I can now find the books

I’m messy, but organized – if that makes any sense.

To an outsider, things may **look** like there’s no order (e.g. my overflowing desk). But I prefer to have my things carefully organized and sorted. For example, even though our home office is a mess, all of our extra computer gear is sorted into labeled boxes: extra keyboards; extra mice; USB and Firewire cables; and etcetera.

So: My wife and I both like books. Between the two of us we have nine Ikea Billy bookcases full of books in the library, plus one in the bedroom, plus half of one in the family room, plus the need for two additional. (I think that sums to 11.5.)

In our old house I had the books pretty well categorized: not alphabetized, but grouped by topic. Martial arts books in one cluster; gardening books in another place; computer books somewhere else. And they were also grouped by sub-category: the martial arts books were clustered by the country of origin (Japanese, Chinese, Korean…), and sub-clustered by style (Karate, Aikido, Judo, Ju-Jitsu, Ninjitsu…)

Because of this, I could find a specific book in under sixty seconds. I like this. Drives me nuts when I have something (book, tool, spare part…), but I can’t find it.

Unfortunately, when we moved to our current place, the books got shelved out of order: even though I had been careful to box them by category, the person helping us just shelved them based on what fit, rather than by topic.

March 17th, I couldn’t stand it any more: I spent about an hour in there rough-grouping some of the books. Unfortunately, it’s rather crowded in there – and we really **do** need two more bookshelves, so there’s a bit of stacking and juggling.

Each night I'd set a timer and spend 10-15 minutes rearranging books. Haven't done it the last few days, but I'm pleased to say that I'm close to completion. Not **all** the topics are sorted. But most of the "main" ones are.

And that's enough for me. I can find stuff again.


--GG