Priorities

This house thing, while very, VERY exciting, is definitely swallowing my life. Add to that a horrific upper respiratory infection that triggered my asthma and knocked me flat this week, and I am feeling super overwhelmed, like I am behind on everything, my to-do list stretching for miles.

Of course, thanks to the treatment for my sad lungs I have BOUNDLESS ENERGY (with a core of exhaustion) because of a short course of steroids (medrol this time, not prednisone, thank the heavens) and nebulizer treatment.

So naturally, in addition to cleaning out rooms of furniture and "stuff" that we don't want to bring to the new house, I've decided on a new project.

I have decided to catalogue every book in the house on index cards.

Not a full Dewey Decimal situation, but author, title, and genre on cards that are (for now) organized into rubber-banded stacks with a cover card that is color coded by room and bookshelf location.

Is this really, REALLY the highest priority task I could be doing right now?

Is it compulsiveness fueled by medrol tablets and albuterol mist?

Procrastination on the less pleasant things that must be done?

Maybe.

But it's also incredibly soothing, and a fun "break" activity in between dusting and moving stuff into storage tubs and deep cleaning baseboards and floors and cabinets.

It's amazing how many books we have, and how many I've forgotten about because in our current cozy home they are hiding behind instrument cases, or tucked into an overstuffed shelf.

This is one of the things I am most looking forward to in the new house -- BOUNDLESS BOOKSHELF SPACE. There are three walls of built-in bookshelves floor-to-ceiling, and one more built in in the hallway upstairs. There will be book space galore! I don't need to cull and purge my books anymore, which is incredible.

But I do want to set it up like a library, and we plan to get a little card catalog for shits and giggles. You can still buy the cabinets. I get a kick out of thinking about a house that's totally wired and wireless, has no landline phone, is all modern and high tech, but has a card catalog in it, albeit a very small one.

I've got the living room done already:

Look at them all! Just about 400 index cards in there...
Also, I love this lamp we found in HomeGoods. 

If only I could organize the other crap in the house this clearly and easily

I figure it will make it easier to set up our shelves and pack for the new house if we have a full reckoning of our inventory so far. It will make it so organized, so easy to group by genre and have the ability to find any book quickly, and even sign them out on the back of the card.

Should I be planning for the week while I'm frantically scribbling book titles and authors in my best handwriting? Probably. But it's a weird sort of grounding activity that's getting me through this bizarrely stressful period of transition, as exciting as it is.