll on us. Two months after my previous entry here, James had to get a power chair. After two falls on the stairs which resulted in two compressed disks in his spine, the two heels of his feet riddled with bone spurs, two bad knees in which he gets steroid injections quarterly, and two arthritic hips, our health provider felt that this was necessary for him to have transportation to actually keep working, never mind actually go and amuse ourselves occasionally. He can no longer walk any long distances. Up until last spring he was coming out with me at night to walk the dog, but he can no longer even manage that.

In July 2016 he had the first of two heart attacks; the second of which was in September of 2017. One doctor freely admitted that he should have been catherized in 2015 when he was having minor chest pain and was sent to Northside Hospital for a battery of tests, but after 24 hours of testing they said he was okay and sent him home instead. We have made major dietary changes, with low-sodium and low-carb as our motto, but problems with his kidneys have continued to plague us. He started having kidney irregularities in December of 2015, but not one of his blood tests flagged the high scores, nor was he contacted by a doctor to get them checked out, so we didn't know they were abnormal until he had the first heart attack. For six weeks between March and April of this year he was actually on kidney dialysis thrice a week, until someone finally figured out the big problem wasn't his kidneys, it was his prostate gland. It is now so enlarged it is blocking his ability to completely empty his bladder. The overflow is is backflowing into his kidneys, causing most of the problems. He is now undergoing tests in that area to see what the ultimate solution to the problem is.

In December 2017, while starting out on a trip to Chattanooga, we were struck by a car running a red light. The back quarter of the black pickup truck was completely ruined, especially the right rear wheel, which was bent on its axle. The expensive power chair lift at the back of the truck was also ruined. The power chair was thrown across the road, but miraculously still works, although it was very scratched up. We spent the month of January searching out a new pickup and bought a white 2014 Toyota Tacoma we found at a small used car lot. We got enough from the insurance claim to pay for a new trailer hitch and chair lift and put something for a down payment. The black truck was showing power train problems, so it was probably for the best, but now James has a multi-year truck payment he didn't have before.

Our young pets Tucker, the hyperactive tricolor terrier, and Snowy, the white and grey budgie, are now mature guys. Tucker is less hyperactive, still very alert and very terrier-torial, and celebrated his fourth adoption day just recently. He will be five in the fall, and Snowy will be five in November. After learning to perch on my finger after months of coaxing, "Mr. Snow" had a complete personality change in October of 2015 and became a nipper. In the last few months he has been letting me scratch him behind the ears, and he talks up a storm, especially when I put on his favorite program, Leo Laporte's podcast "The Tech Guy." But finger sitting? No dice.

My milestone came in January of this year when I retired after nearly 33 years of Federal service. Workwise I just flat out couldn't take the stress of end-of-fiscal-year anymore and the traffic horror that is the Atlanta commute any longer. When we moved into this house it would take me forty minutes to get to work and an hour to get home. When I retired it was 45 to fifty miles in the morning, and 80 to 120 minutes for a ride home. Teleworking for eleven of the twelve years we have been here was a godsend, but even two or three days a week fighting traffic became draining. I'd also become a dinosaur at my job. CDC is no longer hiring purchasing agents; the trainee contract specialists cut their teeth on purchase orders and now everyone does them along with their contracts. There were only two purchasing agents left, and the other one was also contemplating retirement. Plus it had gotten more and more difficult for me to drive in the dark. I've never been able to drive well in twilight and it has gotten worse over the years; and except for the ten weeks around the summer solstice, I was pretty much driving to work in the dark daily. That and the crazy traffic was making me fearful. Last year the Atlanta Braves stadium moved seven miles from our house (we didn't get to vote on it; they just stuck it there and now it has eaten up all the county's budget for parks so that they are threatening to close half the parks around us) and made the traffic situation even worse.

In the months since January, when I haven't been keeping James company in a hospital room or going back and forth to doctors' appointments with him, I have been trying to get the house in order. I suppose everyone finds this out (except perhaps minimalists) as they get older, but you tend to accumulate the damnedest pile of junk as you live. You buy new stuff and toss some of the old stuff, but not all, and it just fades into corners, taking up more and more space each year. I've been wanting to tackle this junk for years, and now I have the chance.

I wish it looked a lot better, but it looks a little better and even that is a help. This is a brief summary of the progress (I'm sure it's a boring list to read, but these are major victories for me):

• I tidied up about 3/4 of the garage, tossing old boxes, general junk, and decanting my bicycle and putting it in a position that I can ride it rather than it being trapped near the nose of the pickup truck. This has also made room so that if James parks the truck properly he can walk around the front of it and not have to go out of the garage in extreme weather. However, I did not get a chance to tidy the tool shelves before the weather got too hot. Perhaps in November, when the air is breathable again.
• All the stored food has been cleaned out in the kitchen, downstairs in the pantry closet, and on the downstairs hall shelves. I had to completely empty the kitchen pantry after it was invaded by carpet beetles. We had stuff in there from when we moved! All old stuff or bug-infested stuff was thrown out, a big 33-gallon bag of it, a terrible shame. I had the exterminator come and treat, and then it was restocked so only sealed containers are on the floor. Good food that had too much sodium in it was donated to a friend's church's food pantry.
• The broken desk in the library is finally gone and all the backlogged books are shelved. I need more shelves.
• The closet in the spare room, which holds party supplies, things like vaporizers, all the wrapping paper, and two boxes of magazines was completely cleaned out. I added another box to hold advanced-purchased gifts, folded all the tissue paper neatly, and tossed out a box full of cloth material that I was never going to use. Convention programs were all boxed neatly and I tossed out some bad memories I didn't want to keep.
• The master bedroom closet was stripped of junk and storage drawers and boxes labeled.
• Various other things were organized and labeled (like stored Command hooks).
• Several boxes of usable stuff went to Goodwill, including computer speakers, working computer parts that we won't be using, extra keyboards and wired mice, housewares, gifts we weren't using, a few clothes (usually when clothes leave here they are not wearable).
• Broken electric and electronic things were dumped in the electronics recycling boxes for disposal in November, like broken fans, clocks, and my poor MopVac, which I haven't used since Swiffers came out and you can't get the rubber mop part anymore anyway.
• At least a half dozen full 33-gallon bags of junk have gone in the trash (maybe more).
• Four Xerox-paper boxes of books and DVDs went to McKay's and were actually traded for cash instead of credit.
• The hall closet was cleaned out until all cleaning and party supplies and light bulbs and paper towels and towels can be taken out safely.
• I discovered my 1974 graduation present tape recorder still plays, which is a good thing because I still have cassette tapes!
• I have made inroads in tidying my craft room so I can actually work in it. I have been doing a couple of very amateurish watercolor paintings and playing with watercolor pencils.

There is still much more to go but James' problems are depressing me and wearing me thin (so you can imagine what it's doing to him), so I've slowed down a bit. Summer always makes me depressed anyway; it's so hard to exercise when there's barely any air out there. I'm trying to do 30 minutes of activity a day, but it's a hard slog when it gets up into the 80s and all I want to do is sleep under an air conditioning vent.

But, as Walter Cronkite always said, "That's the way it is."

Labels: birds, books, bookshelves, crafts, decorating, DIY, dogs, food, furniture, house, kitchen, library, organizing, storage

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 10:06:00 PM

(0) comments

A "Gnedby" is what Ikea has renamed the narrow CD towers once known as "Benno." I bought two of them about a month ago for use down in the library. Yes, they are very narrow, but I thought they would be perfect for use with regular paperbacks, small trade paperbacks, and even small hardbacks like Whitman books. I'd planned to put them together the last Friday I was off, but I had a stinking headcold and a low-grade fever instead. I'd worked through most of both and was damned if I was going to assemble shelving while blowing my nose every five minutes.

Ikea stuff is simple to assemble, especially if there aren't drawers or doors, so these went together easily. Annoyed to find out, though, that the "lock screws" they're now using are plastic. How cheap. Bad enough they quit making all the nice Leksvik stuff—glad we got our china cabinet and bed and the side table and James' night table when we did!—and stopped making the CD dividers for the Billy shelving.

While the shelving didn't take me long, the book shifting did. I love my books, but not having to shift them around in large quantities. The first Gnedby went into the narrow space between a Billy bookcase holding biographies at the top and travel books at the bottom. and the door to the library, and I moved any paperback biographies and small-sized biographies, like the Dell Yearling book of Jean Fritz's biography and the two of Beverly Cleary, into it. A few health books went on the bottom and now there is biographical room again—well, until I finish all the books I have about Theodore Roosevelt, etc. at least! To top it, a foam pumpkin hollowed to hold fall flowers.

The second Gnedby went into the bay between the children's books on the right and my Christmas books and bound volumes of "St. Nicholas" on the left. Again, I picked paperbacks, small hardbacks like children's books, small trade paperbacks, to go on these shelves. I could then rearrange the bookcase so that the World Book Encyclopedia Christmas books and my big Augsberg Christmas annuals, which had been on the floor between two bookends, were shelved.

I tried to arrange the little shelves with some kind of a theme. The topmost shelf is fiction. The second shelf is all my favorite Christmas fiction, the stuff I read every year, from The Cottage Holiday to Christine Kringle. The third shelf is some other fiction and the next is some books about Santa Claus, from the Jeff Guinn trilogy to When Santa Was a Shaman, and the rest are nonfiction books about Christmas history, origins, and customs. You can spy the "St. Nicholas" statue that my cousin Deanna made for my mom on the bookcase to the far left—what better place for it than with "St. Nicholas" magazines?

The library's still pretty crowded; at some point I'm going to buy six of the 15-inch wide Billy shelves and put them up at the end caps of the stacks to add more space. My history books runneth over!

Labels: books, bookshelves, decorating, organizing

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 5:39:00 PM

(0) comments

We went to Ikea tonight...yay! They finally had the five other shelves we needed for the bookcases downstairs. (The Ikea website says they are not in stock yet, so we were quite happy.)

I also bought one of the narrow (15 inch wide), short (41 inch) Billy bookcases. Behind our sofa we have two media "bookcases" that I bought at Target several years ago. These are cherry colored, only about 30 inches tall (about the height of a sofa table), and about the same wide. The shelves are also narrow-widthed, since they were made especially for videotapes and DVDs. Before we moved into the house, I went back to get another. The sofa is 92 inches long and three would just fit behind it.

Well, they would have if Target still made them. Grumble. We've had some cheap stackable DVD holders between the two of them, but they just looked...cheap. The Billy is an okay alternative, although it's too tall and deeper than the others by three inches. The big problem is that the unfinished back of the Billy sticks up over the back of the sofa. I'm going to need to dig in the trunk for one of Mother's bureau scarves to cover up the eyesore.

Labels: bookshelves

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 11:07:00 PM

(0) comments

Well, it's not finished, but I'd say it's over eighty-five percent done.

We assembled the other four bookshelves and put them in place. Then James went upstairs to deal with some kitchen projects and I spent about three hours reshelving books. I haven't had such a good time doing hard work in a long time.

The history books now have their own bookcase. I want to organize the books by subject at some point, all World War II homefront books together, all Victorian/Edwardian books together, general American or British histories together.

The linguistics books are taking up half a bookcase. At the top of that one we also have our "art" books: Escher, Kincaid, Rockwell, and the Taaschen advertisement books.

The organizational books and our photos are now in one of the "cap" bookcases on the end.

One bookcase is actually almost empty, which I find enjoyable. Room for more! I have magazines in magazine holders and a few books (Roman albums for Star Blazers and Blake's 7 annuals) at the bottom. I'm going to sort through the magazines and bring all the decorating ones to work, just leaving the Reminisce issues and Best of British. I've found my "decorating style" and don't need them any longer.

One bookcase has now enabled me to separate the regular novels from the science fiction and fantasy novels—and there's room for James' Tom Clancy collection, too.

I've spread out my children's book collection in a rather higgilty-piggilty fashion in the second bookcase. All the "Little House" books are together at last.

The "cap" bookcase here holds all the American Girl books and underneath my copies of the Junior Classics and my books about children's books, like Gillian Avery's Behold the Child and also Where the Heather Grows, and the St. Nicholas anthologies, a Youths Companion sampler, and a book about The Brownies Book.

Last finished was the wall between the entry door and the bathroom. I have put one of my grandmother's kitchen chairs under the light switch, replacing the small bookcase that held the magazines and some computer books, with the computer desk we bought for the old computer next to it. But we erred when we bought that desk; it's too bulky and looks out of place. When we get a chance we are probably going to replace it. The small bookcase is now on the other side of the computer desk, under two magnetic bulletin boards James mounted on the wall. There are still some computer books in it and part of our collection of Backwoods Home.

Still need to figure out what to do with the Starlog issues.

And of course, now we need the other shelves.

But they're all up. Yay!!!

Labels: books, bookshelves, library

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 5:33:00 PM

(0) comments

Two more down.

Friday afternoon I phoned Ikea, and the extra shelves that we needed for the pair of bookcases we had earmarked for the paperbacks were not back in stock yet.

Things that are out of stock for a while like that make me nervous, especially when you have begun a project in a certain color and are going to keep needing that color until you finish. What if the beech-color bookcases were on their way out? It would look terrible if we had to buy the four other bookcases in another color.

I phoned James and asked him if he wanted to have supper at Ikea. So it was chicken marsala again before going downstairs and picking up the remainder of the bookcases. One is not really expensive. Four are a bit of sticker shock. But now we're done buying bookcases.

Having nowhere to put them last night, we just stacked everything in the hall.

Tonight, after supper, we did the two paperback bookcases, even if we didn't have the shelves. What happened is I "cannibalized" two of the shelves meant for James' paperback bookcase for mine. Mine are now all out of the smaller bookcase I built and re-shelved. James used the two shelves that were left and shelved books he had left in one Xerox paper box and some fiction novels that he had finished that were upstairs. The rest can stay in the other set of bookshelves that I built that are in the "bay" between bookcases for now, and we'll keep watching Ikea. If it gets to the point that they don't get the beech-finish extra shelves in and we get fed up, we can always buy birch shelves, which are just a shade off. Since the shelving will be in the back, it won't be that noticable.

It was after ten when we finished, so we figured we will do the rest tomorrow.

We also re-hung the wire shelving in the garage that collapsed, recounted in the March 7 post. We added more hooks, including installing a couple upside down so the shelf couldn't pop up and out. We also distributed the weight of the boxes a bit better. Hope that works out.

Labels: books, bookshelves, Ikea, storage

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 10:29:00 PM

(0) comments

(Or "Project Library, Part 2")

Yay!

Labels: books, bookshelves

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 10:31:00 PM

(0) comments

Upon rising this morning, we got the two dark bookcases and one of the oak-finish bookcases into the truck bed. Unfortunately the second oak bookcase would not fit, so I popped the hatch on the car, folded down my back seats and the passenger front seat. The other oak case just fit in the body of the car, although we couldn't latch the hatch. James and I bungee-corded it in, and I bungee'd the door to the latch and we wended our way to Goodwill. Watching the hatch door in the rear view mirror was a quick lesson in aerodynamics; as I speeded up it rose, as I braked at stop signs, it lowered.

And so the oak monstrosities are gone.

James gathered his models and trucked (literally <g>) to the IMPS meeting. I backed my car out into the driveway and swept out the garage, which hadn't been done since last fall. Since I was out there anyway, I also got out the Ortho and sprayed around the garage doors and also right at the foot of the steps where we had the ants running last August. I'm not taking any chances with the little buggers.

When that was finished I had a WallyWorld trip, since I was out of oatmeal and yogurt. Got a few other groceries we needed. I can't seem to get out of WallyWorld for under $50 most times. $51 today.

Back at the house, I assembled the record stand I had bought a month ago at Linens'n'Things. At some point I will get the Crosley phonograph so I can play Mom's 78s, but right now all I can budget is a stand. I am going to put James' records in it. I want the stand that is $20 more, since it has a shelf for my 45s (it's linked here). When we get the Crosley I will either put it downstairs, or put the stereo-phonograph I have downstairs; then James can play his records when he's modeling.

(I should get rid of a few of my LPs. I have bought all the George Winston LPs I have on CD as well, so I could play them at work.)

So tonight we made a quick stop at the Borders in Buckhead (man, and I thought we had trouble driving through Buckhead years ago; the traffic is even worst now, with all of the upscale restaurants and bars). James finally found "Launch" magazine, which is only being sold at selected Borders; the Buckhead store is the largest in the area. I found a very interesting book called Huck's Raft, a sociological study of American childhood.

Then we went to Ikea for supper—I'm very fond of their chicken marsala—and we bought two more Billy bookcases. They're now downstairs waiting to be assembled.

(Ikea also had some little scatter rugs for $2. We bought one for Willow, who is very reluctant to stay downstairs with James when he models; she wants desperately to be with him, but she also is upset when "the pack" is not together. We have put the scatter rug in her crate so it will get her scent on it, and then we'll put it downstairs. Maybe it will make her more comfortable. Also, in the scratch'n'dent room, we found a little plastic dog food bowl in lime green for twenty cents. This can go in the car with the free Lassie bowl we got last year and these can be Willow's bowls when we go traveling.)

[11:20 p.m. Bookshelves are up. Took us an hour and fifteen minutes, maybe a few minutes more. Did make one boo-boo. The bottom shelf on one case is backwards, with the raw side out. Unfortunately we didn't notice it until everything was hammered together (the back nailed on and all that). Hm. Delta Apple Barrel Gloss has a similar brown. Maybe I can cover it up with my trusty paintbrush, or at least make it less noticeable. It doesn't make any difference to the strength of the unit, it's just an esthetic thing.

Oh, here's the stand, Emma.]

Labels: books, bookshelves, dogs, Ikea, records

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 9:24:00 PM

(2) comments

When last we met...James and I went to Ikea last Saturday and bought two 31" wide Billy bookcases with the height extensions. We had emptied the old bookcases, piling the books haphazardly nearby, and moved the shelves out to the hallway temporarily—since he was working this weekend—for transport to Goodwill next weekend, vacuumed the space, then we put together the new bookcases and put them in place.

At 10:30 this morning, after eating breakfast during an episode of Wishbone (how appropriate!), I trucked downstairs. The "reloading" took awhile because I wanted to categorize the books, so I had to pick through them as I reshelved. I started with a bottom shelf of oversized books of every persuasion, including James' big Buck Rogers in the 24th Century strip compilation volume, and another bottom shelf of full-color heavy paper aircraft magazines. There are also three shelves of books about airplanes, one of paperback books about aviation during World War II, then hardback books about World War II aviation, a shelf just of World War II, a shelf of military-type books (including Tom Clancy's nonfiction), a shelf of books about Vietnam and Korea, a shelf of science fiction oriented nonfiction, a miscellaneous shelf which includes medieval books, and a shelf of rocketry/space/modeling books.

We managed to collect, before they quit making them, a black tower unit that is 12 inches wide. Presently it was beside to the two oak bookcases that I hate, next to the door opening into the room. But when we buy the next two Billy units to replace the oak bookcases, the three units next to each other will not fit and allow the door to open all the way back to the doorstop.

So I emptied the tower unit and "walked" it across the room; it fit just right between the side of the Billy and the window ledge. Then I reshelved most of what was in there: things like the Red Cross survival manual and other books about dealing with crisis, the money management/smart shopping books, etc. I had some nonfiction books about children's literature that I had stored there, too, but I put these on top of the bookcases with the St. Nicholas volumes.

Here are the two Billy bookcases and the tower:



Would you believe all those books in the Billys were in two of these?:



While I was down there I also rearranged the shelves in the St. Nicholas bookcase (in part to show off the beautiful St. Nicholas statue my cousin Deanna made for my mom and who now "guards" the magazines), and rearranged the Christmas/seasonal books. Then I started emptying out the oak-finished bookcases, but only managed one before Mr. Stomach started to growl. I'd worked down there nearly six hours on a cup of latte yogurt, a glass of milk, and one of those Special K protein bars.

St. Nicholas guards St. Nicholas:



Half the "icky oak" bookcases emptied:



When I got upstairs to have some more milk and a SlimFast meal bar, there on Design on a Dime they were re-doing a couple's library! Came out too cool, too! (But we have more books...LOL.)

[Update: 6 p.m. James is home with Boston Market chicken. After Design on a Dime I emptied the other oak bookcase and vacuumed again.]

Labels: books, bookshelves, library

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 6:03:00 PM

(1) comments

I had to raise myself from torpor this morning. I don't know what is with this cold, but it is leaching away so slowly. I still get hoarse at night and still cough occasionally and am so damn tired.

Anyway, it was time to get back to business, since all the holidays are over. We went to Ikea and bought the first two Billy bookcases of the remainder we need to finish the library. These are the two that will be used for James' nonfiction books. We bought the extenders for the top, so we have nearly nine feet of bookcase (by five feet wide). We assembled them tonight in about 90 minutes (we were moving fast on the last one because we wanted to see the AKC Agility Championships). Right now the old bookcases are out in the hall near the laundry room and there they will have to stay for two weeks since James has to work all of next weekend (he's got a class on a new system). The next weekend he's free (knock on wood), we'll take them to Goodwill, since they're still good (just not large enough).

So that's my project for next weekend, reshelving the books. I'll try to keep all the different categories—aviation, space, military history, etc.—on their own shelves.

The next bookcases to go will be the ones near the door to the library. These are still good and will go to Goodwill as well, but I'll be glad to get rid of them. They are "oak" finish and I loathe oak. This set will be for the biographies, the travel books, the animal books, the space program books, the trivia books, the few science books, and the miscellaneous books, like The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection.

Oh, and we did actually buy a breadbox. James has complained that our potatoes always sprout or turn green before we can use them. He was reading a book or magazine about keeping food and it said that potatoes age quickly in light and in the open. Ours are in an open bin on top of the microwave, near the kitchen window. So last Thursday after work I did a major clean out of the pantry and left enough room for one of Ikea's wooden breadboxes. We'll be keeping potatoes in there from now on.

Labels: books, bookshelves, food, kitchen, library

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 10:48:00 PM

(1) comments