Areas of Unrest

30 November 2003 - Patterns of Bibliomania

I'm still more or less in a "don't feel much like writing" mood, but I am going to press on with weekly entries anyway, because I suspect that doing so is the only way to break out of that mood.

First, two random observations that should be subjects for full-blown rants were I in the mood for ranting:

1. Coffee is a flavor. Therefore, the existence of flavored coffees is an abomination. The existence of gingerbread-flavored coffee is too awful to contemplate.
   
2. A martini is a specific type of cocktail, namely one that consists of six parts gin to one part vermouth. It is acceptable to make martinis with other ratios of gin and vermouth (though dubious to drink them) or to use vodka instead of gin. In the latter case, one calls it a vodka martini. Other cocktails are not martinis, despite what the "martini menu" of nearly any half-way trendy restaurant would have you believe. I do not know where this abuse of terminology arose (though I suspect that, like all other ugly fashions, California is implicated) but it must stop.

Anyway, this has been another insanely busy week. I took some time out during the day on Monday to go downtown and pick up my visa for the Vietnam trip. While there, I had a long and interesting chat with a woman who is going just about the same time I am. I also took advantage of decent weather (i.e. clear and not particularly cold) to get in a good long walk.

Things at work were pretty crazy, though, even with a short week. One budget matter we were expecting to hit didn't, but a report we'd sort of forgotten about did come out. I spent a lot of time playing telephone tag trying to track down the status of another matter. And I needed some time to prep for a meeting I have tomorrow with a person who is so evil that his official first name in our office is "that bastard." My approach is to stick to technical facts and refuse to let him sidetrack me. Anyway, that all meant that I actually did put in a full day on Friday, despite there being only about three other people around.

On the home front, I've made a great deal of progress on my project to catalog my library, with all of the shelves but one entered into the database. There are, however, several stacks of books that I need to decide whether or not to keep, so have not logged in yet. And I haven't addressed the unread stack. I also sold another 45 books to one of the used bookstores. I didn't even bother with the other store I use, since there were only eight the first place rejected. I used some of the trade credit to get a couple of books I'd specifically been looking for (e.g. the Lonely Planet guidebook for Vietnam) as well as some trashy airplane reading that I can trade with other people when I'm done. My current goal is to get down to under 2500 books, though I may decide not to count cookbooks inn the total since I sort of collect them. At my current rate of progress, it's going to take me about five years to get there.

I'll also note that everybody else is in end of year cleaning mode, too, so it was a much longer wait than usual at the trade desk. Usually, they tell me to come back in 20 minutes or so. This time, it was an hour and a half. So I went over to a fabric store nearbly and browsed pattern books, with the vague notion that I might actually do something with some of the fabric I've lugged from place to place over the years. It's probably been at least a decade since I've bought a pattern and I hadn't realized that they'd gotten so expensive. The good sort of patterns are those with lots of variations. For example, you can buy a blouse pattern with four or five options for collars and three or four for sleeves. The patterns like that cost 12 to 15 dollars now! I can't remember ever paying even half that. The other thing I noticed is how many patterns there are for costumes - all sorts of period stuff, as well as Halloween costumes. There's even a whole range of period costumes for Barbie dolls! I didn't actually buy any patterns, but I did find a few possibilities. I think, though, that I'll keep working on reducing the yarn stash first and tackle the (much smaller) fabric stash later.

Everybody else is in shop shop shop mode. And I just keep getting more and more determined to declutter my life. Weird.