I haven’t posted much for the last month, mostly because I’ve been busy and exhausted. A big project at work that I’m in charge of — the complete reorganization of one of our lines of books — has turned out to be much more complicated than expected, something like four or five times as much work as we’d originally planned (I know, I know, that’s probably true of half the big projects in the world), and yet at the same time it’s very time-sensitive — every week longer the project takes costs us money in sales, and if we’re much later finishing up than mid-March, we will miss our window of opportunity for six months’ of sales altogether and it will cost us a huge amount of money. So there’s been a lot of pressure to keep the workflow moving, which has meant some overtime, a lot of extra stress, and very little energy and time left over for blogging. Fortunately all of that is almost finished.

As if that weren’t enough, Dave and I have been crazy enough to pick February as the month to move into a new house — a duplex this time, actually. So a lot of our spare time for a month now has been spend packing and schlepping boxes of books and dishes and books and clothes and books and computer equipment and books. I think between Dave and me, our books are filling up something like 200 banker’s boxes (10″ x 12″ x 15″ boxes).

There has been a fair amount of furniture to move, too, and some of it heavy and/or very awkward. But the books are what’s taking up the most time.

Then there’s stuff at the other end to do — bolting bookcases to the wall (I have read Howards End twice, not to mention the liner notes of several albums and CDs of the music of Charles Alkan, and I have friends who had bookcases topple during Loma Prieta, though fortunately with no damage to humans — nearby furniture was another matter — so I’m a bit jumpy about the possibility of being flattened by an shower of books in an earthquake, and I bolt all my cases, and anything else that’s tall, solidly to the wall); changing some of the old two-prong outlets to properly grounded three-prong outlets, so we can plug in our computers somewhere other than the kitchen counter and the bathroom; figuring out carefully with tape measure and squared paper how the furniture is going to fit in the new space; re-figuring everything on the fly when the bookcases turn out to be an inch and a half too large to make it around the corner in the hall, no matter how many different angles and orientations we try; mixing up some plaster to patch the place where we made a dent in the wall in the hall trying to squeeze a bookcase around the corner; and of course unpacking stuff, including all those books, and finding new homes for it all.

Looks like we’ll be done in one more weekend, though. Sure hope so — I’m bushed.