Wednesday, July 23, 2008

recognizing limits

My original plan for today had been to travel two hours to Abingdon, Virginia to explore the annual Highland Arts Festival. But last night, after the three hour weekly shopping trip my joints ached so much and I was so tired, I knew that a trip requiring substantial walking was out of the question for today. Instead I will reschedule the trip for next week -- an appointment I had next week got rescheduled for September, so I have more time next week. The thing about RA is that you can live a full life, you just have to recognize your limitations and work with them.

This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as the thunderstorms and rain that was predicted for last night has extended well into the afternoon today, and would have made walking around among craft booths in an open grassy area a bit dicey.

Since I had cleared the decks of "paid employment" as John likes to call it, instead I turned my attention to a household project -- cleaning up and reorganizing bookshelves. While I have the books off the shelves, I've decided get really anal and enter all the information on each book into an Excel spreadsheet. John had already done this for a couple thousand books stored in his study, but the few thousand in my study, the living room and family room have yet to get that treatment. Once complete I will no longer have to run all over the house trying to figure out whether or not I still have a book and where it might be.

4 comments:

Qaro said...

Good for you! When I went to our art festival a few weeks ago it poured! You each have a couple thousand books? Dang! You put my thousand to shame! :)

sgreerpitt said...

Having tons of books is an occupational hazard (and occupational expense) of academia. If we lived in an urban area, and near a university, we'd depend more on libraries, probably.

I still hope to go to the art festival next week.

Qaro said...

I forgot to mention that if you record the ISBN, that makes it easy to import your Excel worksheet into Library Thing. But I think the free account only holds 200 books.

Have fun at the festival!

Jessica said...

Thank you so much for posting this! I am going to go show Nick this to prove to him that I am NOT the only one who likes to keep their books organized! Granted, I have about 1,900 less than you and your husband, but I still know what I have!