Ever start a task and seriously wish you hadn’t?
A month or so ago I was getting work done in the house that involved knocking down a wall to extend my existing kitchen and fitting a whole new kitchen.
There are floor to ceiling bookshelves at one end of the room so before the work commenced, I packed up all my books. No mean feat.
Scoot forward a month and the work was complete…which meant that the books needed to go back on the newly painted shelves…all nine large boxes of them!
Previously there had been no rhyme nor reason as to how they had been arranged. (I can feel some of you book lovers twitching as I write that.) Books by the same author did tend to be grouped together but they most certainly were not in alphabetical order.
That had to change!
Was I up to the task?
Putting those books back proved to be something of an endurance event.
Initially I spread the alphabet out to allow space for the collection- A’s on one shelf, R’s nearer the floor and M’s in the middle of the middle shelf – you get the idea- and began to empty the boxes.
I quickly decided that there would also need to be a few separate sections for poetry books, biographies etc so each of those was assigned one of the smaller shelves.
As I unloaded each box, the shelves began to fill.
The alphabet gaps proved to be too tight, so shelves were stacked then oved along and down to squeeze in more R’s or S’s. The re-arrangement meant some of the books were lifted and shifted three and four times.
By the sixth box, the sweat was pouring off me and over three hours had passed.
By the seventh box, I’ll admit I was wishing I’d never started.
By the right box, I was cursing certain authors for writing such weighty tomes.
By the ninth box, I was exhausted.
More than five hours after I started the boxes were empty and the books were back on the shelves. There’s really not much room to spare!
Then my mother drops the bombshell – “We’ve got some of your books. When do you want them back?”
Aghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
Coral McCallum 