Reading: Below the Root

Moving: Didn't go for a walk

Learning: We have 87 shelf-feet of books.

1 May 2000: Grumpy

In the evening, when my mood lifted.I added some pictures to 19 March. I took pictures of every snowfall that I thought might be the last.

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When Blake gets tired of dinging his beak against the Frangelico canister that's meant to keep him from chewing on corners or singing in his oatmeal box, he clambers up the variety of toys that hangs from the top perch. It is how he indicates "I am helpless without you, since I don't know how to climb down, so please come and pick me up now."

Today I took pictures of Blake and his filthy, pea-encrusted beak, and RDC took a picture of him trying to climb up cables (much slicker than his toys, with no purchase) to get to the desk, and yesterday I took a picture of him peering from the top of the bookcase upon which this playpen sits into the newly-emptied top shelf. None of these came out.

Another picture I took a while ago and had better post before it becomes obsolete is of my corner of the world. I'm pretty sure that's Shelley's index page on Fiver, but I don't remember which of her bizarre twisted animals was blue. Have I posted a picture of my desk before? If I didn't, I meant to after Sara illustrated her desk a while back. No, but I described it.

So. This is at least a couple of months ago because we still had the futon. The big pillow is leaning against the dartboard backboard, which makes a convenient prop when it's not on the door. The backboard and actual dartboard can't live on the study door or the front door (the only two available spaces with enough distance) because they're too likely to fall. RDC is looking forward to putting up the dartboard permanently in the house.

Then the big bookcase we bought in 1998 sometime. I wanted some space in my teeny corner of the bedroom in the old place for my stuff and we briefly considered building another, but found this when questing for lumber at Home Despot. On top are my 3D puzzle of Camelot and my grandmother's collections of marbles and seashells (Long Island shells). First shelf, Celtic history, Elizabeth Bowen (The Last September is going to be made into a movie!). Second shelf, blank books, a 400-year-old book RJH gave me for a wedding present, The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, and the Earthsea trilogy, and my Curious George lunchbox full of crayons and colored pencils, plus another box covered with illustrations from a Curious George calendar, filled with art supplies. Third shelf: notebooks, a tin Whitman sampler box of stationery (because my sister and I loved the cardboard ones), and Tigger wearing the "Summer Reading" hat my babysitting family gave me. Fourth shelf, paper and catalogs hidden by the pillow and three boxes, one with art supplies, another with Christmas card supplies, and the third and most important, where I stow my letters and things before they go into permanent boxes elsewhere. The blue bumpersticker on the box says "Make Phoebe Smile!" which was the fund-raising slogan for my library's expansion several years ago. (I'm not the only one who calls it Phoebe, except I think the Phoebe of the bumpersticker might refer to the woman whose name the institution carries, not to the institution itself. I myself do not distinguish between the woman and the institution.) The fifth shelf is general non-fiction: Women and the Law, Against Our Will, Europe in the Middle Ages, Granddaughters of Corn.

Turn the corner. My paper model of Caernavon Castle lies atop a bookcase we bought with a gift certificate from Hold Everything that NBM gave us as a wedding present. Top shelf, a stack of Penguin Austen and Brontës and The Jane Austen Quiz and Puzzle Book, then Watership Down, The Clan of the Cave Bear, Possession, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Mandy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Phantom Tollbooth, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Wrinkle in Time, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, Jacob Have I Loved, The Catcher in the Rye, The Changeling, Jackaroo, and Temple of My Familiar. Missing are The Mists of Avalon (with the Celtic fiction), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (with general fiction, behind this shot), and others that go with their authors.
Second shelf, L'Engle, children's books, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Dark Is Rising sequence, two Dr. Dolittles, Where the Wild Things Are and The Jessie Wilcox Mother Goose.
Third shelf, Sisters, Medieval Art, A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, an atlas, and four Dr. Dolittles.
Fourth shelf, Swallows and Amazons books, Cynthia Voigt, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Fifth shelf, Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes books and some picture books, like Madeline, that are too tall for the sixth shelf, which holds an illustrated Hans Christian Andersen book Danish Ulla gave us for a wedding present, Our Bodies, Ourselves, a few Chris van Allsburgs, poetry, my Riverside Shakespeare and my not-David Benson Chaucer, The Art Pack, and The Music Pack.
Seventh shelf, more nonfiction: Feminist Research Methodology, The Rise of the Hapsburgs Monarchy and Uppity Women of Medieval Times (that was a gift).

Then my Lego Castle with my pink Fisher-Price dragon atop the little bookcase I bought for two bits at a tag sale: Fowler's Modern English Usage, Roget's, Wheelock's Latin, Ille le Pu, The Elements of Style, The Elements of Editing, and of course, Van Winkle's Return.

That little one is on top of the larch one, which has first writing books (Living by Fiction, Bird by Bird, A Circle of Quiet, A Room of One's Own) and second, Margaret Atwood including The Handmaid's Tale, A.S. Byatt excluding Possession, Susannah Kaysen including Girl, Interrupted, and Alice Walker excluding Temple of My Familiar. Third and fourth, my favorite non-fiction: Mary, Queen of Scots; A Distant Mirror; For the Love of Books: A History of the Libraries of Old Lyme, Connecticut; A Mouthful of Air; Dr. Seuss Goes to War; What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew; The Tao of Pooh; The Great Cat Massacre; Forbidden Knowledge.

Madeline sits on my asparagus pencil box and Opus on my blue and green Slinky. My grandmother's pink ceramic elephant and little radio shaped like a Tropicana orange, and shells and pictures finish that off. Above, the birth announcement picture of ZBD, a wax plaque of St. Mark as a lion (a gift of RJH), and The Unicorn in Captivity, which I bought from the Cloisters. The collage of my favorite greeting cards (and you can just see the bottom fringe of the feathery Hallowe'en mask I wore to volunteer at a Colorado NARAL silent auction). Then lots of photographs: under the card collage, my girls, the youngest of whom just turned 19 on Saturday, three collages and two frames.

Just to finish the photograph, though: under the desk is a box of the only books I haven't unpacked (ones with my names in the acknowledgments and sewing books), and to the right is Fiver's tower. On the far right that's the chair shoved way out of the way, and the handle of the Nordic Track slung with the elastics RDC uses to strengthen his nonconnective shoulders.