raquel of the ranch country is finally on line, and other details of normal life

I finally got some pictures taken today.  A STACK (well, actually, THREE precariously piled stacks ringing my desk --woe to anyone who sits down and puts his elbows out the tiniest bit ) of pictures taken today.

I moved boxes.

I re-piled boxes and reduced my solid WALL of boxes behind my desk by TWO!!!!

I'm feeling enough better to start to worry about what's coming up in the next few weeks -- which means that my nerves start to go, even though my body is just beginning to feel normal.  Darn.

However, feeling a little better means I can start to DO things again.

Like clean.  When I don't feel well, I don't get the cleaning done ... and when you have colds / viruses, etc. you need to CLEAN the house well so that you don't just keep re-infecting everyone, right?  But when you're feeling bad, you don't have the energy or brain power to clean.

So.  Doorknobs have been bleached.  Keyboards ditto. etc. etc. etc. around the house to get all the places where germs lurk and laugh.

I pulled another box off the pile in the front room to re-do after the Sacramento Fair.  Now I'm down to THREE boxes left.

Then I signed up for Pasadena today AND booked my hotel room, so no going back now.

(Now I get to quietly freak that I don't have enough  GOOD STOCK....wahhhh.....)

I have books to mail out (which is always a good thing).

Now I get to plow through some data entry, and some taxes.

Getting back to Raquel of the Ranch Country (see the book picture at the top there, right?)

I picked this book up one day (reasons are many and too long-winded to mention, but I felt that HUM I sometimes get. I don't question it. I just pay my money and THEN figure out why).

This book is the first book by Alida Sims Malkus.  She wrote a number of books for young people (especially women) during her writing career, most of the historical in one form or another. This book, however, is a loosely based autobiography. (She must have started with that old saw -- write what you know....).  One of her later books -- The Dark Star of Itza -- became a Newbery Honor book.   From what I can piece together of her life, she sounds like a fascinating woman.  If I ever get time, I'll try and read this book, just to see what her life must have been like.

Now that I've got my picture for it, the book is FINALLY going up on my website. 

The impassable forest of boxes that is my workroom...

Right after I took the picture of son number two in his goofy sweatpants, I decided that I'd had enough of the boxes in my workroom. The pictures to follow can't really give the best idea of how claustrophobic it's getting in my workroom with rows of boxes (all organized by what they are & where they need to be in the scheme of what needs to get done next.... yes, organized!) but it's a start.

I try to be an organized and fairly tidy person (at least in my mind I am...) but this dilemma with the boxes piling up in the last month or so is REALLY getting to me. Usually I have two bookcases along the wall where there are now piles of boxes and only a few boxes in the room which are those currently to be added to the database. Say five boxes or so at a time....

NOT the 40 which are currently sitting out in areas I normally can walk through.



This is to the left side of the desk I built. It's a homemade L shaped desk that was SUPPOSED to make my life easier as it had more counter space to hold IMPORTANT things.... not the piles of papers, books and stuff that's there currently -- however, every time I dust, I find that there's NO WHERE ELSE to put the stuff, and drawers just fill up and get forgotten about. Now when I built the desk I though very hard about what I needed, then spoke to a few other book dealers for their input. I used the idea of having cabinets (like kitchen cabinets that you find at your local hardware supply store) for part of the base. The cabinets are sturdy, easily put together, for the most part, and can HOLD extra STUFF... but, it turns out, there are different heights to cabinets & I SHOULD have gotten the cabinets for bathroom use, not kitchen use, as there is a height difference of about two inches. It's not important unless you have to sit down at your desk & find that NO office chair in the world will raise you up high enough to be able to be comfortable. Thus, my work seat is a wooden stool. It works, but the longer one sits....

There. You can see the stool. I didn't take the time to completely tidy the work area as my photo snapping was a bit spur of the moment -- also, if I had started to clean before I took the picture, I would have spent all my time cleaning and not then taken the picture at all.

This is directly behind my stool. I have about 18 inches space behind me before the stacks start (these are the boxes with the newest collection of NON-FICTION books I'm working through). On the counter to the left here are the books that have been entered into the database during the last week & are waiting in alphabetical piles to be taken downstairs and put on shelves (or piled with the books that are going to the next book fair).

Hopefully, one of these days when the boxes are all gone (ha!) I'll take some more pictures & you can see the floor of the room...

Soon....

In the next year or so... :)