I’ve spent a couple hours this morning trying to dig out the mess that is my office, which goes along with the couple hours I spent last night doing the same.  I’m now able to get to the closet and have some stuff organized there, but the books are still a mess and I don’t have adequate shelving space.  I’m seriously tempted to zip to Home Depot and buy some cinderblocks and wood.  Ladybug seems to have accepted finally that I’m all out of space.

We went on a book binge yesterday to a used book store in Durham that we had not been to.  A hair under $70 later, I had a ton of new books, most of which cost me less than three bucks– one by Debra Allbery, five by James Applewhite, two by Gerald Barrax, one by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Maudelle would have killed me if I had passed on it), one by Cornelius Eady, two by Louise Gluck, two by Lisel Mueller, one by Ellen Bryant Voight, and about six more that escape me right now.  The weird thing about this bookstore was that, though they had a small poetry section (which yielded most of the above), they organize books by publisher, and file most of their poetry away that way.  So, I spent a good amount of time looking through the publishers that I felt were likely to yield some poetry (Louisana State, Pittsburgh, New Directions), but really just didn’t bother with the majors because I don’t know who publishes who and when I found the large presses, I didn’t feel like subjecting Ladybug to hours of me hunting through rows and rows of fiction for that one book of poems from FSG.  (Plus, the publishers were arranged in no particular order, so I never even found Knopf, Norton, and Harper-Collins.  Smaller presses like Greywolf?  Fuhgeddaboudit.) And who knows?  If I’d committed to that hunt, I might have bankrupted us.  At the very least, I wouldn’t have had any place to put the books.