Saturday afternoon

[ellarien]

I was doing some light dusting and tidying-up just now. For a few minutes I was on the verge of panic because I couldn't find the little cardboard box of jewellery I took to New Orleans -- not in the front pocket of my laptop bag where it lived all that week, not in the bedroom -- but it turned up on the lowest shelf of one of the living-room bookcases, so that was all right. Then I started dusting bookshelves, and made a distressing discovery. All the bookshelves I've bought since I moved here have been of roughly the same design, as seen in the icon; plain light oak (mostly plyboard and veneer rather than solid wood, I think, but a couple of steps up from the foiled chipboard of my first-generation shelves), with one fixed shelf in the six-footers and the rest moveable, supported by pegs. A strip of rounded-off wood is glued to the front of each shelf to make them look thicker. In at least three instances, I noticed today, those strips are coming away, and one of them is split along nearly half its length. I'm not sure whether to blame the climate -- which I mostly choose not to control too closely when I'm out or asleep -- or the weight of my books.

I think I'm going to lie down with a good book for a while, before I find anything worse.