Mittimus Monday

mittimus ~ warrant granted for sending a charged person to jail

If you’ve been reading my Monday posts for any length of time then my next statement should come as no surprise at all. My vacation last week did not go as planned.

The prospect of a whole week of free time was mind-boggling. I was going to start on the weekend (the first weekend, which was a holiday weekend) by doing some cosmetic changes to my blogs and coming up with a workable schedule for writing during the week. Maybe I would even make a list of other stuff I’d like to get done: check out my yarn stash and get started on some Christmas presents, organize my recipes with an eye to healthier eating, sit on the deck and read, check out my material stash a do a little sewing...

Yeah, none of that happened.

You heard about the beginning of The Great Bookcase Switcheroo last week. If you haven’t, go HERE. By Wednesday I was afraid it was going to turn into the Neverending Bookcase Story.

I don’t know about you, but I have found that five shelves for a six foot high bookcase is not nearly enough. And apparently they don’t sell extra shelves for that colour of bookcase (they do for the other colours) so the hubby bought a third bookcase thinking we could just use the shelves from it. Only when we got it home he said, “Why don’t we swap out this bookcase with the last one from your office so they all match?”

I was on board with the idea because a) the bookcase left in my office was just a slightly different birch colour than the new ones, and b) the permanent shelves of the new ones were in a slightly different place so cosmetically speaking it would look better. So I emptied the last bookcase - the one with the double rows of paperbacks - and we put the new one in its place. I used the adjustable shelves from it for the other two bookcases and once I had the hubby drill extra holes for the little metal thingies that hold the shelves, I was able to finish the first two bookcases.

Looked good. Or so I thought. Until I tried to use the shelves from the old bookcase in the new one and discovered a major problem - the new bookcases were an inch and a half wider than the old ones which made the shelves useless. So the next day (which would be Tuesday) I went to Walmart and picked up another bookcase, the shorter version of the big one. This gave me six extra shelves to work with (if you count cutting down the sides).

Now it was a matter of putting all the piles, boxes, and bins of stuff back on the shelves. Believe it or not, I actually weeded out three boxes of books to donate in the process, and I did a lot of rearranging of books.

Now, one of my main reasons for wanting a bookcase on the landing (aside from using up some of that wasted space) was to make it easier for the hubby to access his CDs, and maybe have a place where we could put our DVDs. The bookcase from the dining room is perfect for CDs, you’d think it had been built for that purpose.

In fact, it holds his entire CD collection in one place with room to spare (at least there’ll be room to spare until I get some of my CDs in there) Unfortunately, it did not work so great for DVDs. However ... there’s a tall, square, bookcase in the living room that was designed for paperback books that was the perfect fit for DVDs.

Of course that meant emptying it first, finding new homes for the books that were in it, and gathering up the DVDs that were kind of spread around. Once that was finished I needed to turn my attention to the bookcases now in the dining room that were only partially filled. You can sort of see them in the above picture.

It was about Thursday by this time, and while you’d think I might have carved out a little guilt free time to do something ... I don’t know, fun? for the remainder of my vacation, I had company coming for the weekend so I kind of needed to put my dining room back together.

Believe it or not, I did have the living room and dining room put back together by lunch time on Saturday (when my company arrived).

My office, on the other hand, will be a story for another day.

Martyrium Monday

martyrium ~ shrine erected in memory of a martyr

You know, it’s really feast or famine with me lately, isn’t it? I either have nothing at all to say, or way too much. Today’s post bodes to be a long one. ;-)

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we’ll start with a picture:

This is the landing going to the upstairs of our house. It just cries out for something, doesn’t it? I figured it would be the perfect spot for a bookcase. Maybe two. Surprisingly enough, the hubby was onboard with the idea, so when we were out of town on Saturday we stopped by one of the many Walmarts around and bought a couple of those bookcases you have to put together yourself.

Unfortunately, they no longer make the 48 inch high ones. Our choices were limited to 30 inches high, or 72 inches high. Seriously, it was a no brainer. Why buy a tiny bookcase when you can buy a huge one?

What we failed to take into consideration was the depth of it. Having those bookcases along that wall would remove 12 inches of depth from the landing. *sigh* So now we’re stuck with two, six foot high bookcases that have no home. But wait!

In the dining room, against one wall, is a smaller bookcase. It’s only 42 inches high, about 48 inches wide, and more importantly it’s only 6 inches deep. However, it also doubled as a plant stand, a CD holder, and general catch all. To be honest, it was a little unhandy as part of it was tucked away behind another table/cabinet that I also had plants on top of.

This is the stuff that came out of this bookcase:

There used to be a mirror hanging above this bookcase, but when we re-did the bathroom we relocated the mirror to there, leaving an empty space above the bookcase. Two six foot high bookcases would cover up that empty space nicely, even if they were kind of pale for that room. But wait!

In my office I have three 6 foot high book cases in a darker colour. It would be a pain in the butt to swap them out, and I was okay with having mismatched bookcases in my office in the name of having the dining room look more coordinated. But wait!

When I added the third bookcase they no longer made the maple coloured ones, so I had to get a birch coloured one. My bookcases were already mismatched, what I’d be doing is make them all coordinated.

So... the two new, birch bookcases went into my office.

The two bookcases from my office went into the dining room.

And the bookcase from the dining room went up on the landing.

So. Let’s recap shall we? The bookcase from the dining room was emptied and moved to the landing. The two new bookcases went into my office and the two matching ones from my office were emptied before going into the dining room. Now I just have to re-fill them all.

Sometimes, bright ideas grow a little dimmer with the execution. ;-)

Metagrobolize Monday

metagrobolize ~ to mystify; to puzzle out

Everybody get their clocks adjusted on the weekend?

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there that hates the time change. And I don't care if the clocks are going forward or back, I hate them both. I don't know who came up with this stupid idea, but they're just ... stupid!

*lightbulb goes off over head*

I should do some research on this!

To start with, here are some facts I came up with to support my dislike of the time change:
- heart attacks increase by 10 per cent after a time change
- it not only disrupts the sleep pattern it reduces the quality of sleep
- suicide rates increase right after a time change
- there is an increase in traffic accidents just after a time change

The concept of Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise has been around since 1486, however Benjamin Franklin made the phrase popular in his "Poor Richard's Almanack" in 1739. And he is also supposedly behind the satirical suggestion in 1784 that Parisians economize on candles by getting up earlier to make better use of the daylight, the root of the daylight saving time idea.

In 1895, George Hudson, a scientist in New Zealand, proposed shifting forward two hours in October followed by two hours back in March. There was no follow-through with this idea, nor with British builder William Willett's idea of turning the clocks forward 20 minutes for each of the four Sundays in April and back again on the four Sundays in September.

I kind of like the sound of that last one, it would be so much easier to spread the time changes over several weekends.

It appears Germany was the first county to embrace daylight saving time, in 1916, to support the war effort by saving fuel. Several other European countries followed suit, but went back to standard time after the war.

Canada and the U.S. had a year-round daylight saving time during WWII, called "War Time". This went from February 9, 1942 until September 30, 1945. After that things kind of fell apart for the U.S. There were no consistent rules for DST and caused chaos with transit and the broadcasting industry. This lasted until 1966 when the Uniform Time Act was established, setting DST to begin the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October.

In an effort to conserve energy during the energy crisis, U.S. Congress extended DST to ten months in 1974 and eight months in 1975. In 1986 this was amended to have it begin on the first Sunday in April, ending on the last Sunday in October. And finally, in 2005, U.S. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, changing the dates again. Daylight Saving Time now begins on the second Sunday in March, and ends the first Sunday in November.

So now you know. Don't you feel better?

:-D