Confederacy of a Dunce - Street furniture

Monday, October 01, 2007

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This weekend the Dunces said goodbye to a couple of old friends, two large Ikea bookshelves (one "Leksvik" and one who-knows-what) which have been with us for ages and together offered us a dozen (much-needed) shelves of book storage. Unfortunately as we've moved the shelves from place to place, their structural integrity has gradually decreased (despite our efforts to take them apart very carefully, and just as carefully store all the hardware necessary to rebuild them successfully). And now they can probably be best described as "wonky"; they are fine if carefully propped in a corner, but tend to slouch if left to their own devices. But they've been happily slouching in the back bedroom for some months now, loaded with books and showing no signs of imminent collapse. Perhaps I've exaggerated their lack of structural integrity (although I'm irritated by their tendency towards "disposable", like many Ikea products [Sometimes you do get what you pay for]); the real problem is that they don't really fit anywhere in our flat. They've remained in our back room just because we've abandoned the room, leaving it as a disorganized storage area where we hang our clothes to dry, park an extra bike, and so on.

But now things are changing. Mrs. Dunce is spearheading the effort to make the room usable, which includes building a set of shelves* from floor to ceiling in a fairly wide alcove next to the chimney breast. These shelves should have just about as much capacity as the two bookshelves, and will allow us much more space in the room. So we dragged the two old shelves outside, leaving them next to the bins in the hope that someone else might consider them useful and take them away. I didn't think there was much chance; they looked even more wonky sitting on our crooked pavement in the front garden. But surprise, surprise, this morning they were gone. So now there's no going back. We have to build the shelves, or get rid of a dozen cartons of books!**

* We should be up to the job of shelf-building, having already completed a small test run in another room using the same style of shelf mounting.

** While I was clearing off the old bookshelves, I was also going through the books with an eye on getting rid of those we didn't need any longer. But I only found a dozen or so that I could really do without (to give you an idea of my hoarding tendencies, Battlefield Earth made the cut). So it was hardly worth making an effort to get rid of any books this time around.

house | read

Monday, October 01, 2007 2:57:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007 1:27:28 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

With regards to L. Ron Hubbard, it is much better to keep his best novel and sacrifice the decology (which summed to 5/6ths of the dozen outcasts, right?).

The Noblesvillian

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 9:43:38 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Sacrifice the Mission Earth series?! Heresy!

Dunce