A Month of Books

Managed to sort through my books and put them away. The following pictures show my idea of ‘tidy’! There are hundreds more books in other bookcases and rooms.

The third photo (just above) is the reject pile… am ‘signing them off’ from my book database (when not feeling too tired and unmotivated). In the picture you can just about see a few Dean Koontz novels, including The Taking (large white hardback), Demon Seed (red) and Velocity.

Decided to see which books I’ve read in the past month (information taken from my journal):

The Taking (Dean Koontz) I already referred to it here.
Mr Murder (Dean Koontz) DK raised a sub-theme in this book of the importance of stories and novels.
Icebound (Dean Koontz) Very good. An Alistair Maclean type thriller. It’s the only one of DK’s novels I passed to Mum to read, as I didn’t think she would like the gory or supernatural occurences in the others!
Reader’s Digest Good Health Fact Book Mum brought it home and I read some of the sections and pondered! So it counts a little bit.
The Good Guy (Dean Koontz) Pretty good. You wondered who ‘Doorman’ was.
Demon Seed (Dean Koontz) Scary. Finished it in three hours.
Lightning (Dean Koontz) Better than I hoped. Quite science-fictional.
The Darkest Evening of the Year (Dean Koontz) Comment from my journal: “…too much about dogs and arsonists, but struggling on with it.” One of the villains had a perspective on women who write diaries! He believed there was no meaning in life, and it was dangerous to imagine there was. I had the thought that if you’re a prawn, you might end up in a dish of Stir-Fried Prawns with Pak Choi. I don’t know what that means.
Panicology (Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams) About fears whipped up by the media. Less lightweight than I expected. Some of it was of interest, but in other places I felt it was as much opinion as anything. People’s priorities differ, and nobody has a crystal ball.
Outsider (John Francome) – my current reading. Interesting, but running some risks where I’m concerned. Will see…

In my journal, shortly after my comment on whether there’s meaning in life for prawns, I mentioned reading an article, by Louis Menand in The New Yorker, on why people read diaries. It said we get a better idea of what people are ‘like’ from seeing them through the eyes of others — so diaries mentioning others are more interesting (and illuminating) than those focused on self.

Again, it depends on priorities! Imagine if something happened and people had to live underground. It might be all you knew, if you were born there… but there could be an archive of books and diaries about living on the surface. In those circumstances, you would absorb all the bits about the warmth of the sun on your skin, and birds warbling away to themselves.

Just a thought…

PS: Checked the difference between diaries and journals — I definitely write the latter, though not as creative as I would like! Sometimes wish I could write less, so that ‘taking your diary with you’ would mean a couple of moleskin pocket books for the whole of your life. That’s because I worry about space, storage, flood and fire. (What would you save in a fire? I expect a multi-volume journal would be left behind). But this post is quite inspiring. Happy journalling!

Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake

My sister found ‘more neighbour wilting stuff’ – this one a video clip of Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It’s ‘We Are Homeless’, if I remember right. A friend hated it – she said it sounded like someone panicking, and it made her panic too.

I’m trying to sort through boxes and files of paper and notepads from my house. It’s a boring job and I really don’t want to do it – except that I keep finding some strange things. There was a tiny hand-made book with mostly blank white pages in it. The names of countries were written at the top of the pages in my neatest tiniest handwriting. Not all of the pages are blank… there’s an old Chinese stamp, and three old Indian stamps… all in very poor condition, and all quite old. I’m not a stamp collector and never really fancied the idea, so I was completely stumped. What was this?

Mum is the stamp collector – she took a look and said they had bits missing and are worthless. She must have chucked them away. I said maybe I made it for one of my… ah!! And suddenly a memory flooded into my brain… only it felt more like a realization than a memory. It hurt. I didn’t remember it… it all just felt right. Just the sort of strange thing I would have done around the age of 23… I made it for one of my bears’ children.

Good grief.

Even worse, I have just this minute found a blank A4 sheet of paper… blank, that is, except for something written at the top in my handwriting.

“Not heard from you for a while. Are you still alive, or have you been overtaken by the Saargataans and made to lose your memory of who you are and who you know?”

I don’t remember it at all – and I don’t remember who the Saargataans are. Perhaps it was me they caught up with?

Comments for this entry (during its previous life on Blogigo):

1. Geosomin wrote at Dec 6, 2007 at 15:33: I had that Paul Simon album…
Isn’t it wierd how you can find older things and look at your own handwriting or work and be utterly stumped as to how and why they happened? I always found it a little disconcerting that I could so completely forget parts of my life…

2. Diddums wrote at Dec 6, 2007 at 16:39: That’s probably the real reason I’m not enjoying sorting through any of that stuff – it’s as though I’m looking through the belongings of a stranger…

3. Pacian wrote at Dec 6, 2007 at 18:05: I’d tell you about the Saargataans, but you have to wear your tinfoil hat first, to avoid their mind rays…

4. Diddums wrote at Dec 6, 2007 at 18:17: Um…. (scrabbles through the mess on her desk). Was sure I had one somewhere… “that might come in useful,” said I to myself, only I can never find it.

5. Geosomin wrote at Dec 6, 2007 at 23:10: You can borrow mine

6. Diddums wrote at Dec 7, 2007 at 00:14: Thank you. . There, I’m safe from the Saargataans – for now.

Trying Not to Make Such a Meal of Things

Something I wrote in an email to a friend:

I’m a bit of a procrastinator, busy or not – with me it’s always: “I’ve got to do this PROPERLY!” Prepare the ground and get my plans in order and be sure of plenty of time off… therefore nothing gets done.

For instance I might say, “I should creosote the shed” and nothing happens, because I need the whole day, and to get up early, and lots of sun and fresh air, and enough creosote, and all the brushes, and the stuff to clean them, and the jars to clean them in, and the old clothes to wear, and the bags to put down round the shed to protect everything, and water to wash down anything I splashed accidentally, and a dry brush to brush down the shed and remove all the dust and cobwebs and little spiders and bugs.

Just doesn’t happen, as the thought of all the planning and work puts me off before I even get started.

Then Mum comes along and says “I should creosote my shed,” and buys a tin of stuff, and when she finds ten minutes between ‘Flog It!’ and ‘Countdown’, she’s out there (in her good clothes, minus dry brush, jars, bags et all, with an overcast sky lowering), and she’s already halfway through covering the shed with this creosote. And finally she comes back in, and says “there, that was a messy job; the stuff was like water and sprayed all over me!” and smells of spilled petrol…. but her work is done.

Maybe the secret is to play down the preparation and just throw yourself into it!

One day, doubtless, I’ll just do the website without having planned it. Just – “eh, that annoys me!” and next thing you know, I’m up to the ears in code and graphics. That’s usually how it happens.

Must admit, Mum can get to grips with the shed but would never put up a website in a month of Sundays. She would be much more likely to chop down trees and put up entire sheds than make a website. So I guess I shouldn’t underplay my ‘getting to grips’ with stuff – it’s just different stuff. She’s left me a message asking me to look at her printer today, which has gone on strike. I sorted it out last time it did that. I was muttering to her about it not being at all intuitive – you need to consult the map to find out where all the printer options are; they’re hidden in the unlikeliest places. I wrote out a couple of sheets of instructions for her concerning the printer alone, but now maybe the problem is something different.

Well, the printer seemed to have healed itself – I tried to print out a blog post from Aw Diddums, and instead it spat out five pages of a route description. Then it started printing them out all over again, and I stopped it, and checked the job queue, and it had five or six of the same jobs waiting – and one of Aw Diddums. Managed to clear all that without deleting the printer from the computer (which I did twice before; once on Mum’s and once on my own – at least it also cleared the jobs queue while it was at it!)

So that was all right. Except that Mum said originally it was refusing to print her route description – it did two pages then stopped. I don’t know what that was about. I said either she accidentally turned the printer off, or it had to be ‘turned off then on again’ to clear the block (a corrupted file or something). I hope this isn’t some kind of printer glitch I will start seeing in my own sweet printer. I would be very disappointed.

Anyway… I must get on with my procrastinating.

Comments for this entry (during its previous life on Blogigo):

1. Pacian wrote at Apr 5, 2007 at 12:04: I’m doing my procrastinating later. Maybe tomorrow.

2. Geosomin wrote at Apr 5, 2007 at 16:21: Procrastination is something I keep meaning to try…:)

I know the feeling. I fixed up a room in December with my Dad and I’m STILL in the midst of painting it… just too daunted by the day or two of hard work after all the mudding and sanding and priming I”ve finally gotten thru. That’s my goal for this weekend – to finish it up.

Truth is if I don’t soon my husband may kill me as all the stuff from that room has been sitting in the rest of the house for 3 months. The planning thing is what gets me too…It’s just a little room…but so daunting!

3. Jo (kitschkitten) wrote at Apr 6, 2007 at 08:09: Hey Diddums,

I find the secret to overcome procrastination on one thing is to be procrastinating on another thing. Eg. today I was supposed to be fixing up a website, looking for jobs and about a dozen other things – but because they are all a bit overwhelming, I have found myself instead spring cleaning the house. I had been meaning to spring (autumn) clean the house properly for a long time though! So at least something is getting done…

4. Diddums wrote at Apr 8, 2007 at 01:39: Pacian: ha ha…

Geosomin: it’s funny how it’s hard to get oneself doing something one dreads, but then when you get started, you almost enjoy it. Or at least feel it’s not the end of the world. Well… I don’t know, I’ll have to think about that. Sometimes I get a bit lost in the middle of something I didn’t want to do anyway.

Jo: I found that too, recently – I was so busy not doing A that I suddenly found myself in the middle of doing B. And the euphoria from finally cracking B carried me into doing A quite soon after. Hoorah.

PS: I heard back from my friend, saying that in the time it took me to write all that in my blog post, I could have finished creosoting the shed! But he can’t know me that well… I would still be carefully brushing off the spiders.