Moving.

So, I bought a house. There are two main reasons that this is important.

1. Now, I will have nothing to distract me from all the reading. Because there is no reading to be had when a drummer lives upstairs.

2. It also means that now the North Country is stuck with me, at least for a little while.

After this move, I will have moved six times in as many years. On the bright side, it means that I'm very good at packing, and also that I've never had time to let much dust accumulate.

However, it also means that I've had to move my books six times in as many years.

When I moved to Philadelphia to go to library school, I divested myself of a lot of them, including my entire hardcover set of Harry Potter. I donated it to a girlfriend of mine who is a middle school teacher, and I have no regrets. (Though I did have to buy a paperback copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban, because what was I thinking?)

But then I lived in the Philadelphia area for four years. You know what they have a lot of in Philadelphia that we don't have here in the North Country? (Apart from places to get cheesesteaks?) Bookstores. In my first neighborhood, I had to walk past two just to get to the grocery store. My last birthday in Philadelphia was spent bookstore-crawling from Old City back to my house in the Art Museum neighborhood. It's fair to say that I returned from Philly with more than just an appreciation for a good soft pretzel. There were so, so many liquor store boxes.

(Liquor store boxes = small and sturdy = the best book boxes.)

I did attempt to keep the number of books in my house under control. My rule for years was that I could only own as many books as would fit on the shelves I already owned. If a book came into the house, a book left. Three books came in, three left. And then I moved into an apartment with built-in bookshelves.

You can imagine how that played out.