Tag: library

Go ‘way, I’m sleepin

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

My sole accomplishment this weekend, if you want to grant it that status, was taking this spinning bookshelf out of its box (fresh from the TikTok shop!) and putting it together, which means that I now have this little spot for all of my YA books, or at least I have this little spot for all the YA books I have right now, because I’m going to outgrow it in about five more books. It’s pretty and colorful, though, and the fact that every book on there but one is exactly the same size grants it a really pleasing symmetry. I’ve said this before; there is a difference between being a reader and a book collector, and I am very much both of those things.

That’s about all I did. I’m about halfway through R.R. Virdi’s The Doors of Midnight, which is 800 pages long so it’s taking me a while, but I took one pill on Friday night because I was having trouble sleeping and it knocked me on my ass for a day and a half. So there’s not much else of note worth talking about at the moment.

This happened Friday at work, so I can’t count it as an achievement, but I’ve got all of my classes planned out through December 4th, an event so rare that, statistically speaking, it didn’t actually happen. Any number of things can upset my plan (which is why I’m never planned out this far ahead; it’s mostly pointless) but we’re in a sort of autopilot-type unit right now, where C has to follow B which has to follow A, and the only real changes that could happen is delays either due to school closings, further sickness, or my kids just not getting something, and then really all I have to do is back everything up a day, which is no big deal. There are seven instructional days until Thanksgiving; I have no plans for Thanksgiving and we likely won’t make any either, since Bek’s family is the weekend before Thanksgiving and my family is the weekend after Thanksgiving. So that weekend will probably be filled with Lego, reading and video games and not so much massive amounts of food. But I have to survive that long first. We’ll see.

I’m still never doing this again

On By Luther M. SilerIn art3 Comments

Okay, I admit it: once I got past the incredibly tedious “making books” section of this project, it ended up being quite a lot of fun, and the whole project probably took 12-14 hours over three or four days, including the early part where I glued some furniture together and then didn’t touch it again for a month. And now that it’s finished it looks great on the bookshelf, although I’m probably going to turn the lights off once the motion sensor in the front starts becoming annoying. 

I still have a Lego set to put together in the next couple of days, so I probably ought to figure out where I’m going to put it when it’s done.

If anybody has any questions about the build, let me know. Those are rubber bands in that one picture; one of the walls was just the tiniest bit warped and I needed everything to squeeze together a bit while the glue set. 

This was $50 on Amazon and there are several other options if you’re curious.

A supposedly fun thing I’m never doing again

On By Luther M. SilerIn artLeave a comment

My apologies to David Foster Wallace, but never has a stolen (and lightly edited) headline been more appropriate for one of my posts, and I’m including the time I ripped off Roger Ebert.

If you spend time on TikTok, and specifically if you spend time on TikTok interacting with book accounts (“BookTok”), you have absolutely seen some ads for these cool little bookend diorama things at some point or another. I tried to find the actual ad so that I could embed it and was unsuccessful; it’s basically a video of someone putting the thing together with — and this is important — lots of satisfying-sounding clicks and snaps as he puts things together. 

TikTok’s algorithm has me dialed in in a way I have never seen from any form of advertising before, guys. I have bought more shit because I saw it in an ad on TikTok than I have from any advertising source ever, and it’s not close. Do you happen to remember that metal scorpion from last summer? TikTok. The brand of shoes I’ve been wearing for the last, like, three years? TikTok. My wife? TikTok.

Okay, maybe not that one.

I had previously opened the box for my library bookend and closed it back up three or four times, having forgotten every time just how much a pain in the ass the initial few pages of the instructions looked to be. You see, there’s no clicking anywhere in this build. No snapping. What there is, is a whole fuckton of gluing. God, so much gluing. And cutting with scissors. And more gluing. And sanding. And holding things together at precisely the right angle until the glue sets. And more gluing.

Those books up there? That took three and a half hours. Each of those books is a separate piece of wood, which had to be popped out of a larger piece of wood, sanded down, and then the individual covers had to be cut apart with scissors, and then the covers had to be glued to the pieces of wood, and then the individual books had to be glued together to make the piles, meaning that 90% of the art on the book covers was going to be be completely obscured. All of those books have full front and back covers! You’ll never see them, because they’re glued to each other!

And then, because that wasn’t enough, there are the books in front, which are made by taking a 10″ piece of full-color printed paper, spindling it together to make mock pages, then gluing that together and gluing it inside a book cover, meaning that the books will never be opened, and the, again, legitimately cool designs on the pages will never be seen. That barrel in the back? Two pieces of wood glued together, then four full-cover newspaper pages (well, one was a map and one was, rather inexplicably, a massively oversized postcard) that had to be cut out, rolled as tightly as possible (I’m actually kind of proud of how good a job I did rolling them) and then glued in such a way that they won’t unroll when placed inside the barrel. Again, 90% of the art will never be seen.

I originally planned to finish this thing today and then do a post about the entire build, but again: that was three and a half hours and it was tedious as fuck. The rest of the build, in theory, looks more fun, and I’ve put some of the furniture and such together, but … Christ. This had better look Goddamned amazing when I’m finished with it. 

In which I have far too much to do

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading4 Comments

It will not surprise you to learn that I have been putting off a number of things that needed doing, and as a result it is the Sunday before I have to go back to work and I have a number of Things that need accomplishing. That said … the reading room is done? Or close enough, at least? I need to do something with that shelf in the middle, there, the one that is leaning to the side; hopefully I can come up with a way to push the shelf next to it a couple inches over to shore it up a bit without removing every single Goddamned book off of the shelves again. We had one bookshelf fall apart moving it from the living room to here, and several of these are not going to survive another transition, but if I can pin it between two shelves that are more or less properly vertical we ought to be okay.

I’ll put up some pictures of the living room and the bathroom soon too; the living room’s conversion is complete, barring only some cable management behind the TV that — wait for it — I’ve been putting off, and, well, the bathroom is exciting. But for now I’m going to cross “blog post” off of my to-do list and move on to something else. I gotta make it through five days this week and then I get a three-day weekend for MLK Day; I should be able to manage that, I think.

In which The Great Rearranging may be upon us

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

It is not outside the realm of possibility that I have too many books. I know, it’s unlikely, and I’m not 100% sure that “too many books” is actually a thing, but it’s possible. What is definitely true is that I don’t have enough room to arrange the books that I have properly.

I am currently faced with a week off from work, and because I am an American I am viewing this less as an opportunity to relax and more as an opportunity to “get things done,” because the possibility of going a week without working or “accomplishing things” is just beyond my ability to comprehend. And I find myself casting an eye upon these bookshelves, and their current state of overpopulation, and thinking about opportunities to give myself a job that I can complete half of and then ignore for a year.

If you look at the top shelf of the middle bookshelf there (the top shelf, not the books stacked on top of the bookshelf) you will get an idea of what I’m thinking, because I rearranged that one as a test. I’m wondering what I can do if I shift to mostly vertical stacking on the bookshelves, especially the books that are currently perched on top of the shelves themselves. In theory, so long as the shelves themselves hold up, I can stack those clear to the ceiling– and if I use only completed series for them, which I’m also thinking about, I can put things up there that aren’t going to be rearranged all that much.

Understand that that is only the top half of less than half of just the bookshelves that are against that one wall alone, if you want to understand the magnitude of this job I’m contemplating.

I dunno. If I think about it long enough, I can switch over to stressing about how I had a whole week to get it done and didn’t do it. That won’t be especially mentally healthy, but it would certainly be less work.