12 Jan 2008

For Christmas I had four glorious days in a row off. I haven't had that many days off in months and months and months. 

I thought it would be a great opportunity to organize my albums, something I've been meaning to do for ages.  When Lord of the Rings stuff arrives in my house, it goes through a "checking in" process that would be the despair of any professional librarian. (Showing my age here. Librarians have gone the way of the record player. I think they call them Media Specialists these days. *sigh*)

BTW, my daughter asked me for a vinyl disk reader for Christmas. What the hell is that, I wondered. You know, she said, one of those devices that spins the black vinyl disks and reads them to play music. Wracking my brain, it finally dawned on me. You mean a record player?!!!!!

There's your generation gap, in a nutshell, lol!

First it sits on the kitchen counter for a week or two.

Then it gets moved to the stairwell for another week or so, awaiting the looooong (you would think I needed to tote it to Tibet!)  trip up the stairs.   Once up the stairs, it gets (carefully) dumped in a corner of The Shrine, where, after a month (more likely six months) I can't stand the mess anymore, and I finally make time to photograph it and either shelve it or catalogue it.

Cataloguing involves finding any album with empty pages of the right size, and getting it safely off the floor.  So nothing was in any particular order, and finding items I wanted to look at meant much aggravating searching, although it was often enjoyable to do so.

So Christmas Eve-eve-eve found me emptying every last one of my forty or fifty albums onto the floor of my bedroom, in a sort of chaotic semi-circle.  It took me from 7am until well after midnight (and a good bit of the next day!!!!), but I finally got everything sorted, and reinstalled in albums, in at least a semblance of organization.    I realized it was harder to do than I thought, since random items are really oversized and had to go into some of those gigantic albums that take so much shelf space.

Being pleased with myself, I thought, golly, it's time to do something with the doggoned website, so I started tinkering with it, the upshot being, I am completely revamping the "museum" pages, and adding thousands of photos. Finally!

This will eventually mean (hahahahahah!!!!!) I'll get the store caught up, too.

But first.......living in The Shrine as much as I do has gotten depressing. The windows are blocked so that the light doesn't fade anything, and all four walls are fully lined in bookcases, a massive desk in a terribly depressing color and which is very uncomfortable to work at, and on top of each bookcase are (literally) towers of action figures, trash and popcorn bins, those gigantic popcorn buckets and so on.    It kind of takes the fun out of collecting, because it's like living in a cave. Gollum's cave. I mean, since he is glaring down from multiple angles.

The bookcases are cheap chipboard ones from Target and Home Depot. I learned early on that dusting all this stuff is an entire weekend's project, so I got velcro and plexiglass and covered them. Practical, but irritating when the velcro fails, and really unattractive.

There are even three waist-high bookcases sitting in the middle of the room holding overflow. There's not enough room to swing a hamster, much less a cat, and it has really gotten on my nerves.

A couple of weeks ago my good collector friend Kathy, knowing I have a thing for stained glass, sent me an Ebay auction for a stained glass window of the Hollin gate of the Mines of Moria. I bid and won, and when it came, it was delightful!

I had originally planned to put it in an empty window in my library (i.e. "the who-needs-a-dining-room-besides-I'd-rather-have-lotsa-books-than-nice-china-anyway" room), but after looking at it, a plan burst full blown into my brain. (Lots of space for bursting up there. The synapses are generally unoccupied in this regard.)

As a result, like a total glutton for punishment, I have my IKEA catalogue at hand, and have spent the last two evenings mapping out how I can get some better storage, condense the space, and hopefully, have enough room for a lounge chair, and one of those nifty coffeetables with the glass display top, and a slot underneath to hold my scanner.

I am dumping that monstrosity of a desk. I sincerely believe if Saruman had had a nicer desk, he would never have turned to the dark side. An ugly,inconvenient desk does something to your mind.

So this morning, after my teenage IKEA worshipping daughter rolls out of bed, we are off to IKEA to see what we can see.

This is going to be a major major major project, but, hey!  The MLK holiday is next weekend.......