Pipe dreams... coming true?

I.  Love.  Books.  Can't get enough of 'em (e-reader, you say?  No way, I keep it real, mothafucka).  I like to read while I walk, while I cook, while I listen to radio, while I watch TV, while I read other things, while I attempt to converse, while I'm falling asleep, while I play with my dog, while I write blog posts, pretty much while I do everything except drive.  Turns out reading while driving is a terrible idea, even if the book is Operating Motor Vehicles for Dummies.

Since I moved, my books have been in two four-foot high stacks of boxes.  In retrospect, it's an old house and maybe leaving several hundred pounds of books in a small area was a bad plan, but the floor still appears to be unbowed and solid.

Last Sunday, I decided I wanted to be able to look at all my books, which meant taking them out of boxes.  Some time ago, I had made the totally ridiculous statement "When I unpack all my books, I should organize them, too!"  Stupid.  When I packed my books up, I was like a headless chicken on speed, so they were not put in boxes with rhyme or reason or neatness.

But, there I was, just having watched a season of Breaking Bad, hanging out in my underwear, and staring at a pile of books on my floor.  I mean, at the very least, I wanted all the books by one author to be grouped together, right?  And maybe all my books on the rise and fall of colonialism in Africa should be grouped together, so that they don't start all kinds of pretentious conversations around my young adult sci-fi books and make them feel inferior?

Next thing I knew, I had stacks of books, by the first letter of the author's last name (fiction only), YA books, then non-fiction and graphic novels.  Halfway through, it looked like this:

Ryder: These stacks of books look unstable.  Wait, oh god, am I my own genre?  Will have I have to sleep  on the book shelf?  Am I just here so there can be some kind of black and white and read all over joke?

Porch Covering

I like my porch.  It is my favorite place to be, even though all the spiders in the city have moved there.  I like to do the following things on my porch: drink beer, read, nap, drink more beer, sweat profusely in the sun,  eat, drink wine, stare at my dog, and accidentally flash my neighbors (sorry, neighbors) (kind of... you seem like maybe you're a bunch of dicks).

The thing about Oregon is that summer is about 3 and a half weeks long, and then there's something like 15 months of rain.  I don't want to be chased inside just because of the rain, but I also don't want to get wet.  So!  A covering!  A lesser and more practical human being would just buy something like this: A tarp canopy! or this: Another one!

So those are almost exactly what I want to build, but not quite.  I've looked into it, and I'm pretty sure if I spend around $300, I can make my own out of 2" PVC pipes and tarps.  To the diagram:

Now, let's break this thing down in all its glory: