Aaaargh!

So I plugged my lovely big anti-RSI keyboard back into the machine, freshly rinsed and slowly dried - and the return key still didn't work, after its wining. So I fiddled a little, and tried it again - and it worked! And it worked almost consistently (viz it failed once, in several dozen reiterations), so I put the alternative keyboard away and settled down to do some real work - and the return key failed immediately, and has not worked again.

- And then I was just in the process of typing 'It's the only key on the keyboard that misbehaves', when other strange things started happening - I hit the return key and got a c, I hit the n and got [n, the back-arrow took me a whole word back and then gave me a 7 when it got there. Like that.

So the keyboard goes back to the bathroom for some seriously radical treatment, kill or cure, and I'm stuck with several more days of this OEM little thing, which has become known as 'Ouchie'. Its only major advantage is that being so much smaller, it's much less of an attractive target for Mac to treat, sit, lie or sprawl upon, so my work is less cat-inspired than it has been recently.

I has builded a bookshelf!

[ETA: I has actually builded a cat-play zone. Apparently.]

It's not a particularly well-builded, or even particularly stable, bookshelf, but there is reasons and causes for this: among them are the buckled nature of the metal supports just where the screws are meant to go in (on account of they had such trouble getting the screws out: I think they went at 'em with hammers in the end), and the fact that I forgot neglected to fix the back on. It's just a temporary structure anyway, thrown up in the hallway to accommodate the first load of books that I have to take off extant shelving, in order to remove said extant shelving, in order to replace it with another and stronger of my new-built shelving units. Yes. Like that. There's probably a word for it. I'll probably take down this bookshelf in the end, but it's dead handy right now. Going to be. Soon as I start shifting books.

Meantime, the warm glow of the accomplished craftsperson (snerk - you'll notice I'm not posting photos. Even of the cats being cute on shelves), and my dinner awaits. Hungry now. I has earned it.

Now, children, what shall we do with these shelves...?

I built the shelves; I filled them. I quail, at the thought of how often I am going to have to do this, to get all the books reshelved. That's twenty-four linear feet of shelving, and - well, I suppose it might be one-twentieth of the collection. Might be. I'm not good at judging quantity, but I usually underestimate.

Maybe I should use this opportunity, this process, to LibraryThing the collection? That might encourage me to filter, even - 'cos some of these books, it would be hard to admit publicly to their ownership. And even this evening, I did find a few that I thought maybe I could let go. If I were strict with myself. It's that thing where you find you have vol three of an indeterminate series that you've never read; that's a fairly pointless position, and the alternatives are either to make a serious effort to find at least vol one, or else to pass it on to someone else. Like that. It happens a lot, on my shelves; I've picked up so many random books, one way or another.

But. They are my books. I know few things about myself, but this is one: that I keep my books. Even those I dislike, even those I'm fairly sure by now I'll never read. They are my books; I keep them.

Now I have to find a home for countless old videos, that were squeezed onto the old shelves in front of the books. That's going to be a recurrent problem, for the old shelves were deep and allowed of double-stacking. Not so the new ones. Sigh. Too much stuff. If I can't winnow books, maybe I can winnow videos...?