“Honestly, it’s not as bad as the books.” Where to put them all? It’s the question about moving to a smaller place that has most troubled us. Yesterday, almost as soon as we arrived, I pulled up the long carpet in the bedroom, put pads under the feet of the bed, and swung the bed around to below the east windows. By the time Gary brought up a bookcase from the car, it was mostly done. And miraculously, he likes the new arrangement. This goes a long way toward answering the question.

This new configuration of bedroom furniture leaves two long walls free for—wait for it—bookcases! Gary could move ALL his books over if he filled the north wall with four of his bookcases. He will likely do that.

I could probably fit some combination of two or three or even four cases on the west wall, or stack them to squeeze in even more. I probably won’t do that. The cases I’d most like to retrieve are too big (too wide, too tall) for our car. And I still have eleven mostly sorted and entirely full cases at the beach plus a tub of sorted books that need to move into the third bookcase waiting for them on our condo’s south living room wall. I am ready to let go.

Ideally, I would like to move my grandfather’s handmade wood tool chests onto the west wall instead of another wall of bookcases. In a single stack they are slightly over four feet long, 11″ deep, and about 53″ high. My grandfather painted them machine shop gray and he stored nuts and bolts and saw blades, hand tools, and sandpaper. I repainted the cases teal and replaced the nuts and bolts with art supplies. That’s the plan for the summer.

The Parrish prints might have come this trip but rain was forecasted. Now they will likely wait too. I plan to repaint some walls below the chair rail once the repipe is completed. The entire west wall of the bedroom will likely need painting. The contractor is supposed to do this, but so long as he gives me a clean surface, I’d rather do the painting myself. That will be late July or August.

Today, between 8am and noon, the building repipe contractor was supposed come to mark out a massive hole in the now-empty west wall in order to review and update plumbing. That wall is now bare. It is at least possible that much or all of that repipe is already done in our unit. The previous owner redid all the plumbing and the wiring and the walls and floors and woodwork. Everything. Was it done perfectly? Was it patched perfectly into the existing soon-to-be replaced existing plumbing? Maybe. Fingers crossed there isn’t anything awful inside that wall.

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COVID UPDATE

We seem to be doing fine. It’s been ten days since the start of symptoms. We never had a sore throat (ever), no coughing fits, I’ve had no fever since last Friday, and we are generally feeling better. We went for a walk yesterday to buy groceries, masked. That was just over a mile and a half round trip, and not more than five minutes standing at checkout. It was my first walk in ten days. It went well. I do not expect to attempt a short run before March. Easy does it.

To be fair, I’ve been sicker. Without a flu vaccine, flu leading into bronchitis and twice into pneumonia nearly put me in the hospital. This was not as bad, though it was scarier. People do die of influenza every year. I thought it might be my turn eventually. But, instead, I am getting well, the sun is shining, and I am planning renovations for later in the year.

Best of all, none of the people from our building with whom we had contact have gotten sick—not the neighbors who had us over for lunch the day before we were sick or the neighbor who sat in our living room for an hour most days over that previous week.

Where did we pick up Covid after avoiding it for nearly four years? We suspect at the Living Room Theater. It’s the only place we were inside for longer than a few minutes. (I knew it was a bad idea to ever enter a movie theater again, but I really wanted to see Origins.) Everyone we knew had already had Covid and we were hoping the (many) vaccinations had done the trick. More fools us! The film was great, but I won’t be taking that chance again. It was a stupid move.

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BEST BOOK from recent reading: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit.

Solnit’s weaving of personality and achievement and national character with how we understand time and place is masterful. I bought this book when it first came out because it focuses on Edward Muybridge, a man I knew from the Dover reprints of his photographic motion studies. However, when I first tried reading it more than twenty years ago I realized that it was not only about Muybridge but about how he and others changed modern society’s understanding of time and distance. I stopped reading.

This is the book a man was explaining to her at a partynthatbshe absolutely must read, the book she had herself written, and he would not listen to her long enough to hear that. That led to Men Explain Things to Me, which is wonderful and which I first read as a short essay. I read it immediately, and the book, and the memoir that came next… it still took too long to get to this book which is best of all.

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A few years ago, we bought the pilot of The Mentalist because the first seven minutes include amazing editing and character and are our go-to for a laugh. I can’t find a free clip with that entire sequence, but below is most of it. You miss the irony of the accused kid having the same design on his t-shirt as the EMT’s tattoo and the arrogance of police consultant Patrick Jane walking uninvited into the victim’s grand house, examining family photos, and making himself a sandwich and a cup of tea. He’s made a cup for the victim’s mother too, before she arrives to demand, “Who are you?” That’s how they come to be sitting together at her kitchen table. …wait for the last line from Patrick Jane. He’s right.