these things may not interest you, but here they are anyway

[thanate]

We had an actual thunderstorm come through last night (as opposed to the one last week which kindly gave us high winds and lightening without bothering to drop any rain) with 2.7" of rain, which may be more than we've had at a time all year. In theory, there's more to come over the weekend, too, and if nothing else, it's been beautifully cool and I have had a semi-productive day. The big thing was managing all the housework-tetris steps to get the smoky bookshelf unloaded into boxes & other shelves so that I could get the stupid thing *out* of my house. Ha!

(Er, I bought the thing at an estate sale some years back, not thinking quite hard enough about the fact that the house kind of reeked of tobacco as I walked into it, and several years in the shed & sun were insufficient to get the smell out of the shelf. This is not too much of a problem in the winter, but in hot and/or humid conditions the entire living room starts to smell... so at the moment, anytime I shut off the a/c. But! it is on the porch now, and the books that were on it (also tobacco-infused, as they came from my grandparents' house, where my father's father smoked a pipe for sixty years) are a) in boxes, and b) not nearly as smelly. The shelf also held the DVD collection, but as nobody sticks their nose in a DVD case for hours at a time, I don't consider this a serious liability. Yes, I was once poisoned by a tobacco-infused book. I don't recommend it.)

In the process of getting out boxes to put the books in, I did some rearranging in the shed, and got the grauwulf to help me pull out the steamer trunk of clothes I packed up shortly after we got married, since there wasn't much in the way of closet space a the time. So I just spent a while digging through glorious piles of clothing. Some things, while still fantastic, I can allow to leave the house (in hopes that they will go to someone else who will love them! and will maybe actually fit in them!) and then there's a pile of things to try on, and a few piles of things I was delighted to rediscover where they'd gotten to. And now I have space to hang them up, even. (mmm, walk-in closet...) Of course, at the moment everything is sitting in piles all over the bedroom floor, but since grauwulf is on his way to Vegas for exciting computer con stuff, I don't suppose it matters. I have had decades of practice at not tripping over the random crap I pile on my floor.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If it was just the books, I would advise what I am doing with a used book I got as a gift, which is leaving in a sealed box on a raised cookie rack, with baking powder below, to pull out the tobacco smell. But I can't see how this would work with the entire bookshelves, so the outness, yes. Yes, I do see that.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

It's also just the cheap chipboard kind, and we're (theoretically) in the process of moving things around so that the collection of stuff on that shelf will eventually be wanted in two other places anyhow. And the books are more or less readable, so I haven't worried about them too much. Possibly I should seed the boxes with baking soda while they await their new home.

Sadly, I also have a much cooler china cabinet upstairs with a similar problem, and large amounts of baking soda, spraying with vodka, repainting the insides of drawers, and even a weird oxygenating treatment don't seem to have fixed it. (It's better than it was, but not enough.) I haven't decided what to do about that yet; for now the answer is mainly to use the craft room when the windows are open.