Reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the midst of: A.S. Byatt, Biographer's Tale; Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter

On deck: Suburban Nation; Invisible Man; Don Quijote

Moving: hrm

Watching: "Moulin Rouge"

9 March 2002: Wood

For ages I wanted a new bookcase. I had moved a row of books to the top of the wobbly poplar bookcase that we (I use the term loosely) constructed way back in the first Denver apartment, which displaced one of my castles to the top of another bookcase, where it couldn't be seen, and displaced from there a small wooden chest my grandmother painted to the top of shorter bookcases among my Pooh bookends and darts and a candelabra. I moved another row of books to the top of another bookcase, displacing another castle. I wanted to install brackets on the walls to make another set of shelves like that to the right of my desk. But maybe the studs weren't spaced correctly or I had no faith in my ability to mount brackets evenly enough for level shelves or I didn't know how to use the electric drill. Meanwhile, I've put software manuals in the shelves around the television (where they must be laid on their backs). I've culled books--I didn't particularly like The Arcadians and Kate completely betrayed everything set forth in Look through My Window. But mostly I set new books on the tops of other books and stacked the Dickens, the Dr. Dolittles, the Moomins.

Today I was removing the stupid icky old hardware from the sunroom, now that we finally have blinds there (mounted, not by me, by using an electric drill), when RDC came in and asked where I wanted to go. "Richter's," I replied, hesitating only so long as it took to remember a name.
"Richter's is a bar by Yale in New Haven," RDC pointed out. "D'you mean Rockler's?"
That's what I meant. The woodworking place. We were going to build me a bookcase, less wobbly than the eight-inch-deep poplar, sturdy and handsome.

I wanted a bookcase six feet high, four feet long, and deeper than an eight-inch plank (which is only 7"). Instead, we looked at yet more books. How to make Arts and Crafts furniture (where is there quartersawn oak?). How to make shelving. How to do groovy stuff like a nameplate for the house (but we have no jigsaw). Also, Build Your Own Coffin.

RDC spotted that title and showed it to me. I ogled. I bet there're lots of local and state laws at the insistence of the funeral industry, to quell that. "Call me Queequeg," I said, which made even him laugh.

But what can I say, I was fed up. I don't know how to use the tools, I'm a kinetic learner who must practice not just read manuals, and my ignorance is a problem; but RDC kept saying "let's do that this weekend" and we didn't. For a long time. A lovely glass-fronted bookcase would be lovely, but not what we needed in the den; even a square boring bookcase would be fine, but I had no confidence that we would build it. Ever.

I want to learn to use the woodworking tools and suggested that rebuilding the kitchen and sunroom window moulding would be a good project. In the meantime, I wanted a bookcase sooner than that. "Let's go to Scandinavian Design," suggested RDC. I was skeptical. We bought our desks--really just computer tables--there, and Danish modern looked fine in our apartments but isn't the sort of stuff we want in the house (at least on the main floor, where my study isn't). But okay. We went waaaaay out there (east Denver is Kansas, north is Wyoming, south is New Mexico, and west is Utah, yes we are city-dwellers) and walked in, and what did we see in the vestibule of the store, not even inside the store, but a six-foot high, four-foot wide, one-foot deep bookcase, for a hundred bucks.

It's laminate, but we couldn't build it for that little cost in wood, that little investment of time, and it is in my study, not a public space. Besides, laminate or not, it's a lot nicer looking than our previous bookcases. The edges aren't square but--bullnosed? beveled? I was supposed to have the dark laminate Service Merchandise bookcases, but they're too tall for the basement. So they're in RDC's office, which is public space in that it's on the main floor, with that color scheme, and doesn't have a door. But the desks are Danish modern.

Bookcase serendipity happened once before. I wanted a bookcase for my desk corner in the one-bedroom apartment, as tall as possible and three feet wide, so there'd still be enough room along that wall for our bikes. We went to Home Depot to buy wood, and there was my bookcase. We don't have the bikes in the bedroom anymore either. Yes, I like having a house.

So now I have a new bookcase.

The futon is still upstairs ("I see you have some furniture in the living room now," said SPM when he was over today) but once we figure out the taxes, we'll start the couch hunt again.

Now fiction starts in the new bookcase and gets all the way to G before the next case. The lower left shelf in the new bookcase is empty, because it's inconvenient. I am profligate of space. Tigger, Dickon, Madeline, Opus, and the pink elephant have a shelf all to themselves, which actually might be cruel since all my picture books are in the new case, and my notebooks and some blank books and my "Make Phoebe Smile" box of correspondence.

The general fiction ends in my study with two authors whose shelf-proximity I hadn't considered before. D.H. Lawrence and Ursula LeGuin. What would they talk about.