Spent much of the weekend again at the bookstore’s new location, mostly figuring out how to make bookcases stand securely, without teetering or toppling, in the arrangement Dave wanted them. The ones standing against a wall, of course, are easy; the tricky ones are in the middle of the floor with nothing near them to anchor them to but other bookcases. But with some ingenuity and some spare lumber, I got them all up and pretty solidly in place. No guarantees if the Big One comes, but at least they won’t come down in a mild tremor or if a child tries to climb one. Or a cat, more to the point. The cats have been having fun jumping on and off them ever since we turned them loose in the new space.

So I’ve been at the bookstore every evening and weekend for a couple of weeks and am behind in everything. For example, it’s Tuesday and I’m still working on Friday’s Listener crossword puzzle, “Double Cross”. The instructions say that each clue actually leads to two words of the same length, and the solver has to figure out which one goes into the grid. This being the Listener puzzle, I figured that this was going to mean that I wouldn’t be able to tell which words went into the grid and which didn’t until I was just about finished, and that I’d need two copies of the grid, one to fill with one set of words and one to fill with the other, and that something near the end of the process would tell me which was the right grid.

Sure enough, that’s what’s going on so far. Things were getting so messy that this morning I took the puzzle into Pages (page layout software) and created one PDF with two copies of the grid and a second PDF with all the clues on one sheet, and recopied all my work so far onto those. That’s a little easier to work with. I have the grids about two-thirds filled in. A “cautionary message” is created one letter at a time as you solve the clues, and I have enough of these letters (about three-quarters of them) to be pretty sure what the message is going to be, but I have no idea yet how it’s supposed to help me.