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?

"Lost" and found

I frequently "lose" things (wallet, keys, watch, cell phone, dog), and usually what that means is that it is exactly where I first thought to look for it.  But, then I assume that I would never put something where I should and look all over the house/office/car for said item.  By the end of the search, I think that I have looked in the obvious place, so I am shocked when I finally find it there.

This morning, I was looking through my bag, and I found my watch (shockingly, exactly where I thought I had put it a month ago).  I have been lazily keeping an eye out for it around my house, after my second assumption that I had taken it off there and it was now living under a pile of paper or unpacked boxes or maybe in the bottom of one of the decorative holes my dog has kindly added to the yard.

In my great excitement, I put it on immediately and showed it off.  "Isn't it awesome?" said I, "Look how the face is all made out of wood!"  In my world, watches are for decoration.  They are like the non-girly form of a bracelet.  Telling the time is secondary.

Fast forward three hours, and I'm still smiling to myself about the watch.  Then, I check the time on the computer, and unconsciously check the time on the watch.  They are not the same.  The hands on my watch aren't even moving.  Haven't been all day.  It took me the entire morning to notice.

It is not 3:35.  It is 11:20.  Bad watch!

Now, I have to fix the battery in my watch and pray that it hasn't finally given up the ghost from the time I ran it through the washer and dryer.

Fixing a watch battery may sound like something easy, but it seems like an insurmountable goal to me.  There are multiple steps involved:  1) Admit my watch is powerless without a battery, 2) Don't lose watch again, 3) Figure out how to open watch, 4) Don't lose watch back, 5) Find battery type, 6) Buy battery, 7) Set time on watch, 8) Make amends to everyone I have hurt by not knowing the correct time, 9) Continue to not lose watch.

Stay posted for my continued failures as I try to put my watch back into working order (see also: maybe I should just buy a cheap Timex, batteries are hard to find).